Data sources & estimation

Our numbers come from two places: our own tracking of shows in cinemas across India, and reports from producers and the film trade. This page explains each one, and how we fill the gaps between them.

Our own show tracking

We track ticket sales for shows in cinemas across India, city by city. For each show we record the city, cinema, chain, language, format and show time, the number of seats and the seats sold, and the money collected. We add these up ourselves.

• Advance booking pages show this tracking for shows that haven't happened yet: tickets sold and collection so far, by city, language and format.
• Live collection pages show it for shows that have already played that day, updated through the day.

Tracked figures cover the cities and cinemas we track, not every screen in India, so they are lower than All India figures. Pages built on tracking say "tracked cities" and show how many cities are included.

Producer and trade reports

Final day-by-day figures, lifetime figures and overseas figures are compiled from producer and trade reports. Where reports differ, we compare them with our own tracking and use the figure that fits the evidence best. A film's page notes whether its figures have been checked by Films Discourse.

How we estimate

• Gross from nett (or nett from gross): when only one is known, we work out the other at 18% GST and mark it as estimated.
• All India from tracked cities: when we publish an All India figure during the day, it is our estimate built from tracked cities and how those cities usually compare with the whole country. It is labelled as All India and replaced by the final figure later.
• Footfalls: where a film's footfalls (tickets sold) aren't reported, we estimate them from India gross and the average ticket price for that year, and mark them as estimated.
• Language split: a day's figure is divided between languages in the same proportion as the languages in our tracked shows that day.

Audience figures

The HypoMeter and the opening-day predictions come from Films Discourse readers. Interest tracking before release follows how many people have marked a film as interested over time. These are measures of audience interest, not collections.

What we don't do

We don't publish figures we can't back up, and we don't round numbers up to make a film look better or worse. If a figure is a guess, we say so. To see how the figures are defined, read our box office methodology.