Advaya Capital closed its acquisition of Comscore Movies for $70 million, pulling one of the industry's last independent box office data platforms into private hands. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the deal Wednesday. Comscore Movies has tracked North American theatrical performance since 2011, when it absorbed Rentrak's legacy systems. The platform processes receipts from roughly 40,000 screens and publishes weekend estimates that studios, exhibitors, and Wall Street analysts treat as gospel.

The transaction separates Comscore Movies from its parent, the publicly traded Comscore Inc, which has spent four years unwinding debt and shedding non-core assets. Comscore Inc retains its digital measurement and audience analytics divisions. The Movies unit generated roughly $18 million in trailing revenue, putting the exit at a 3.9x multiple—tight for a data asset with monopoly-grade distribution but defensible given the platform's age and the theatrical market's uneven recovery. Comscore Inc will use proceeds to pay down a $45 million term loan due in 2026.

Advaya Capital, a Los Angeles-based firm managing $1.2 billion across media and entertainment infrastructure, now controls the primary source of real-time box office intelligence in North America. The firm has spent eighteen months assembling data assets around content performance: it bought Gracenote metadata in a joint venture with Nielsen in 2022, and holds minority stakes in three streaming measurement startups. The Comscore Movies deal extends that pattern. Theatrical data is thin infrastructure—expensive to collect, hard to replicate, and essential for allocation decisions across a $9 billion annual domestic box office. Advaya is betting that scarcity value compounds as studios consolidate and exhibitor bankruptcies reduce the number of reliable data partners.

Two risks frame the trade. First, Comscore Movies depends on exhibitor cooperation. AMC, Regal, and Cinemark—collectively 48% of domestic screens—provide nightly receipt feeds under contracts that renew every three years. AMC's current agreement expires in June 2025. If major circuits decide to internalize data or renegotiate terms, Advaya's moat narrows. Second, theatrical measurement is a shrinking category. The domestic box office peaked at $11.4 billion in 2019 and has since settled near $8 to $9 billion annually, with streaming cannibalizing mid-budget releases. Advaya is acquiring a platform whose primary use case is in secular decline, unless the firm can pivot Comscore's infrastructure toward streaming, where measurement fragmentation creates fresh scarcity.

Allocators should track three follow-on events. First, watch for exhibitor contract renewals in Q2 2025—pricing resets will signal whether Advaya intends to extract rent or reinvest in coverage. Second, monitor whether Comscore Movies begins publishing streaming viewership estimates, which would mark a strategic shift from theatrical-only data. Third, note any secondary acquisitions of theatrical or VOD measurement assets in the next twelve months, which would confirm Advaya is building a rollup. The firm declined to comment on integration plans or management changes.

Advaya Capital is run by founder Anil Advani, who previously led UBS's media investment banking group and worked under Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham. The firm's limited partners include three Middle Eastern sovereign funds and two US public pensions. Comscore Inc's stock rose 6% on news of the divestiture, closing at $1.82 per share. The parent company is now capitalized at $94 million, down from $1.1 billion at its 2018 peak.