Tracking 104: Metrics Beyond Awareness And Interest

At The Quorum, we understand there is a learning curve for reading and interpreting tracking data. That’s why we created the Tracking 101 Series. (If interested, here are links to 101, 102, and 103.)

When looking at tracking data, most people begin with awareness and interest. These are pretty straightforward. Awareness measures the people who know about the film, while interest measures the people who want to see it. The other metrics, however, help round out the story. We’re going to use SINNERS and THE ACCOUNTANT 2 as examples.

SINNERS and ACCOUNTANT are two of the success stories of 2025. The former opened to $48M and crossed $100M after only nine days of release. ACCOUNTANT debuted to a solid $25M, nearly identical to the opening for the first film nine years ago. And yet, if you looked at just awareness and interest, you would think the two films should have had identical openings.

Take a look at these two charts. ACCOUNANT (light yellow) actually had higher awareness than SINNERS (dark yellow) on day of release.

And on the interest side, the two films were nearly identical.

Based on just these metrics, it would be reasonable to conclude that the two would have similar openings. But look what happens when we add additional metrics.

Let’s start with location. This is where we ask people if they would watch the film in a theater or at home (or not at all). 45% of people said they would watch SINNERS in a theater vs. 41% for ACCOUNTANT. So, while the two had similar interest levels, more people would wait to watch ACCOUNTANT at home.

For the fee question, we ask people if they would be willing to pay to watch the film or if they would only watch it if it was available for free or on a streaming service they currently subscribe to. Willingness to pay is not exclusive to seeing it in a theater. Some people are willing to pay to watch it at home. This question captures both groups. SINNERS comes out slightly ahead here as well, with 55% saying they would pay to watch the movie in a theater or at home vs. 53% for ACCOUNTANT.

The real separation happens with our intensity metrics. Heat and PLF are only available to subscribers. The heat metric is a more intense version of interest. We ask people to measure their interest in seeing a film on a scale from one to seven. We consider anyone who answers five, six, or seven interested in the movie. Heat measures just those who said their level of interest was a seven. We see meaningful separation in this metric, with 18% of people expressing the highest level of interest in SINNERS. ACCOUNTANT was at 14%.

PLF measures the percentage of people who said they would watch the film in a premium large format theater. Once again, SINNERS comes out ahead 13% to 9%. Combined, these two metrics indicate a higher intensity and willingness to pay more for a premium ticket for SINNERS.

It’s easy to look at the awareness and interest metrics and not dig any further. But a more well-rounded picture emerges when triangulating among the various metrics that are available on The Quorum.