How to read these grids
Both datasets are comparison tables. A sorted column answers one question and hides others. On the Parks page the sort is 2023 recreation visits. On the Films page the original row order is kept, and the new highlighted column is the theatrical multiple.
- Read the highlighted column against at least one other column before you rank a row as “bigger” or “better.”
- Hover a glossary term below. The definition slides open. Move the pointer away and it closes.
- Dashed headers on the data pages are short versions of these same definitions.
Park glossary
- Recreation visits
- The National Park Service count of recreational entries in a calendar year. It is not unique visitors. A person who enters three times counts as three visits. This is the sort column on the parks table.
- Overnight stays
- Nights in park lodging, campgrounds, backcountry sites, and similar in-park beds. A park can have a large visit total and a small overnight count when most people live nearby or sleep outside the boundary.
- Overnight share
- Overnight stays divided by recreation visits, shown as a percent. It is a rough signal of trip type. Yosemite is about 41%. Cuyahoga Valley is about 1.5%. It is not a count of unique overnight guests, because one visitor can account for several nights and the visit count is entries, not people.
- Area (acres)
- Official land area inside the park boundary. Useful only when it is paired with visits. Acreage by itself describes the map, not the crowd.
- Visits per 1,000 acres
- Recreation visits divided by acres, multiplied by 1,000. A crowding signal, not a measure of trail quality or scenery. Cuyahoga Valley leads this set. Yellowstone is last.
- Established
- Year the unit was designated a national park. Some places were monuments, recreation areas, or forests first. Cuyahoga Valley (2000) is young as a national park and old as a protected landscape.
- Highest point (ft)
- Highest named summit or rim elevation inside the park, in feet. A proxy for mountain character. Acadia and Cuyahoga Valley are much lower than Rocky Mountain or Grand Teton.
- State(s)
- The state or states that contain the park. Multi-state parks such as Great Smoky Mountains and Yellowstone often sit on regional travel routes, which helps explain visit volume.
Film glossary
- Production budget
- Out-of-pocket cost to make the film: cast, sets, effects, and post-production. It typically does not include marketing. A low budget can still sit on top of an expensive advertising campaign, which this table cannot see.
- Domestic box office
- Theatrical ticket sales in the United States and Canada.
- International box office
- Theatrical ticket sales outside the United States and Canada. Uncut Gems is the exception in this set: its international release was not a comparable theatrical total, so the earlier table recorded $0 and a Netflix note.
- Worldwide gross
- Domestic box office plus international box office. For Uncut Gems, the worldwide cell is domestic only and marked with an asterisk.
- Theatrical multiple
- Worldwide gross divided by production budget. Moonlight at 43.5× means tickets totaled about 43.5 times the production budget. This is not return on investment in the profit sense. Theaters keep a share of the ticket, and marketing is outside the budget, so a film can post a multiple above 1 and still lose money. The earlier glossary called this ROI. This site uses “multiple” so that limit stays visible.
- International share
- International box office divided by worldwide gross. It shows where the tickets were sold. It does not show where the profit was earned.
- Independent film
- A feature produced largely outside the major-studio system. The films in this set are discussed through A24 releases. Budgets still range from $1.5 million to $70 million, so “indie” is not one spending level.
Sources
- Park visits, overnight stays, acreage, establishment years, and high points: the class parks page, compiled from National Park Service visitor-use statistics and park profiles for 2023. The public statistics portal is NPS Stats (IRMA). Park-by-park profiles are on nps.gov.
- Visits per 1,000 acres and overnight share are calculated on this site from those figures. They were described in the earlier walkthroughs and not computed there.
- Film budgets and box office, except The Witch: the earlier class table, described there as public box office records. 2025 and 2026 titles are unchanged from that table.
- The Witch (2016 theatrical release): domestic about $25.1 million and international about $15.3 million, on a reported $4 million budget, from Box Office Mojo. Rounded to the nearest $100,000 on the films page. The 2025 re-release is not included.
- Images:
A24-Logo.pngandThe_Witch.jpgare copies of the files already in the ACAD 274 folder. The originals were not edited.
What changed from the earlier pages
No separate instructor comment file was stored with the assignments. The expansions below answer the gaps in the two pages themselves: claims that were written out and not calculated, and a poster that was not a row in the table.
- The parks page gained a full density and overnight-share table, plus a third walkthrough (Acadia against the Smokies).
- The films page gained worldwide gross, a theatrical multiple, an international-share comparison, and The Witch.
- The ROI definition is tightened. The number on the films page is a theatrical multiple, and the glossary says what it leaves out.
- The one-page assignments are still in their original folders. This site is a copy of the material, reorganized, not a replacement of those files.