Box Office Mojo is one of the most reliable movie news websites in the industry, giving accurate daily box office results, as well as weekend estimates before Noon ET every Sunday. It also features year-by-year charts, special articles, predictions, news, and most importantly, MPAA rating announcements, release date and title changes. I go to boxofficemojo.com every day – in fact, several times a day. It’s an invaluable research tool and helps with scheduling the films I need to see each week.
Last Friday (10/10) the site mysteriously disappeared, with visitors being re-directed to a generic box office page on IMDb (Amazon bought BOM, through subsidiary IMDb back in 2008) leaving millions of loyal fans and industry insiders rather puzzled. The disappearance of BOM was Variety‘s top story on Friday, as they, and many others in the movie business scrambled to try to find out what had happened. The internet was filled with speculation, as well as “RIP” stories. When I first Tweeted about the situation on Friday I heard back from panicked Mojo followers, worried that this was the end.
Was the site might be undergoing a design change (which it has done several times before since its inception in 1999)? Was Mojo being absorbed into IMDb? Would we now have to pay for access to the information that Mojo provides? Reps for IMDb and Amazon would not answer any questions from the media.
But then, just as mysteriously, Box Office Mojo returned midday Saturday, without any cosmetic changes. And when Sunday morning came, the weekend box office was up, as usual. When asked to comment, officials from both IMDb and Amazon still refused to reply. The head honcho at Box Office Mojo, Ray Subers, finally tweeted these two remarks on Sunday:
“I think it’s about time to resume normal programming here…” and “Actually, two things. 1) I am 100% OK. No health/family/personal issues whatsoever. 2) I will not be answering any Qs re: the past 3 days.”
And he still hasn’t and probably won’t. Will we ever know “the rest of the story” on what really happened to Box Office Mojo? Likely, no. But the most important thing is that the site is up and running, as if nothing happened at all.
If I had the chance to speak to Subers directly I would tell him, on behalf of the millions of us who enjoy and depend on his site, “Don’t do that to us again!”