Website Case Study
Box Office Journal
Live box office figures from The Movie Database, turned into four clear pages with the context needed to read them properly.
At a Glance
Box Office Journal tracks the business of cinema. We built it from the ground up as four pages: a homepage, films now playing in theatres, an upcoming release calendar and an all-time highest-grossing list. Every figure comes live from The Movie Database (TMDB), and each page pairs its live tables with written sections that explain what the numbers mean.
- Project
- Website
- Sector
- Film and entertainment: box office data
- Scope
- Four-page live data site
- Highlights
- Top 10 table, release calendar, searchable all-time list
- Live site
- BoxOfficeJournal.com
The Brief
Box office figures are easy to find and easy to misread. The site had to present live numbers cleanly and explain them well enough that a casual filmgoer and a close follower of the business could both rely on them.
- Show what is playing now, ranked, with gross, budget, release date and rating in one table.
- Give films in theatres, upcoming releases and the all-time list their own pages, reachable from a four-item navigation.
- Make the all-time list searchable, so any film can be looked up directly.
- Make clear that figures are worldwide lifetime grosses, not weekend domestic numbers.
What We Designed
A three-part promise, every dollar, every screen, every story, heads the homepage, beside a hero card for the week's number one film and headline figures for what is in theatres. Below come the Top 10 table, a trending list of what people are watching, upcoming releases, the newsletter (The Daily Gross) and a plain-language guide to what readers can look up and how to read the numbers.
We gave it the look of a trade paper after dark: a near-black background, warm off-white text and a gold accent that nods to marquee lights and award statuettes. Playfair Display handles headlines and Source Sans 3 keeps dense tables legible. Even the favicon follows the system, a Playfair Display B in dark navy on a gold tile, so the brand holds together down to the browser tab.
Top 10 table
Rank, title, genre, gross, budget, release date and rating for ten films now playing in theatres.
Release calendar
An upcoming release calendar shows which films are heading to theatres and when.
Searchable all-time list
The highest-grossing films of all time, searchable by title through TMDB's own search.
Context with the data
Written sections on every page explain what the figures cover, so the live tables never stand alone.
How We Achieved It
All movie data loads live from the TMDB API whenever a page opens, so the charts stay current without anyone touching them. The figures reflect worldwide lifetime gross rather than weekend domestic numbers; the page labels them as worldwide and adds a short section on how to read the numbers, so readers compare like with like.
Each page carries static explanatory sections alongside its live tables, which gives readers context and gives search engines real text to index rather than an empty shell waiting for data. Navigation is just four items (home, in theatres, upcoming and all-time), and the newsletter signup and contact form are protected against spam with Google reCAPTCHA.
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