Movies Decoded
The Complex Relationship Between Budgets, Box Office and Ratings
By analyzing coded data for all of the American films created in 2009, several interesting correlations came out of some graphical representations of this data. Secondly, the rating scores for comedies and dramas compared to the rest of the industry averages are represented using box graphs. The most interesting correlation is that between Box Office and Production Budget. We would expect to see a strong correlation between production budget and box office returns, as the greater the investment, the more likely it will do more than pay itself off.
In this relationship between Production Budget and Box Office returns, an increase of Production Budget has almost a 1:1 ratio for the corresponding increase in Box Office returns. Interestingly, this relationship does not necessarily mean that if a movie’s production budget is upped, it must do better, and should do better by that same amount that the budget was raised by. This implies that there is often a budget threshold for movies that do exceedingly well, such as those within the 300–800 range for Box Office returns almost all had at least a 100-million-dollar budget. Contrarily, a lot of movies with very small budgets can have 100-million profit margins because the production budgets were so low in the first place. Comparing box office returns and production budgets with review scores creates some interesting figures for interpretation.
In the graph relating movies’ Production Budget with MetaCritic Score, there is only an ever-so-slight correlation between a higher production budget and a higher score. The slope of the linear approximation is only about 5%, so on average the production budget must increase 20 times for the same increase in score on the y-axis. Therefore, in 2009, there was almost no correlation between the production budgets and the review scores of the movies.
The review score has a noticeable impact on the Box Office returns for each movie; the slope is 1.21, meaning that the Box Office has a little bit greater an increase for each point change in score. This is an aggregate trend, but not surprisingly, better movie ratings result overall in better box office returns. Lastly, a comparison between comedies and dramas is carried out to show the review scores given to dramas compared to the rest of the industry, and to comedies compared to the rest of the industry.
Lastly, just out of interest, I ran these two box plots to show the drastic difference in the way that people (especially critics) perceive certain types of movies. In theory, for each genre of movie, there should be an equal distribution of movie scores that fits in with the entire industry; however, this is far from true. In the box plot for dramas, the dramas 25th percentile almost aligns with the industries 50th percentile. The middle 50% of the scores for dramas was about 10% higher than the rest of the industry, as opposed to the middle 50% for comedies, which lies about 5–10% lower than the industry box plot. Comedies do much worse than dramas in the world of movie reviews, often because comedies have lower production budgets but also because people have higher expectations for things making them laugh than people tend to have for things appealing to emotion, and creating dramatic scenes and narrative. These differences make it very difficult for comedies to do nearly as well as dramas on average.
