It is a campaign where the studio buys up all the tickets for the performance online....selling out the theatre. Then next week they can report the highest gross per theatre numbers in the trades.
Miramax was very good at doing this.
The studios wouldn't stay in business long if they made a habit of this. Their purpose is to make money, not give it away. And theater chain owners would scream bloody murder. They get as much or more of their revenue from concessions as from tickets sales. Am I supposed to believe that the studios are footing a big chunk of the original production costs for films, and then buying up millions of tickets which will not be resold, and paying off theater owners for the lost concessions? Theater owners have a stake in this business too, and wouldn't stand for this if it happened on more than very rare occasions in a limited number of markets. And local journalists would have a field day, since they'd have no trouble confirming the stories with the many casual workers who staff theater ticket windows, projection rooms, and concession stands. And most of these major studios are publicly traded companies, or segment-reported subsidiaries of publicly traded companies, so the stock analysts would be all over this, followed quickly by the SEC's investigators, who'd slap fines and nasty publicity on the studios that would put a quick stop to such schemes. And competing studios would get wind of such antics quickly, and be quick to expose them, since their own revenues would suffer from false promotion of competitors' films as blockbusters. If major studios were falsifying financial reports by misreporting sources of revenue and targets of 8 figure expenditures, while engaging in deceptive practices that thousands of casual theater workers, plus theater owners, are in a position to notice and blow the whistle on, the execs would be in deep trouble very quickly, and the practice would end.
Nope, if what you describe has ever happened, it has been rarely and on a small scale. Inflated ticket sales/attendance numbers are very common in the sports world, but none of the major sports organizations are publicly traded, and nobody is paying for the tickets. The same companies, or incestuously related companies, are getting most of the revenue from ticket sales, and reporting the numbers, AND managing the events on site (so unsold seats are frequently packed with people who've been given free tickets, making the reported numbers look at least vaguely believable to naive people, and making concession owners happy since people who got free tickets buy at least as much junk food as people who already spent a bundle on tickets).