How did the ticket vendor in a cinema come to be called the box office?
There are many words and terms in the world of cinema that don’t make a whole lot of sense without context. The word blockbuster comes from a term used for large bombs in World War II but is now more commonly used to describe a hit movie.
A Foley artist is a sound department worker who creates everyday sound effects like walking on gravel and closing doors. The term comes from Jack Foley, a pioneer in the field. Then there is the best boy, which sadly does not refer to a canine mascot of a production, but to a human crew member of any gender who assists with electrical, lighting, and camera equipment.
However, within the lexicon of cinema, one unexplained term stands out as particularly ubiquitous – box office. Sure, those words aren’t particularly complex or obscure, and yes, most of us know that the phrase refers to the location at a theatre where tickets are purchased. But contrary to what you might assume, it isn’t derived from an office shaped like a box or a box that people put tickets into.
So, what is the origin of the term “box office”?
Believe it or not, the phrase has been around since the Elizabethan era when wealthy theatre patrons were able to attend performances in special private boxes so that they didn’t have to mingle with the riff-raff. Tickets for these exclusive boxes were sold in an office outside the theatre, which appropriately came to be known as a “box office.”
This origin story also accounts for why the phrase has come to describe the financial success of a production as well as the physical location where tickets are purchased. Because tickets for private theatre boxes were more expensive than regular tickets, the revenue generated at the box office came to represent the overall revenue of the production. The more box tickets a production sold, the more money it would make.
Over time, the film industry adopted the phrase and came to represent the financial performance of individual movies. As you’ve probably noticed, given the obsession with gross revenues of the latest cinematic releases, studios closely analyse the numbers generated at the box office to assess whether their movies have performed well. It isn’t all about immediate financial return, either. Box office performance can determine a movie’s potential for international distribution, streaming deals, sequels, prequels, and everything type of “quel” that studios are so eager to pounce on these days.
Studios live and die by these numbers, even when doing so is in direct conflict with the story. For example, Francis Ford Coppola was adamant that The Godfather Part II was the end of the Corleone saga, but when faced with financial pressures and a studio eager to cash in on the series’s success, he agreed, against his better judgement, to make a third.
Sadly, there aren’t many cinemas that have private boxes for patrons to enjoy anymore, no matter how much you’re willing to pay, and even the physical location of the box office is going out of fashion. Now that buying cinema tickets online or on touch screens at movie theatres is more ubiquitous than ever, it’s easy to imagine a future in which the term “box office” is even more confounding to younger generations than it is today.
