Reading the Numbers

Why these two grids belong together

The earlier assignments ranked twelve national parks by 2023 recreation visits and fifteen A24 films by budget and box office. Each page stopped at a sorted list. This site keeps those numbers and pushes the next question: visits are not the same thing as a wilderness experience, and a production budget is not the same thing as a return.

Parks: fame is not foot traffic

Great Smoky Mountains recorded 13,297,647 recreation visits in 2023. Grand Canyon recorded 4,733,705. Per 1,000 acres, the Smokies are about six times as busy. Cuyahoga Valley, a 32,572-acre park between Cleveland and Akron, is the densest unit in the set, at about 87,800 visits per 1,000 acres, and only 1.5% of those visits show up as overnight stays. Yellowstone is the opposite pattern: the largest park here, one of the least dense, with overnight stays equal to about 40% of visits.

Open the parks grid

Films: a bigger budget did not buy a bigger multiple

Moonlight turned a $1.5 million production budget into about $65.3 million in worldwide theatrical gross, roughly 43.5 times the budget. Marty Supreme, budgeted at $70 million, returned about 2.7 times. Talk to Me, at $4.5 million, cleared about 20 times. These are theatrical multiples, not profit. Marketing and the exhibitor’s share of tickets are outside the budget column.

Open the films grid

Excerpts

The full tables live on the Parks and Films pages. These four rows are the comparison that motivated the site.

Table A. Visit rank beside density and overnight share. Density is 2023 recreation visits per 1,000 acres. Overnight share is overnight stays divided by recreation visits.

Park	2023 visits	Acres	Visits / 1,000 acres	Overnight share
Great Smoky Mountains	13,297,647	522,427	25,454	8.3%
Grand Canyon	4,733,705	1,201,647	3,939	30.4%
Yellowstone	4,501,382	2,219,791	2,028	40.3%
Cuyahoga Valley	2,860,059	32,572	87,807	1.5%

Table B. Three A24 budgets and the theatrical multiple (worldwide gross ÷ production budget), using the figures from the earlier film table.

Film	Budget	Worldwide	Multiple
Moonlight	$1,500,000	$65,300,000	43.5×
Everything Everywhere All at Once	$25,000,000	$147,900,000	5.9×
Marty Supreme	$70,000,000	$191,300,000	2.7×

Where to go next

Parks

The full twelve-park table, clickable briefings, and three walkthroughs. New on this site: visits per 1,000 acres and overnight share for every park.

Parks data and analysis

Films

The A24 financial table with worldwide gross and a theatrical multiple on every row. The Witch is added, because the earlier page showed its poster and left it out of the data.

Films data and analysis

Resources

Glossaries for both datasets, source notes, and a short account of what changed from the one-page assignments.

Glossary and sources