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Actually, when Passion of the Christ was released and selling like hot cakes, there was more than one instance of a moviegoer reporting paying for it, getting a ticket to another movie and being told not to worry about it by management...

That thought occurred to me as well. And someone knowledgable about the movie industry commented on one of those threads that this is sometimes done because of some financial incentive to the theater owner. It's better to show high attendance on certain movies than others, apparently.

So, I suppose, if the Brokeback Mountain distributor is giving a bigger cut to the theater owner (most theaters are owned by huge companies), they may be putting Brokeback Mountain tickets in the slots for other films like Narnia. This cheats the Narnia distributor and benefits the Brokeback Mountain guys. But they can't risk getting caught by selling more tickets than they have seats, so they put up a sold sign when they run out of tickets.

I don't know anything about the business. I am just basing this on comments on a thread about The Passion of the Christ.

Re#74 Thanks for the expansion on what may be going on. What I would love to see is some investigative reporting where somebody interviews surprised moviegoers that were misled into thinking they were simply seeing a Western. That would be a hoot...

"Actually, when Passion of the Christ was released and selling like hot cakes, there was more than one instance of a moviegoer reporting paying for it, getting a ticket to another movie and being told not to worry about it by management..."

Let me get this straight. A movie production company is going to use smoke and mirrors to convince the public that they grossed $200,000,000 and then expect the IRS to except that they only grossed a couple of million dollars???

I don't think so.