Why Hannah Montana 'broke box office records'

A few weeks ago 'Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert' opened in theaters across America. This was the weekend of the Super Bowl.

Countless posts sprung up across the web claiming it broke all kinds of records. This article on Yahoo! is an example, though I was hearing people not very well-informed run the news by me as well. My immediate reaction was, "Yeah, okay..."

A very useful site on the web is Box Office Mojo, where you can get virtually every statistic on a movie's profits, as well as see the movie on a number of lists. Some lists are so obscure as 'Biggest 2nd Weekend Drops' or 'Yearly G Rated 2008.'

'Hannah Montana' grossed about $31,000,000 its opening weekend -- far from a record by normal standards. In fact, it is the 208th best movie in that regard. But the real kicker here is that the theaters, or at least the one by me, were charging $15 per ticket to the show (there is a funny anecdote about how I know this that may or may not be revealed at a later date). Think how many movies could break box office records if they charged double ticket price. A while ago I went and saw 'Meet the Robinsons' in 3D and tickets were $2 more expensive. Reasonable. 'Hannah Montana' puts that ticket price to shame, and to ice the cake, the movie was only 74 minutes long.

Here is a list of records 'Hannah Montana' currently holds, according to BOM:

Yearly G Rated 2008 [note: there were only 3 G movies released so far this year]
Theater Averages (Wide Releases) - All Time
Theater Averages - Wide Opening Weekends
Super Bowl Opening Weekends
Fewest Theaters to Debut at #1

How many of those would have been possible without the doubled ticket price? Maybe one.

There are two morals to the story. First, Box Office Mojo is a great site. Second, this is one more example of a situation where people take 'statistics' to heart without checking for themselves. Sure, it's only a Hannah Montana movie, but do you really think more people saw Hannah Montana than Spider-man 3?