The Motion Picture Association of America tracks movie box office receipts very closely. The resulting statistics are available rather quickly for North America but they take longer to come in from other parts of the world. Revenues from theatrical releases of a movie are only the beginning of the revenue generated by a film. Nonetheless, they are important to the movie industry and they are growing most strongly outside the industrialized world, where the number of theaters being opened annually is rising.

Today’s market size is the global box office revenue in 2008 and 2012, with a geographical breakdown to show what percentage of the total revenue was generated in the U.S. and Canada.

Geographic reference: World
Year: 2008 and 2012
Market size: $27.7 billion (U.S./Canada 53.3%) and $34.7 billion (U.S./Canada 45.2%)
Source: “Global Box Office—All Firms (US$ Billions),” Theatrical Market Statistics 2012, MPAA, Summer 2013, page 4, available online here.
Original source: Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. and Rentrak Corporation
Posted on April 2, 2014