Weekend box office numbers for movies are completely bogus. “Once upon a time, when the studios owned the theaters and carted away locked boxes of cash from them, these box-office numbers meant something. But nowadays, as dazzling as the “boffo,” “socko,” and “near-record” figures may seem to the media and other number fetishists, they have little real significance other than to measure the effectiveness of the studios’ massive expenditures on ads.”