The Numbers Box Office Scraper: Up to 1,000 Free Results a Month

Each movie financials record carries 33 fields, including production budget, worldwide gross, and the site's proprietary legs multiplier. This collector retrieves historical and current theatrical performance across six modes, covering daily charts from 1998 and yearly rankings back to 1980. A thousand results cost $5.00 on Apify's free plan, which provides enough monthly credit to cover this volume without a credit card. This is built for researchers and analysts who need structured data on distributor performance, theater counts, and inflation-adjusted domestic gross. It is not for users requiring subscriber-only talent bankability reports or private contact details, which the records do not include.

Try it before you read further. Apify's free plan includes $5.00 of usage every month with no credit card, enough for up to 1,000 results at $0.005 each before platform usage. Open The Numbers Box Office Scraper on Apify and run the prefilled example.

How reliable is The Numbers Box Office Scraper in production?

Across the last 30 days of public runs on the Apify platform, The Numbers Box Office Scraper recorded 429 runs with the following outcomes.

The data shows fewer than 1 in a hundred runs failed or timed out over the last 30 days. You should expect high stability for unattended schedules, though you should still implement standard error alerting to catch the rare failure. Aborted runs do not indicate a problem with the Actor logic and do not require specific handling in your retry strategy.

What does it cost to run The Numbers Box Office Scraper?

Each result costs $0.005 on Apify's free plan, which is $5.00 per 1,000 results. Starting a run is charged separately at $0.005 per GB of Actor memory. Apify also bills the platform usage each run consumes, at the rates of your Apify plan, on top of these charges.

Worked example: collecting 10,000 results costs $50.00 in result charges before run-start fees and platform usage. With 0.2% of runs failing or timing out in the last 30 days, budget for re-running a portion of those batches rather than assuming every run completes.

The maxItems control is the primary driver of your bill because result charges apply to every item written to the dataset. To verify the data meets your needs for just $0.10, run the example input which caps results at 20.

How do you run The Numbers Box Office Scraper from the API?

The schema marks 1 of its 9 controls as required: mode. Nothing in the payload below is illustrative. Those are the schema's prefilled defaults for The Numbers Box Office Scraper, so the request works once your token is in place.

Call the synchronous endpoint to start a run and receive dataset items in one request:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/crawlerbros~the-numbers-box-office-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"mode":"weekend","year":2026,"movieTitle":"Avatar","maxItems":20,"proxyConfiguration":{"useApifyProxy":true}}'

The same run from Python, using the official client:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")

run_input = {
  "mode": "weekend",
  "year": 2026,
  "movieTitle": "Avatar",
  "maxItems": 20,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": True
  }
}

run = client.actor("crawlerbros~the-numbers-box-office-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

And from Node.js:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client'

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>' })

const input = {
  "mode": "weekend",
  "year": 2026,
  "movieTitle": "Avatar",
  "maxItems": 20,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

const run = await client.actor('crawlerbros~the-numbers-box-office-scraper').call(input)
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems()
console.log(items)

Because the call is synchronous, your client waits for the whole run. Keep it for exploration. For scheduled work, start the run without waiting and collect the dataset afterwards, so network trouble costs you a retry rather than the results.

Which The Numbers Box Office Scraper inputs matter, and which can you skip?

The mode control is the most important setting, as it changes the structure and content of the returned records. Most users should leave proxyConfiguration on AUTO, as the source does not require paid proxy groups for reliable extraction.

• mode (string): What to fetch from The Numbers. Default: "weekend".
• chartDate (string): Date in YYYY-MM-DD format. Weekend/weekly charts snap to the nearest Friday on or before this date. Leave blank to use the most recent available chart. Charts are available from 1998 onward.
• year (integer): Calendar year for the top-grossing-movies chart. Data available from 1980 through the current year. Default: 2026.
• movieTitle (string): Movie title to search for. Returns full financial details (budget, domestic/international/worldwide gross, opening weekend, etc.) for every matching movie.
• minGross (integer): Drop chart/yearly entries below this gross (weekend/daily/weekly: period gross; yearly: gross for the year).
• distributor (string): Only keep entries whose distributor contains this text, e.g. Walt Disney, Universal, Warner Bros.
• genre (string): Only keep yearly entries whose genre contains this text, e.g. Action, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Documentary.
• maxItems (integer): Hard cap on emitted records. Default: 20.
• proxyConfiguration (object): The Numbers' chart and movie pages work without any proxy from datacenter IPs. Leave AUTO on for resilience; no paid proxy group is required. Default: {"useApifyProxy":true}.

