The popular box office-tracking site boxofficemojo.com has effectively disappeared from the internet and all its links are being directed to a generic IMDB page. It should not come as a great surprise, seeing that Amazon-owned IMDB purchased the site back in 2008, but its sudden and total demise without so much of an announcement was a little jarring. It was not even until trying to look up sales data for an older movie myself did I realize that every single result was routing to IMDB and I later found an article on Variety confirming my suspicions.
You may not have heard of BoxOfficeMojo.com directly, but if you have ever read an article recapping the weekend box office numbers (such as on our sister site MOARGeek), you have likely seen a pile of data from the site. For 15 years it has been a great resource to go to when you need a massive amount of information about a film. Everything from domestic and interntional sales numbers, budgets, number of theaters released, weekend rankings, and insightful articles and analysis on their blog made it a must-use site for industry reporters. While IMDB is of course great for things like directors and the technical side of the movie, it has never held a candle to Box Office Mojo’s expansive database of the behind-the-scenes movie statistics.
When Amazon originally bought the company back in 2008, many thought that the acquisition was just to beef up IMDB’s weak box office data and both sites would continue to exist and help each other. While the two survived in harmony for a solid six years, tonight marked the day that ended when Box Office Mojo just vanished into an IMDB cloud of dust.
IMDB itself has some small insights on budgets, sales and other statistics, but it lacks a lot of the in depth numbers that people have come to expect and use Box Office Mojo for. A cynical take on the move to dissolve the site completely into IMDB would point to putting all that juicy box office data behind IMDB Pro’s paywall, but I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen.
For now, and just in case IMDB decides to take the paywall route, a similar amount of information can be found at the-numbers.com.
[button link=”http://variety.com/2014/film/news/box-office-mojo-site-disappears-into-imdb-1201326950/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Variety[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
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