Old-TV1That’s according to this MediaPost story, which says this year’s spending of $1.07b is actually up slightly from last year’s $1.04b expenditure.

There are some standout stats from the story, including that Warner Bros. spent $36m on TV ads for San Andreas, which has a domestic box office take to date of $154m (one third of that during opening weekend), meaning 23% of the eventual results were spent on TV. Compare that to Jurassic World, for which Universal spent $34m on TV ads and went on to make $643m domestically. That means TV spending wound up being just 5% of box office.

TV ads are the epitome of movie marketing efforts as studios put all the eggs in that opening weekend basket. So we can see that through that filter all this spending worked in that it drove attendance over a three or four day frame. But it also shows that there are tons of other factors – familiarity, word of mouth, the entirety of the rest of the campaign and so much else – that plays into things that TV spending alone can’t serve every movie equally.