Fixed-choice controls: mode accepts weekend (Weekend box office chart), daily (Daily box office chart), weekly (Weekly box office chart), yearly (Yearly top-grossing movies), byTitle (Movie budget & gross lookup by title), releaseSchedule (Upcoming release schedule).

What does The Numbers Box Office Scraper return?

The returned records are ideal for building ROI models and tracking theatrical trends across studios. They conspicuously do not contain daily social media sentiment or real-time seat availability, as the focus is on reported box-office totals.

Box-office chart entry (weekend / daily / weekly)

• rank, previousRank, isNewEntry
• title, detailUrl
• gross, isEstimate, totalGross
• dailyChangePercent, weeklyChangePercent
• theaterCount, theaterAverage, daysInRelease
• chartType, chartDate
• recordType: "boxOfficeChartEntry", scrapedAt

Yearly top-grossing entry (yearly)

• rank, title, detailUrl, year
• releaseDate, distributor, genre
• grossForYear, ticketsSold
• recordType: "yearlyBoxOfficeEntry", scrapedAt

Movie financials (byTitle)

• title, year, posterUrl, leadCast, director
• domesticBoxOffice, internationalBoxOffice, worldwideBoxOffice, inflationAdjustedDomesticBoxOffice
• openingWeekendGross, openingWeekendPercent, legs, domesticSharePercent
• productionBudget
• openingTheaters, maxTheaters, avgWeeksPerTheater
• domesticReleaseDate, distributor, mpaRating, runningTimeMinutes
• genre, subgenre, franchise, source, productionMethod, creativeType
• productionCompanies, productionCountries, languages
• sourceUrl, recordType: "movieFinancials", scrapedAt

Release schedule entry (releaseSchedule)

• title, detailUrl
• releaseDate - YYYY-MM-DD
• releaseType - e.g. Wide, Limited, Expands Wide, IMAX, Special Engagement, Wide, re-release, Canceled
• distributor
• domesticBoxOfficeToDate - populated only once the movie has opened and started earning
• recordType: "releaseScheduleEntry", scrapedAt

These are the documented fields. Optional ones can be empty on a given record, so measure how often each field your deliverable depends on is populated across a real sample before automating the handoff.

How do you build the workflow end to end?

Open The Numbers Box Office Scraper and work through these in order. Each step ends with something to check, so a bad configuration surfaces on a small run rather than a scheduled one.

1. Set the mode control to select from box-office charts, yearly rankings, title lookups, or release schedules.
2. Input a specific chartDate in YYYY-MM-DD format for weekend or daily modes, ensuring it is 1998 or later.
3. Specify a movieTitle when using the byTitle mode to access deep financial metrics for a specific film.
4. Apply a minGross threshold to filter out low-earning entries from the chart datasets and reduce dataset noise.
5. Set the maxItems cap to 20 for your first run to confirm the output structure while keeping result charges at $0.10.
6. Review the recordType field in the dataset to ensure the returned objects match the selected operation mode.
7. Check for the presence of productionBudget and legs in the results before automating a large-scale title lookup.
8. Configure a recurring schedule for the weekend mode to automatically capture new charts every Monday morning.

How do you apply it? Three worked playbooks

These are The Numbers Box Office Scraper's own documented use cases, each worked through as an operating pattern rather than a description.

Use case 1: Box-office trackers

Outcome: Pull the current weekend/daily chart into a dashboard

Configure: mode: "weekend", maxItems: 50

Working method: Run the Actor with mode set to weekend and chartDate left blank to retrieve the most recent figures. Check the gross and theaterCount fields to assess current market performance. If the data is correct, integrate the dataset into your reporting pipeline for weekly updates.

Deliverable: A dataset of recent weekend box-office rankings including gross, theater counts, and change percentages.

Stop condition: The run returns results for a previous week despite a new chart being available on the source site.

Use case 2: Film industry research

Outcome: Build datasets of budgets vs. gross by year/distributor

Configure: mode: "yearly", year: 2025, distributor: "Warner Bros"

Working method: Select the yearly mode and set the year and distributor filters to define your research cohort. Execute the run and verify that the grossForYear field is populated for the top entries. Repeat this for consecutive years to build a longitudinal dataset of studio performance.

Deliverable: A historical collection of yearly gross and ticket sales data filtered by studio and genre.

Stop condition: The recordType returned does not match yearlyBoxOfficeEntry.

Use case 3: Investment & greenlight analysis

Outcome: Compare production budget to worldwide gross ("legs", ROI multiples)

Configure: mode: "byTitle", movieTitle: "Avatar", maxItems: 10

Working method: Initiate a lookup for a specific film title using the byTitle mode to fetch detailed financials. Extract the productionBudget and worldwideBoxOffice fields to calculate the gross-to-budget ratio. Perform this lookup for several comparable titles to establish a baseline for ROI analysis.

