That Letter Grade in the Movie Ads Comes From About 500 People in a Lobby on Friday Night

This weekend, two films open across North America and neither of them has a CinemaScore yet — not because anyone is late, but because the grade doesn't exist until tonight. It's made in theater lobbies, on paper, in about the time it takes the credits to roll. Here's the whole machine, in plain terms.

What actually happens in the lobby

CinemaScore, the company, sends polling teams to theaters across the United States and Canada on a film's opening night. Their own description of the method: they poll "a regionally-balanced and statistically robust sample of opening night moviegoers" — in human language, a spread of ordinary Friday-night crowds, picked to look like the country.

Each moviegoer gets a paper ballot with six questions. No pen needed: you answer by bending back tabs, like an old-fashioned pledge card — which is literally where the idea came from. The six questions cover your grade for the film on an A+ to F scale, whether you'd buy or rent it later, and a few details about you — age, gender — so the results can be sliced up afterwards. You hand the ballot back as you leave; the counts are tallied on the spot and sent in the same night.

That's the entire sample: one night, real ticket-buyers, paper. The detail behind it, from a trade account of the method that CinemaScore republishes on its own site: 35 to 45 polling teams work across 25 cities; on any given night they pick five theaters in five cities at random — the randomness is the anti-cheating device, so no studio can pack a friendly house — and aim for 400 to 600 ballots. About 65% of the people handed a ballot hand it back. Picture one big multiplex lobby on a busy Friday: that crowd, times five cities, is the sample the whole industry then quotes.

The full results — the breakdowns by age and gender, the buying intentions — are sent directly to the studios that pay for them. The public gets exactly one thing: the letter.

Why 500 people is both the point and the wobble

Five hundred ballots is enough to hear a crowd clearly and small enough to wobble. The founder put the margin of error at about 6% on 300 ballots: in plain terms, run the same survey twenty times and a few of those runs land a notch off just by luck of who happened to buy tickets. Studios treat the letter as a signal, not a measurement — one widely quoted distribution chief, in that same trade account, calls it "a pretty good indicator" and adds, "it's not always right."

There's a second, bigger tilt built in, and it's the one to remember: opening-night audiences are the fans. They bought tickets for the first showing of the thing they most wanted to see. The Los Angeles Times has made the point for years, in the form this desk likes best: because the first-night crowd starts out enthusiastic, a C from them is "bad news, the equivalent of a failing grade." A grade from CinemaScore is the verdict of the friendliest jury the film will ever face.

What the letters have been worth

Studios care about the letter because it has historically predicted legs — how much money a film makes after its opening weekend, expressed as a multiple. A film that opens to $20 million and finishes at $80 million has a 4x multiple: it earned its opening four times over.

Deadline's obituary of the founder printed the historical averages, from before the pandemic. Read them as the weather history, not a promise:

• A+ → about 4.8x. An opening of $20 million tended to become roughly $96 million before the run ended.
• B+ → about 3.2x. The same $20 million opening becomes about $64 million.
• C+ or D+ → about 2.4x. About $48 million.
• F → about 2.2x — and the shape is uglier than the average, because an F film's second weekend tends to fall off a cliff. The Devil Inside (F, 2012) dropped 76% in its second weekend.

The exceptions prove what the letter measures. Shutter Island got a C+ and still ran to a 3.1x multiple — $41 million to $128 million — carried by its star and director. Vanilla Sky got a D and managed 4x. Star power can drag a film past a lukewarm grade; the grade is measuring the audience's mood, not the box office's destiny.

The F: what it actually means

Only 21 films had ever received an F as of The Turning in 2020, per TheWrap's count — among them Solaris, Bug, Disaster Movie, The Box, The Devil Inside, Killing Them Softly, mother! and The Grudge. Look at that list and a pattern shows: several of them reviewed respectably with critics. An F is usually not "the audience thought it was badly made." The founder, Ed Mintz, said it himself, in the plainest sentence in this whole business: a D or an F often means "they promoted it funny and the absolute wrong crowd got into it." An F is a broken promise — the trailer sold one film, the theater showed another, and the first-night crowd punished the switch.

Mintz is the human origin of all of this. A maths graduate who ran a dental-billing software company, he founded CinemaScore in 1978 after disliking a film the critics had praised — his objection was the founding idea: critics are one person each, and the audience's voice was nowhere in print. Polling on the ballots began in 1979. The company, still run by his family from Las Vegas, has been asking lobbies ever since. His own summary of the scale: "A's generally are good, B's generally are shaky, and C's are terrible."

The other system you'll see quoted

Weekend reports also cite PostTrak, run by Comscore — the rival instrument. The differences are simple. PostTrak doesn't give a letter: it reports percentages, above all the share of the audience giving the film its highest mark, "definite recommend." And while CinemaScore is one night, PostTrak polls across the first two days of a wide release and builds a fuller file — how people heard about the film, why they came, whether it matched what they expected. When you see a weekend story quote "92% definite recommend" next to a letter grade, the percentage is PostTrak and the letter is CinemaScore. They're two different crowds being asked two different questions.

The fine print, in plain sight

Three limits, because they decide how much to believe tonight's grades when they post. First, the sample is fans on night one — the friendliest jury, as above. Second, the ballots only exist for big openings: films opening on fewer than 1,500 screens don't get polled at all, which is why the little platform releases you read about in this library carry no letter and are judged by a different number entirely (the per-theater average — linked below). Third, horror scares the scale: horror audiences grade harder, and the founder's son has long made the point in trade interviews that an F in horror is worth about a B− in comedy. The letter is the letter; the context is yours to add.

Tonight, in five cities, about 500 people per film will bend some tabs. By the time the trades write the weekend up, those tabs will be the grade.