Here in TMDB, we can see the budget for Coming 2 America, $60M. But, how much revenue did it generate? It was not released in theatres, so we really have no idea! How many people got Amazon Prime just to see it? Did they see it during a free trial? Will they keep their subscription thereafter?

There's no shortage of conversation growing about streaming's glaring paradigm shift - no "box office numbers."

We all know that movie ROI is not the sole determinant of whether a movie is "good" or not. There's lots of movies that sell a lot of tickets but aren't very good beyond pandering to the lowest common denominator that will sell lots of tickets, while great films don't always do well at the box office, as they may challenge audiences and turn a night of escapist entertainment into an exercise in thinking/reflecting on the harsh realities of life that many people tend to want to avoid by "watching a movie".

But, box office numbers do - or, did - give us a sense of community, of being able to say we watched what "everyone else was watching" - at a given point in time, we were part of something. This provides some of the threads that weave a social fabric. Here are just two articles on this:

• Smash hit or total turkey? In the age of streaming it's impossible to tell
• The days of knowing how big a movie is are seemingly over in a streaming-first era

As Netflix moves further and further into producing its own content, and the other big players do the same, what's emerging is simply an annualized finance structure that can tally its yearly expenses, tally its yearly revenues, and declare its profitability as an entire entity, unable to break down how each project fared.

One thing we can do? Buy their stock!

One more note - Netflix is the granddaddy of this whole game, trailblazing a lot of quality original content (it all started with House of Cards, followed by Orange Is the New Black, and the floodgates were opened) proving it was possible.

Disney+ not only already owned a lot of its own assets (Disney, Pixar), it also bought the rights to a ton of big content (Star Wars, Marvel, sheesh!). Where does that leave Amazon?

Playing to its strengths as backbone, which helps us better understand not only why it acquired IMDb and Box Office Mojo, but why, specifically, it pulled box office numbers back behind its paywall, no longer available to all for free. Regardless on what platform we now watch a movie, information about all movies is hosted on Amazon infrastructure.

Interestingly, while Eddie Murphy and Amazon made the move to release Coming 2 America by streaming only during this lockdown, other "blockbuster-type" movies (Top Gun: Maverick, No Time To Die) keep getting pushed back - they want it in theatres to get that good ol' global box office buzz.

The times, they are a-changin'.