The domestic box office number attached to almost every movie headline traces back to one company: Comscore. That is confirmed by Comscore's own reporting page, which says its system tracks ticket sales across nearly all North American screens and most of the global box office.
Who actually counts the tickets?
Comscore, not a government agency or the studios themselves, supplies the box office totals most outlets report. The company's Global Box Office Reporting page states it tracks "99% of screens throughout the U.S. and Canada, and 95% of the global box office," and describes itself as "the industry gold standard for global box office measurement," serving "every major movie studio, mini-major studio and prominent independent movie distributor in the world."
The actual reporting runs through a system Comscore calls Swift, which the company describes as "an electronic box office reporting system that facilitates an efficient flow of reconciled theater-level ticket transactions" — an automated replacement for the manual invoicing exhibitors and studios used to exchange.
That system did not start with Comscore. According to Hollywood Reporter's account of the data business's history, the measurement operation goes back to 1976, when Marcie Polier Swartz founded Entertainment Data Inc. at age 23 to centralize theatrical reporting.
How did one company end up running it?
Nielsen bought Swartz's company in 1997, per Hollywood Reporter's reporting. In 2010, Nielsen sold the theatrical unit to Chris Aronson's Rentrak Theatrical for $15 million. Rentrak merged with Comscore in 2016 — a deal Comscore's own 50th-anniversary press release, published April 15, 2026, also cites while tracing the business back to that same 1976 founding.
Who owns the box office data now?
Ownership changed again in May 2026. Bay Area investor Anant Gupta's Advaya Capital bought the box office measurement unit from Comscore for $70 million and revived the Rentrak name, Hollywood Reporter reported. Aronson — who had sold the business to Comscore's corporate predecessor back in 2010 — joined the relaunched Rentrak's board of advisors. The new company, with roughly 200 employees globally, says it wants to operate as "the single, trusted neutral third party handler" of theatrical grosses.
Comscore, for its part, marked the measurement business's 50th year in April 2026 with its own statement. Janice O'Bryan, the company's SVP and Managing Director for Movies Domestic, said: "50 years of uninterrupted measurement speaks to the enduring importance of reliable, standardized box office data." The anniversary release also included input from industry figures on the exhibitor and studio side, including Paramount Pictures' head of domestic distribution Shaun Barber and B&B Theatres president Brock Bagby, both credited by Comscore as speaking to the data's role in the business.
Can studios opt out of being counted?
Yes. Comscore's tally depends on studios and exhibitors choosing to report into it — it is not a legal requirement. In a Hollywood Reporter report from early 2021, several studios pulled back during the pandemic: Searchlight Pictures did not report Nomadland's opening-weekend numbers to Comscore after its Feb. 19–21 wide release, citing the film's simultaneous Hulu debut, and A24 similarly withheld numbers for Minari.
Warner Bros. restricted competitors' access to its Comscore data starting with Tenet's 2020 release, though it continued reporting its own numbers directly to press each Sunday — a practice it kept for Wonder Woman 1984, The Little Things and Judas and the Black Messiah, per the same report. Sony applied similar opening-weekend restrictions. Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Box Office Pro, called the trend concerning at the time: "It would be very concerning for such tactics to become part of the new normal as the industry rises back to its feet. At the end of the day, facts should always take precedence over controlled optics."
What does that mean for the numbers in the news?
When a report says an opening weekend is confirmed, it usually means the figure came through Comscore's exhibitor-reported system — now owned by the relaunched Rentrak. A number a studio releases only through its own press statement, without appearing in that system, is a studio estimate, not an independently measured total, and careful outlets will usually say so.
The 2026 ownership change does not erase that distinction. The relaunched Rentrak inherited Comscore's exhibitor network and its stated aim, per Hollywood Reporter, of staying a neutral third party — but which company's name sits on the reported number, and how the studios and theaters choose to report to it, remains the thing worth checking before treating any box office figure as settled.
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