Deliverable: Movie financial profiles containing production budgets, worldwide gross, and the site's legs multiplier.

Stop condition: The productionBudget field is missing for more than three consecutive title lookups in a known blockbuster set.

What breaks, and how do you design around it?

• Over the last 30 days, 0.2% of public runs failed and 0.0% timed out. Build retries and alerting around those rates rather than assuming every run completes.

If a title search returns several records, use the year and distributor fields to programmatically select the intended movie. When a field like productionBudget is missing, it means the data was not disclosed; your downstream logic should be prepared to skip these omitted keys.

When should you not use The Numbers Box Office Scraper?

Do not use this Actor if you need live ticketing data or seat maps for active screenings, as it only reports aggregate totals published by distributors. If your research focuses on the music industry rather than film, the Kworb Music Charts Scraper provides the relevant streaming and artist data. For those needing business directory information in Eastern Europe, the PaginiAurii Scraper - Romania Business Directory is the specialized tool for that region. This scraper also cannot bypass the paywall for The Numbers' proprietary Bankability talent reports.

What should you check before trusting the output?

• Verify that the recordType field corresponds correctly to the input mode used.
• Confirm that domesticBoxOffice and internationalBoxOffice are both present before calculating a global total.
• Check that the title field is not empty for any movieFinancials record.
• Alert if a run for a post-1998 chartDate returns zero results.
• Monitor for the omission of productionBudget and ensure your ingestion logic handles missing fields without crashing.
• Validate that ticketsSold is a positive integer for all yearly top-grossing entries.

None of this proves a record is correct. It gives a scheduled The Numbers Box Office Scraper run defined points where it should stop instead of quietly passing bad data downstream.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cost for a typical box-office tracking run?

On Apify's free plan, results cost $0.005 each, which is $5.00 per 1,000 results. A standard weekly chart run limited to the top 50 movies would cost $0.25 in result charges, plus platform usage. Apify's free plan includes $5.00 of monthly usage, which effectively covers up to 1,000 results of this Actor every month without any out-of-pocket expense.

How reliable is this Actor for scheduled reporting?

The Actor has a 99.8% success rate over the last 30 days, with 428 of 429 public runs finishing successfully. This level of reliability means fewer than 1 in a hundred runs fail or time out, making it suitable for automated dashboards. We recommend setting up basic alerting for the occasional failure to ensure your dashboard stays current.

How far back does the historical box-office data go?

Daily, weekend, and weekly charts are available from 1998 to the present. If you need older data, the yearly top-grossing rankings extend further back to 1980. If you input a date earlier than these coverage windows, the Actor will return an empty dataset rather than an error, as the source does not have records for those periods.

Can I search for a specific movie's production budget?

Yes, by using the byTitle mode and entering a movieTitle, you can retrieve 33 financial fields including the productionBudget. Note that budgets are not always disclosed for independent or international films. If the budget is not available on The Numbers, the field will be omitted from the output to keep the data clean.

What does the legs multiplier represent in the output?

The legs metric is a calculation provided by The Numbers that divides the domestic box office by the biggest single weekend gross. A higher number indicates that a movie had a long theatrical life and sustained audience interest over time, whereas a low number suggests the film's revenue was heavily concentrated in its opening weekend.

Where to go next

When you are ready to run it, open The Numbers Box Office Scraper on Apify; the free plan covers up to 1,000 results a month.

Other Actors we maintain for related data:

• Kworb Music Charts Scraper: Scrape Kworb.net music charts - Spotify daily/weekly streaming charts (global + 76 countries), the worldwide Apple Music / iTunes song chart, YouTube's most-viewed music videos, all-time top-streamed Spotify artists, and per-artist song-level streaming stats.
• World Rugby Rankings & Results Scraper: Scrape official World Rugby data - men's and women's world rankings (current or historical by date), match results and fixtures across international and club rugby, and national team profiles.
• Watchfinder & Co. Scraper: Scrape Watchfinder.com - the UK's premier pre-owned luxury watch marketplace.
• PaginiAurii Scraper - Romania Business Directory: Scrape PaginiAurii.ro (Pagini Aurii), Romania's leading business directory.

Related guides:

• Kworb Music Charts Scraper: Workflows and Practical Use Cases
• Iowa SOS Business Entity Search Scraper: $5.00 per 1,000 results
• SRA Solicitors Register Scraper: 3 Practical Use Cases

Resources

• Actor documentation, input schema, and pricing: verified against the published Actor on 2026-09-26.

• Actor last updated by its maintainers on 2026-07-11.

• Run outcome figures cover the 30 day public window ending 2026-09-26.

• The Numbers Box Office Scraper on Apify