By: Ally Lamb
If you’ve ever looked for the reviews and scoring of a film on Rotten Tomatoes before watching a film, you’ve probably also come across the website Metacritic.
Metacritic is a place for users to review and rate films of all sorts and genres. I was curious to see the relationships between metacritic score, the box office returns, and genres of films.
Figure 1. Scatter Plot of a Film’s Metacritic Score and Box Office Return

In Figure 1 above, the relationship between the box office returns, or profit, and the score on Metracritic was examined. It appears that there is a general steady mutual level between the two no matter what the score is. In general, most of the films’ box office returns were concentrated between 100 and 200 million dollars regardless of the score, which leads me to believe there is not a strong relationship between the two. I can see this by observing the placement of the scatter plots all the way across the X-axis. However, the were some outliers that show a spike in box office returns that also had extremely high Metacritic scores.
Figure 2. Box Plot of Horro Film and Metacritic Score

Based on the figure above, it appears the films that were not horror genre films received a higher Metacritic score. The numbers on the Y-axis mean the films that were not horror genre were coded as 0 and ones that were, were coded as a 1. The movies coded as a 1 were of the horror genre and scores lower on Metacritic. This leads me to believe that the general public dislikes horror movies more compared to other genres of movies that are not horror. Therefore, there is a decent relationship between the two resulting in worse ratings and reviews for horror movies.
Figure 3. Bar Chart of Metacritic Score and Romance Genre Films

The last relationship I chose to examine was between Metacritic score and Romance genre films. As you can see, the largest spike of score was around 46–50 in metacritic score. There seems to be a regular distribution among the data. I think a score of 50 is not very good but I predict this is because there are so many romance films that people can afford to be picky. Many of them are sappy and predictable and have mediocre scores. Since romance is something most people can relate to emotionally, when it is done badly, people notice.
Filmmakers are making more of an effort to create diverse characters and represent and appeal to more demographics in films, many stick to a formulaic story line to ensure success. Because of this, I think it is safe to assume that there is always an audience for almost any romance film.