A little over ten years ago, in a North Sydney shared office, Kirk Senior uttered famous words that set in motion a beautiful change to the industry. “Mate, do it with us. We’re better positioned than anyone else to make this a success.”

That was the day Vista Group and Numero began their partnership, and what a journey it has been.

The beginning

From the moment Numero software development began, we had a clear mantra: Clean, Fast, and Simple. We wanted to deliver the premiere box office reporting platform for the film industry, launching in 2014 reporting National Film Totals, National Theatre Total, and Market Share reports for the Australian market. By the end of 2014 we had nearly 300 sites reporting to Numero in Australia and were already underway in New Zealand, as well as expanding our software with Film Research and automated email reporting.

Early on, we were committed to a vision of real-time reporting visuals like no-one had seen before. Live Film Totals, launched in 2015, immediately proved the industry desired the same. Refreshing every 60 seconds, industry executives across Australia and New Zealand watched in real-time as their grosses ticked over; it was addictive, and exactly what we were aiming for.

Growing internationally

By the end of 2015, the majority of exhibitors, film distributors, and studios throughout Australia and New Zealand were using Numero. International expansion was on the agenda. Initially looking at other Asia Pacific markets where Vista Cinema had a strong market share, such as Malaysia or Singapore, we instead took the bold move of looking to China—a market with over 6,000 theatres at the time.

By the end of 2016, 6,214 theatres reported to Numero from China. Despite the dramatic increase in data, our platform didn’t miss a beat, as throughout the year we rolled out more and more new features including Release Calendars, Date Range reports, and an estimator tool for covering missing sites.

Over the next year our international expansion added box office data from South Africa and Indonesia, and we commenced out efforts with collecting in the United States. Through 2018 and 2019 we only sped up, with Numero adding data from another 15 territories around the world, primarily in Asia and South America.

During the same period, we released our Mobile Exhibitor App, completed our integration with MovieXchange—another Vista Group brand—and, delivered comprehensive studio-reported grosses for the Domestic (US) market.

Expanding our services

In 2019, there was an increasing demand for Pre-Sales data and reporting. With the increase in demand, various exhibitor partners of ours contributed to Numero’s aggregated data that film studios could track for their titles—thus saving enormous amounts of time and effort in compiling them themselves. And with Numero’s mobile app for exhibitors, it was easy for exhibitors to also make the most of these insights.

2020 of course slowed the world down, but our efforts to deliver European data were accelerated in 2021 to great result. Once Numero launched services in Spain, the UK, Germany, and France, our services were spread across all major continents across the globe.

Approaching the end of 2023, Numero was delivering box office and admissions for 36 territories around the world, with additional analytical and comparison features for Pre-Sales, and insightful mobile apps that deliver results across all formats.

Looking ahead, there are still plenty of opportunities to complete Numero’s coverage of the global box office, and additional studios we can empower with our services. We’re excited to continue bringing box office reporting to the world.