Movie Genre and Profits：Which factors lead to a more profitable movie?
In the article “ Hollywood Silver-screen playbook, how to make a hit film”, the author mentioned “ IN 1983 William Goldman, a screenwriter, coined the famous saying that in Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything” when it comes to predicting which films will succeed at the box office.” To find out whether it is true or not?” They analyzed more than 2,000 movies with more than $10 million in budgets issued in the US and Canada since 1995 to understand what factors contribute to making a movie a hit.
The collection of information from The Numbers, a website that collects data on film releases, and the rotten tomatoes that critics and punters comment on, they find that the strongest predictor of absolute box office revenue is the movie’s budget. Even if it doesn’t improve from its cast, it won’t be affected by praise or other factors, and a movie will promise to gain 80 cents on average in each dollar that spent in the US and Canadian cinemas. The film’s budget is announced during the production process to create a buzz and signal — although in practice its true cost may differ from the announced number.
OMDb; The Economist *Actual box-office revenue minus predicted box-office revenue
†Box-office revenue from leading actors’ non-sequel films over previous five years
The following factors affect box offices revenue.
Sequels and franchise films limit the risks of low revenue. Nearly one in five of the films produced in Hollywood is a sequel. All other factors being equal, sequels earn $35m more than Nonsquels at the box office. For example, a $200 million budget superhero movie will earn $58 million more at the box office than the non-superhero movie of the same budget. Superhero movies (except “Deadpool”) are often child-friendly for a good reason: movies that receive an “R” (restricted) certificate typically have a $16 million reduction in cinema revenue.
A star’s previous movie does help predict their next success. In the past five years, a major actor’s previous non-sequel movie earned 2 cents per dollar. The most dazzling stars, such as Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, whose films have earned more than $500 million in box office in recent years, will add about $10 million to movie ticket sales.
Critics do not play an important role as much as we think. Therefore the article indicates those factors explain 60% of the variation in box-office revenues.
However, I think there are more factors that would affect a movies box office revenue because marketing and movie star does play an important role but the essence of the movie is still an art that makes people resonate from daily life. Therefore, I tried to explore other factors that would affect the box office revenue through data.
The dataset contains important statistics from a large sample of movies. The data includes the movie budget and revenue from different sources as well as ratings from RottenTomatoes, The Numbers and IMDB. Here is what I got(Also credit to my friend Xiling Zhang on data sources and analysis)
Data Transformation and the Cleaning Process
In order to filter the data we need for our analysis, we first filtered out the column “Year” in excel, using Filter function under Data tab. We selected year 2001- 2010. We also found out there are blanks in the column: year, Rotten Tomatoes Rating, IMDB Rating, IMDB Votes and movie genre. We considered these data that blanks are null and used filter function again to remove these data. In the end, we were able to cut down to 1168 items in the source data set and import excel to Tableau for data visualization.
Data Exploration Process and What Our Final Visualization Shows
There are three main charts in the dashboard. The first chart shows the trend of profit for each movie genre. The second one highlights the 30 movies with the highest profits. And the last one is the z-score of profit for each movie genre. These three charts explain the profitability of different movie styles and its relative ratings.
Besides production budget and worldwide gross, ratings and directors are also important factors that would affect a movie’s profit and its prediction of profit.
Question and How They Evolve along the Way
Broad focus: Which movie genre typically leads to higher profit
- Does a higher average movie rating predict a higher profit
- How does movie production budget evolve with time?
- Which movie director has the highest average profit?
- Are certain movie directors especially good at a particular genre (in terms of profit)?
After analyzing the detailed data, we removed the 2–4 questions. Because we found out that movie production budget will be associated with time value of money. Moreover, scientific genre will typically be associated with higher budget. If we used production budget to predict the success of a particular movie genre based on profit, the result will be unfavorable to scientific genre. Thus we think this problem is not a good indicator. In terms of movie directors, we found out that some directors have specialty movie genre. For example, James Cameron is typically good at scientific films such as Avatar. But Ang Lee, a successful Chinese director, directed both “Hulk” and “Brokeback Mountain”. These 2 movies are very different in genre, but are all profitable and have high ratings. Therefore, we exclude director as a predictor of the success of a genre.
In the end, we decided to use line chart to show how does the average profit of each movie genre change with time, use distribution graph to show the correlation between IMDB rating and Rotten Tomatoes rating of Top N profitable movies, and use a Z-score bar chart to further illustrate the predicted future profitability of different movie genres.
We can see the clear correlation between box office revenue and movie genre. The action and adventure movie lead to higher revenue than other genres. These results add up one more factor that could affect a movie’s box office revenue to argument which we identified in the original articles. In the future, we can do budgets based scatter plot varied by movie genre to explore which factors affect more on the movie box office revenue. Moreover, we should measure a movie’s revenue by all channels such as profits from Netflix and other online sales, because more people watch movies from home entrainment system, those part revenue does not reflect in the box office revenue but still a part that will affect the results we conclude in the above analysis.
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