gromit82's profile
Champion

Champion

 • 

7.9K Messages

 • 

281.8K Points

Sunday, March 29th, 2026

No Status

Box Office Mojo problems - holiday weekends

I noticed some problems with listing of holiday weekend box office grosses at boxofficemojo.com.

The year I was looking at was 1989. These problems may also affect other years, but I'm using 1989 as the illustration.

I started from the page at https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/by-year/1989/

  1. Notice that at the top of the page it says, "Key: Long Weekend" (highlighted in green), yet none of the weekends listed, including the actual long weekends, is highlighted in green.
  2. For holiday weekends which are 4 or 5 days long, typically there are a reasonable number of films reporting for the long weekend (13 to 24 films) but only 1 to 3 films reporting for the three-day weekend.
  3. In other cases, it's the other way around. For example, 19 films are reported for the Easter weekend of March 24 to 26, 1989 (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/1989W12/) but only 1 film reported for the four-day Easter weekend from March 24 to 27 (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/1989W12/occasion/easter_weekend/). This may be explainable by the fact that the day after Easter (Easter Monday) is a workday, not a commonly recognized holiday, in the U.S. and thus has little impact at the box office.
  4. The result of this is that some of the "#1 releases" for holiday weekends are spurious. It's a lot easier to be the "#1 movie in America" if no other movies have reported their grosses for the same period.
  5. There is a particular problem with the Christmas and New Year's weekend listings. Dec. 25, 1989 and Jan. 1, 1990 were both Mondays, thus resulting in a 4-day Christmas weekend and a 4-day New Year's weekend. At https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/by-year/1989/ you will see listings for both "Dec 22-24" and "Dec 22-25 Christmas long wknd", as well as "Dec 29-31" and "Dec 29-Jan 1, 1990 New Year's long wknd". However, these don't link to four separate pages. Instead, both of the Christmas weekend links go to https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/1989W51/ and both of the New Year's weekend links go to https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/1989W52/ -- the pages with only 2 films reporting grosses. 
  6. Instead, the link for the Christmas long weekend should go to a page such as, or containing the same data as, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/holiday/us_christmas_weekend/1989/ which shows the grosses listing of 24 films for the four-day Christmas weekend.
  7. And the link for the New Year's long weekend should go to a page such as, or containing the same data as, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/holiday/us_newyear_weekend/1989/ which shows the grosses listing of 23 films for the four-day New Year's weekend.
  8. There is also a problem on https://www.boxofficemojo.com/holiday/us_newyear_weekend/1989/ itself. At the top of the page it says, "New Year Weekend 1989 is December 30-January 2, 1989." That's incorrect. The page covers the weekend of December 29, 1989 to January 1, 1990. "December 30-January 2, 1989" would have been a year before that.
  9. And, finally, the holiday entries at https://www.boxofficemojo.com/holiday/by-year/1989/ are out of chronological order. The holidays are supposed to be in reverse chronological order, with the latest holiday at the top of the page and the earliest at the bottom of the page. The War of the Roses was released December 8, 1989 -- yet it is listed in 1989's holiday grosses as the #1 film for New Year Weekend at the bottom of the page, instead of the top of the page. On January 1, 1989, The War of the Roses hadn't even started filming.

I don't have an easy solution to all these problems, and I haven't checked yet as to what year they started or ended. But there are clearly some problems here.

Oldest First
Selected Oldest First
No Responses!