2009 could mark the first year that Hollywood breaks $10 billion in total U.S. Box Office sales. As of March 16, the total gross revenues are at $2.089 billion, 12.4% over the same point in 2008. If this pace is maintained, total U.S. Box Office will reach $10.771 billion by year end.

A January article at CNN.com speculated that this growth in movie attendance was due to a general desire to “escape” from the recession. A more recent article in Variety speculated that the boom was due to more big releases being launched after the Christmas season. I wanted to take a look for myself.

It was easy to find out how much money has been made to date for the current 2009 releases, but it was harder to tally the information for movies that were released in 2008, as well as tracking down the 2009 releases that had already closed out their run. For releases that came out before January 1, I had to substract their 2008 gross from their cumulative gross, and then add that into the pot. I did all this and then ran the same exercise for 2008. Since the information available was incomplete, I decided to limit the analysis to the top 80 grossers for each time period. The results are as follows.

It seems that the greatest growth has come from movies released before January, like Gran Torino, Slumdog Millionaire and Marley & Me. Pre-January releases like these have grossed 20% more during the window between January 1 and March 15 than Pre-January releases did in 2008.

At the same time movies released after January 1, 2009 have outperformed by 7% as compared to the same group in 2008. Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Taken have respectively taken in $138 million and $127 million. Not one movie in 2008 had made $100 by March 15; the biggest grosser at that point last year was Cloverfield, with $80 million. Big budget releases like 10,000 B.C. and Jumper didn’t seem to find their audiences.

Based on these figures it is difficult to say exactly why this growth is occurring. It might be escapism, it might be good movies. In any case it’s good news for Hollywood.