"Michael Clayton" received five Oscar nods on Tuesday, including Best Picture and a first Best Actor nomination for George Clooney. Pretty good stuff.
It would be safe now to call this movie a success, critically. Financially, it made a nice profit, which in the movie business, deems it a huge success. According to boxofficemojo.com, "Clayton" raked in $39,343,460 since its Oct. 5 opening. (Warner Brothers is re-releasing it Jan. 25 on 1,000 screens nationwide.)
Made for a reported $21.4 million, that's a nifty profit in the WB coffers.
Deemed a critical and financial success, what does this mean in terms of humans? Based on an average ticket price of $10, it means that 3,934,346 people saw the movie. Or, roughly, 1.3 percent of the U.S. population (using 300 million as the population figure).
So when a movie hits that magical $100 million domestic gross, that means 3 percent of America saw it. That's a pretty crazy way to think about movie success, huh?