Interesting question.

The sales numbers/box office returns don't have a lot of meaning for me unless I'm already invested, for good or for bad. If a book that I like isn't selling all that well, for example, I'll usually make a point of mentioning how good it is on message boards, or lending it out to someone who's looking for something new to read. It's not that I wouldn't rec the book anyway, but knowing that it needs the help makes me a little more aggressive about it. On the opposite end, there's nothing quite like the bittersweet shot of schadenfreude that comes with watching a poorly made movie based on a book or game I enjoyed tank at the box office.

I think a lot of it is that we tend to be somewhat obsessive about our entertainment and being able to rank our personal taste by popularity or knowing the financial worth of our favorite actors and sports stars feeds into that. We may not need to know the numbers, but as long as it keeps us talking, I'm sure we'll keep being told about them.
 

i don't pay much attention to ratings or box office figures or even comic book sales. now, that's mostly because numbers make my head hurt and i think math is the devil. but it's also because...well...i don't CARE. Yeah, I like to see the shows and comics I'm into do well...but do those numbers really reflect anything? I've railed against the stupidity of the Nielsen ratings plenty of times because it's basically a handful of people, representing the viewing tastes of millions. how can that be in any way accurate? I'll use the recent example of a show I enjoyed but was cancelled...TWICE! Jericho. CBS cancelled it last season only to bring it back after a tremendous outpouring of fan support. then cancelled it again because it still didn't have the ratings. because no matter how many people were actually watching it, no matter how many new viewers were convinced to watch it, if none or not enough of them had Nielsen boxes, none of it mattered. for comics, sales are reflected not by how much readers are buying, but how much retailers are pre-ordering three or four months beforehand. So you could have a number 1 book from retailers ordering a lot of copies but that's no guarantee anyone's going to buy it.

Now, I understand that these industries are businesses and need some kind of quantifiable weigh of measuring their success to sell ad space and what not. but i agree that there shouldn't be as large a correlation as there is now placed on financial ranking and quality of content. I mean, Serenity got beat at the box office by Flightplan. And which one do people still talk about and hold conventions for?

But as I said, numbers make my head hurt so the more i think about these systems...particularly the ones that don't make much sense...i feel that migraine starting to set in. So i'll go now.

Oh, and I also should say that Checkmate is, indeed, awesome. Just read the last issue yesterday and nearly teared up knowing there would be no more (because no matter what the solicits say, the book I loved ends with Rucka. :p).
 

There's nothing funnier than hearing two people on the subway talk about box office returns as if they work at a studio or something--when they totally don't. I think this is driven by people wanting to follow some kind of 'investment' but not actually investing in anything. It's a daily gamble, a daily hit of something. That said, I bet if papers stopped printing and reporting on box office take of movies, no one would care. People would still go to the movies, still argue about them, and still complain. I feel like we're living through an odd cultural moment when on the one hand it's cool to hate math and on the other, everything is validated by statistics, which as the title of this posts reminds us, is a total sham. The least accurate and most subjective form of mathematics has become the de facto proof of something. Tiresome. I've stopped looked at Box office return and comic sales numbers. Fuggit.
 

Ok, sorry for double post--but think about this. Everyone who likes following box office returns-do you follow stocks you have no money in? "Ohh Novartis is up 10% for the week!" Sounds pointless right? So why do it with movies when you have no financial stake in it?
 

I also don't care how much it cost to make a movie. "Waterworld" or "The Blair Witch Project", they both suck. Sure, it's great that you can make a major motion picture for $50 and a bag of Cheetos, but BWP is still 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back.