Box Office Bomb problems

This ATT was deemed more of a Trope Talk problem, so I decided to continue it here since I wanted to participate.

Box Office Bomb was brought up in the above query as having different problems. Miss Conduct argued that the item is not tropeworthy:

Reymma, on the other hand, argued (and I agree) that while the Trivia item itself is valid, the definition has problems:

I decided to bring this here to resolve all these issues. In particular, I am concerned about the lack of a clear definition, and I wanted to bring this here before I do a wick check and TRS this. So, what does everyone think about Box Office Bomb and its problems?

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Sep 17th 2022 at 7:16:01 AM

There's the additional complication of Hollywood Bookkeeping, as a result of which the nominal financial success or failure of any given media is up to the accountants.

As ElBuenCuate mentioned, there is a cleanup thread that has already agreed to using a stricter definition and has been thoroughly cleaning the on-page examples and wicks.

Probably a stupid question, but is the definition actually official?

Worth noting that the part of Miss Conduct's post the OP quotes seems to be arguing more against Box Office Bomb's subpages being indexes than against the page itself existing with out-of-universe examples. She did end said post with:

My understanding is that Box Office Bomb is an industry term and thus should be catalogued, but under Trivia.

It already is Trivia, and just to be clear, I don't agree with Miss Conduct on this.

I do, however, agree with Reymma that we need an official definition—I understand the cleanup thread has been using a specific definition, but I don't necessarily know if it's officially the definition the Trivia item uses.

Part of the reason I started this thread was so I could gauge whether I should do a wick check on Box Office Bomb and take it in (pending expected results) under "Unclear Description". I would need to know if the definition used by the thread is the official definition so I could judge whether this is TRS-able.

EDIT: The description isn't clear about what counts as a bomb, FWIW.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Sep 18th 2022 at 8:07:17 AM

My logic behind saying it was too common was that most movies underperform relative to the higher-ups' (often unreasonable) expectations. As well, Hollywood Bookkeeping is a thing and generally the only films acknowledged by their studios as flops are films they're willing to throw under the bus for whatever reason. As well, "film made back its budget" isn't tropeworthy, so I don't think "film didn't make back its budget" isn't trope worthy either.

I also think it has no reason to be an index. Like at all. Even if the examples stay, I think it needs to be removed from the indexes. Indexes are mostly there to link between works with meaningful similarities, like the same time frame of release or the same genre or works by the same company. I say Box Office Bomb is no different than any other trivia trope like Creator Backlash or Keep Circulating the Tapes and should not be listed at the bottom of works' pages. People might deliberately seek out, say, Best Picture winners or All CGI Cartoons, because they have something meaningful in common, a shared genre or a single award honoring them, every box office bomb flops for different enough reasons that comparing them isn't really something people do.

And for the record, I do not think that In-Universe examples are problematic, the harshest I'd say the trope should get is "In-Universe examples only."