A private equity-backed deal led by Bay Area exec Anant Gupta aims to revive Rentrak as the single, trusted handler of all theatrical grosses
For decades, Hollywood studio execs, directors, agents and talent have kept up a Sunday ritual: checking box office grosses. Those numbers, which dribble out over the weekend and are sometimes strategically leaked to show momentum (or, in some cases, flops-in-waiting), form the backbone of the entertainment industry’s narrative-driving machine.
Streaming numbers are in their relative infancy and TV ratings are now dissected with multiplatform caveats. But around town people still like to argue about box office grosses, even in a fast-changing, disrupted media landscape.
The Rentrak revival
Anant Gupta, a Bay Area private equity exec who launched an investment firm titled Advaya Capital, inked a deal with Comscore in May to buy that box office data unit and spin it off into its own firm that will take the name of Rentrak. He brought aboard ex-Rentrak vet Chris Aronson, who has run distribution for Paramount and Fox, to join the board of advisors for the firm, which counts 200 employees globally.
The deal unwinds a big merger ten years ago and restores the Rentrak name, which box office insiders will be familiar with.
Why the deal happened
“What we found was a gold standard data set that provides this box office data across the industry to every part of the ecosystem and that has been a very small part of a larger enterprise within Comscore and has had to compete for resources within that broader enterprise,” Gupta told The Hollywood Reporter.
Aronson added: “I don’t think the movies’ division kept up with times, shall we say.”
What Rentrak does today
Today Rentrak collects domestically 99 percent and close to 95 percent of the international box office. The company has been working with studios to develop suites of reports that help them do their day-to-day business and longer-term planning.
The goal now is to modernize the data set further. Gupta said the team plans to use AI to build out predictive analytic capabilities for box office.
“If you can marry some of the marketing data—how people are marketing their movies with what performance, how it drives performance at the box office—that can be very valuable and help you forecast better how your film is going to do,” Gupta said.
The 45-day window debate
Aronson, who ran distribution at Paramount and 20th Century Fox, said the lack of standardization of windows has been “very detrimental to the industry.”
“I think if the industry does in fact coalesce around a 45-day window, you’re going to see a much healthier theatrical environment,” he said.
“Pre-COVID, the windows may have been too long, but they worked. There was not an expectation that a movie’s going to come to the home in a matter of a couple of weeks. So the fact that windows became all hodgepodge, the net-net of that was losing sales, whether it’s a theatrical ticket or whether it’s a transaction at home, or whether it’s a streaming subscription.”
Attendance trends
Aronson noted that the most encouraging trend is in the Gen Z and Gen Alpha area “where the preliminary research is showing, particularly on Gen Alpha, that that generation wants to put their devices down and wants to spend time with their friends physically and not just in their virtual world, and that movies are a conduit to allow them to do that.”
“The business thrives when there’s something for everyone,” he said.
