Box Office Jedi is an online movie publication and box office reporting site. Our purpose is to illuminate the movies through the integration of art and business. We produce forecasts, analysis, and special features about the industry, alongside a comprehensive archive of box office statistics dating back to 1995.

Before the internet, box office was insider knowledge. If you had any interest in it — and we suspect there were those who did — your ways in were limited. If you were lucky, you’d catch the AM radio guy breeze past the top three titles on Monday morning. If you went to brush your teeth, you might miss it. Otherwise you’d wait until the following weekend, when local newspapers and entertainment magazines would publish a Top 10 or Top 20 (Entertainment Weekly was the most comprehensive).

The first wave of online box office sites changed that. Gitesh Pandya’s BoxOfficeGuru launched in 1997, publishing weekend forecasts and recaps. Bruce Nash’s The Numbers arrived the same year, focused on a database-first approach. Both remain active today. BoxOfficeMojo arrived in 1999, and within a few years had grown into the largest of the three.

BoxOfficeMojo was founded by Brandon Gray, who later partnered with Sean Saulsbury to scale the site to nearly 2 million users. Not only did it make box office widely accessible, it illuminated a community of box office lovers that most probably never knew existed. In 2008, it was acquired by Amazon through its subsidiary IMDb. In 2011, its forums were officially closed along with all user accounts.

There’s a story behind the origin of the name BoxOfficeMojo. It could be myth, but we have good reason to believe it’s true. It was the start of the summer season. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me was the projected number one movie, and so the founders made a quick call to steal its “Mojo.”

But it wasn’t their first idea. They had been using another working title in the months prior, in reference to the year’s other most-anticipated film, Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.

Box Office Jedi is an ode to all of this.

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Please write to info@boxofficejedi.com.