Admissions

The count of tickets sold across a market in a period. It is the honest unit for audience questions, because gross box office moves when ticket prices move and admissions do not. A market can post a higher gross in a year when fewer people went.

Philippine admissions fell by more than half between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, and that collapse, rather than any change in the quality of the films, is what the decline of the 1990s actually consists of. The awkward part for anyone arguing policy today is that the series is not maintained. The figures in circulation are compiled from press reports rather than published by an authority, which makes admissions both the most useful number in Philippine film economics and one nobody can currently produce on demand.

Source: The figures this course uses, 131 million admissions in 1996 falling to 63 million in 2004, and 78.3 million in 2014, are compiled from secondary press citations rather than from any official series, and the course marks them as such wherever they appear. The absence of an authoritative national series is documented in section 11 of the Cinema research map and is treated as a finding in 3.7 rather than as a research shortfall.

First used in: 3.5 · Freedom came, the audience did not