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Sales trends vs. gross
Matt makes a good point: if the media wants to point out the movies, albums, and books with the highest quality, they should point to sales trends instead of raw numbers.
Bad movies often have a big opening, thanks to their marketing budget; that tells customers nothing. What's more interesting is what movie is trending upwards, thanks to word of mouth (thanks to a good experience).
Read the comment here.
Rather like the first few months of banner ads. 30-40% click through rates. Companies went bonkers, and advertising-as-we-know-it was dead. After the initial curiosity was sated, click-throughs reflected their true relativity to the customer's needs. So someone invented pop-ups. Same trend. Same with email marketing. Things revert to their true mean.
On the other side, look at Google, one-click purchasing, PayPal, and peer-to-peer file sharing. My favorite from my industry is deep linking from the manufacturer's site to the retailer's buy page. Quick, easy, useful, and win-win-win for manufacturers, retails and consumers. All trending strongly upward over long (in web years, anyway) periods of time.