Comic Franchise Metrics

With the recent Disney-Fox merger, let’s look at which of the major franchises fared the best.

We will rely upon three factors, namely the ROI of the movie, Critics’ score, Audience score. The scores has been pulled from RottenTomatoes, while the revenue data has been pulled from The-Numbers.

We are considering the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Extended Universe, and the X-Men Universe. I’m not considering the Sony Spider-Man series, and the Fantastic Four Series, as they’re basically dead, and have been for quite some time.

You can find the relevant data from my github repository.

> data = read.csv('marvel_vs_dc/data.txt', sep = '|')
> attach(data)
> colnames(data)
[1] "Title"                  "Year"               "Critic"                
[4] "Audience"               "Franchise"      "ProductionBudget"      
[7] "DomesticOpeningWeekend"    "DomesticBox.Office" "WorldwideBox.Office"

First, some basic best-worst cases.

Critically Acclaimed

Best : Iron Man| Title[which.max(Critic)]

Worst : Suicide Squad | Title[which.min(Critic)]

Fan Favorite

Best : Guardians of the Galaxy and The Winter Soldier | Title[which.max(Audience)]

Worst : X-Men Origins: Wolverine 58| Title[which.min(Audience)]

Difference of Opinion

As evidenced from the plot below, the audience seems to love DC movies way more than the critics.The best example is Justice League, with an audience score of 79, but only 40 with the critics.

The other end of the spectrum is Captain America: The First Avenger, but with a difference of only 6 points.

> library(ggplot2)
> ggplot(data, aes(Critic, Audience)) + geom_point(aes(col = factor(Franchise), size = Audience - Critic)

ROI

> ROI = (WorldwideBox.Office - ProductionBudget)/ProductionBudget
> ROI = ROI * 100
> ggplot(data, aes(y = ROI, x=reorder(Title, ROI))) + geom_col(aes(fill=Franchise)) + coord_flip()

The movie with the best ROI is hands down Deadpool, at 1281%, whereas the next movie in line (Iron Man 3) is a distant 575.3%.

The movie with the worst ROI is The Incredible Hulk, at just 93.1%.

What makes a movie successful?

While studios might consider ROI as the only metric of a movie’s success, ratings are kind of important too.

> ggplot(data, aes(Critic, Audience)) + geom_point(aes(col = factor(Franchise), size = ROI))

It seems Deadpool , which enjoys the highest ROI, also is rated highly by both the audience and the critics.

Let’s create a metric as follows.

> Metric = 0.5*ROI + 0.3*Critic + 0.2*Audience

Now the results from hereafter are subjective to the relative importance I give each of the above parameters.

No surprise there.

Most Successful Franchise

> library(plyr)
> summary = ddply(data, ~Franchise, summarise, ROI=mean(ROI), Metric = mean(Metric))
> summary
  Franchise      ROI   Metric
1        dc 264.2962 161.2281
2    marvel 318.8045 201.0670
3      xmen 331.8811 203.5305

And plotting the results

> library(reshape2)
> dfm = melt(summary[,c('Franchise','ROI','Metric')],id.vars = 1)
> ggplot(dfm, aes(x = variable, y = value)) + geom_bar(aes(fill = Franchise),stat = "identity",position = "dodge")

Therefore, contrary to my previous belief that MCU was the more successful franchise, X-Men narrowly beats it, while DC is a distant third in both categories.