#PIECES 1982 BOX OFFICE MOVIE#

As Adolph Zukor, the founder of Paramount Pictures, once said: ''If we knew in advance when we made any picture how it was going to be taken by the public, we'd have to hire a hall to hold the money.''ДЇew people in Hollywood would have bet more than a nickel on the commercial success of movies about an elderly couple preparing for death or the spiritual crises of two runners preparing for the 1924 Olympics. The list of box-office winners and losers contains a number of surprises, as usual. Murphy, a film-industry analyst and a professor at the University of Southern California, believes the 30 percent share has never been achieved before by any single distributor.

#PIECES 1982 BOX OFFICE MOVIE#

Mostly because of ''E.T.,'' ''On Golden Pond,'' ''Conan the Barbarian'' and ''Best Little Whorehouse,'' Universal Pictures earned an astounding 30 percent of all film rentals paid to the movie studios. Universal has kept 60 percent of the $319 million ''E.T.'' grossed in 1982. However, when a movie does extremely well during its early weeks -a time when the studio gets a bigger share of each box-office dollar - the distributor earns a larger percentage. They amount to roughly half of the money a movie takes in at the box office. ''On Golden Pond,'' with Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda, was in third place with $63 million.ДЇilm rentals are the monies returned to a film's distributor. ''E.T.'' brought Universal $190 million in film rentals in the United States and Canada, three times as much money as the secondplace movie, Sylvester Stallone's ''Rocky III,'' which earned $63.4 million in film rentals. But what were the runners-up and the disappointments? Much of the credit goes to Steven Spielberg's homeless extraterrestrial in ''E.T.,'' which was, of course, the biggest boxoffice success of the season.

But the 1982 mark was 16 percent higher than the record set in 1981, while inflation of ticket prices was only 6.5 percent. Records have been set in recent years because of increases in ticket prices. More than $3.4 billion worth of tickets were sold across the country, a box-office record. The results for 1982 are now in: The year was a box-office bonanza for movie makers.

Pieces 1982 box office