I see your point, but the producers of the movie don't have to show inflated ticket sales. It's the owner of the theater, a separate company, who would be misrepresenting the ticket sales by putting "Sold Out" in the window. As long as the theater accurately reports its income to the IRS, who is going to care?
And consider this. When the movie gets nominated for an Academy Award, which is probably the intent from the get-go, it can be re-released as "Nominated for X Academy Awards". And the company that owns the theater can profit from that. And if it wins, which isn't all that unlikely, it can get a longer and bigger run at theaters. So I still think there may be an element of hype here.
BurbankKarl was claiming that Miramax engages in this practice, paying theater owners for big blocks of tieckets which nobody will use. The theater owners do not stand to benefit in any way from posting "Sold Out" signs for showings that almost no one has bought tickets for. They don't care what movie wins an Academy Award; they'll just re-show whichever ones do. It's the studios that have a huge cash outlay in production costs for certain high profile films, and need to show profits on most of those big ticket films, or they'll have trouble getting financing for future ones.
Theater owners profit from selling tickets and having live junk-food buying people show up at the theater to actually use the tickets. They want to get rid of unpopular movies as quickly as possible, so they can use their theater space to show movies which WILL sell tickets.