Weekend box office reporting is a seminal part of entertainment media. In recent years alone, it has served as everything from a checkup on the general health of movie theaters to a litmus test for each new Marvel film. But recently, box office reporting has gotten a little weird: All the earnings are being reported in terms of budgets and profitability. This used to be language reserved for obvious box office flops — movies that cost $100 million or more barely putting up $10 million in their opening weekend, for example. But this past weekend, specifically with respect to Ryan Coogler’s fantastic new vampire horror film, Sinners, it became clear that we don’t really know how to talk about the box office anymore.  Let’s get a few things out of the way first: The latest box office report was pretty great for movie lovers and movie studios — particularly Warner Bros., which had the weekend’s top two movies. Sinners was an unambiguous hit, pulling in more than $48 million domestically to earn the top spot, with a worldwide total of $63.5 million. It’s the biggest opening for an original movie so far this decade, and it’s also among the biggest openings in recent memory for an R-rated horror film. Meanwhile, both A Minecraft Movie and The King of Kings proved they have genuine staying power, earning $41.3 million and $17.3 million, respectively. Even The Amateur, Warfare, and Drop performed pretty well in their second weeks.  At first glance, just looking at all those numbers, it’s easy to see why entertainment reporters so often center their news reporting on movie budgets and box office weekend reports. They can take each movie’s total gross so far and cross-check it against the film’s budget, and it feels like they’ve instantly proven whether a movie is successful. Except that there’s a whole bunch of problems with that approach.  The biggest and most nebulous one is that it’s not a particularly healthy way for film fans to engage with the medium they love. Movie fandom isn’t numbers driven, and shouldn’t ever be. A movie’s quality is in no way dependent on how much money it makes; some of the best movies of all time were notorious flops upon release. It can still be exciting and newsworthy when a movie does well, or even when it does badly. It’s just that its profitability isn’t any kind of measure of quality. Speaking of which, profitability itself is a notoriously murky concept in Hollywood. Creative accounting by movie studios can keep a movie unprofitable on paper for years if that means not having to divvy up the profits with anyone whose contracts entitle them to a percentage of a movie’s proceeds. And while movies’ production budgets are often well reported, their marketing budgets aren’t — and those can often equal or even exceed a blockbuster’s production costs. In other words, any reporting that’s simply balancing a movie’s gross against its budget should be taken with a grain of salt, let alone reporting that’s talking only about a movie’s opening-weekend haul.  Since the early days of the superhero boom, opening weekends have come to be seen as a movie’s make-or-break moment. If a movie opens well relative to its genre category and MPAA rating, it’s treated like a massive success, regardless of how it performs for the rest of its time in theaters. If a movie opens poorly, it’s treated as a surefire sign that it’s going to flop. But the opening weekend isn’t quite the bellwether it used to be. It’s still important as a sign of how much cultural pop a movie has, or whether it’s a surprise in one direction or another — particularly in an era when reporting on advance ticket sales leads to movies being characterized as hits or flops before they’ve even opened. But as cinema owners fight to regain the exclusive theatrical window, popular films will continue to make more and more of their money in the trailing weeks after their release. In fact, movies like Elemental and Wicked opened below expectations, but outperformed projections on every subsequent week, going on to become massive hits.   Similarly, as The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey pointed out on X over the weekend, movies are also making more money on premium VOD platforms than ever before. While studios have largely been quiet on the subject of VOD profits, Universal Pictures did loudly proclaim a victory around Wicked, announcing that the film made $26 million in its first day of PVOD release and $70 million in the first week. Most movies aren’t going to do Wicked numbers, but the film’s impressive total gives us a clear picture that premium streaming rentals are much more than minimal dividends atop the theatrical total. And none of this includes potential studio profit drivers such as a movie’s streaming release boosting subscriptions for a streaming service, or licensing deals to bring a film to cable TV or other streaming platforms.  Box office reporting is complicated business. If you say too little, you run the risk of leaving uninformed readers lost in a sea of meaningless numbers. But say too much, and you risk overwhelming the audience with details that don’t matter. Still, there’s a fine line between giving context and concern trolling. Reporting production budgets alongside opening-weekend grosses doesn’t always cross that line, but speculating that one of the most impressive box office openings since the start of the pandemic — for a movie with a modest budget by blockbuster standards, no less — is anything other than good news? That’s certainly a step too far.  The truth is, very few people outside of film studios themselves will ever know for sure whether a movie can be considered objectively profitable, or by what margin. And the studios aren’t making that information public. It’s important to take weekend box office reports for exactly what they are: a measure of how many people went to the theater during a given weekend and which movies they saw. Box office reports might be a good sign for a movie or a bad one, but either way, they represent the beginning of a movie’s release story, not the end. That’s how we should treat them. And right now, the signs say that people really like Sinners, and that they’re going to movie theaters to see it.