It surveys film audiences to rate their viewing experiences with letter grades, reports the results, and forecasts box office receipts from the data.

Ed Mintz, who majored in math at the University of Wisconsin-Madison[1] and founded dental billing software company Dentametics,[2] with wife Rona attended The Cheap Detective in June 1978.

Mintz had not worked with polls or the entertainment industry, but decided to use his math and computer skills for a business surveying the opinions of hundreds of film viewers.

[2] A website was launched by CinemaScore in 1999,[6] after three years' delay in which the president sought sponsorship from magazines and video companies.

CinemaScore's expansion to the Internet included a weekly email subscription for cinephiles to keep up with reports of audience reactions.

For each film, employees polled 400–500 moviegoers in three of CinemaScore's 15 sites, which included the cities Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Dallas, Atlanta, Tampa, Phoenix, and Coral Springs.

[10] Usually, to maintain comparable sample sizes, only films that open in more than 1,500 screens are polled and reported on CinemaScore's website and social media.

The distributor of a film that opens in fewer screens can also contract with CinemaScore for a private survey, whose result would be disclosed only to the client.

[11] Some of these privately contracted surveys' results have nevertheless been publicly touted, such as the "A+" ratings for films including Courageous and A Question of Faith (both released by faith-based distributor Pure Flix Entertainment).

[15] Ed Mintz cited Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Cruise as the "two stars, it doesn't matter how bad the film is, they can pull (the projections) up".

[20][6][21][22][23] Vulture wrote that besides horror,[17] Another type of movie features prominently on the list: let's call it "Misleading Auteurism".

These are movies made by prominent, often Oscar-nominated directors that investigate risky and controversial subject matters and receive both praise and pans.

But because of how the movie industry works — the name of a director alone not being enough to get most people to go see something — they tend to be marketed as more straight-ahead genre films, resulting in a whole bunch of misled and pissed-off audience members.Vulture cited as examples of such F-graded films Steven Soderbergh's Solaris with George Clooney, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly with Brad Pitt, and Darren Aronofsky's mother!

"[24] Ed Mintz rejected being connected to Rotten Tomatoes, and defended CinemaScore methodology of polling select audiences on the opening night, to see if the film meets the expectations of the people who most want to see it.

[25] CinemaScore's forecasts for box-office receipts based on the surveys are, according to the Los Angeles Times, "surprisingly accurate" as "most of [the company's] picks...are in the ballpark", in 2009 correctly predicting the success of The Hangover and the failure of Land of the Lost.

As of August 2024[update], two directors have made the list four times: Jon Erwin (thrice with his brother Andrew—in 2015, 2018, and 2021—and once with Brent McCorkle in 2023), and Alex Kendrick (2011, 2015, 2019, and 2024).

The following directors have appeared on the list twice: Steven Spielberg (1982, 1993), James Cameron (1991, 1997), Robert Zemeckis (1994, 2004), Pete Docter (2001, 2009), Malcolm D. Lee (2013, 2017), Peter Berg (2013, 2016), Brad Bird (2004, 2018), George Tillman Jr. (1997, 2018), and Jon Gunn (2017, 2024).