Big Data Collection in the Box Office
In this article, the data collection will be on a topic related to the film industry, and the star power will be discussed. To be more specific, this data collection is for the future study of determining what is the most important factor affecting the fluctuating box office for the movies.
To begin with, the box office used to stand for a place in the theater or concert hall where the tickets are sold for a movie, play, etc. shown in Fig. 1.
Now it is commonly used to represent how many tickets have been sold for movies or plays. This refers specifically to the commercial sale of a film or play. The box office can be calculated by the number of spectators or ticket sales. In today’s film industry, the box office has become one of the important indicators to measure the success of a film. Thus, how to reach an exceeding box office number became a goal for lots of people.
How to Collect Box Office Data
Nowadays, Box office data is most commonly collected through theater ticket sales, electronic reporting systems, market research, and online ticketing platforms. Dedicated tracking companies provide comprehensive reports to industry stakeholders. But most of the movies that have their own social media account, will update their box office frequently. This usually happens when the box office of the movie reaches a new number, and the official wants to post something to mark it. Each ticket sold and dollar collected at theaters around the world is reported directly to Rentrak, the entertainment and marketing industries’ premier provider of worldwide consumer viewership information, and put into a database accessible not to the media, but to a small number of studio execs.
Major Factors That Affect the Box Office of a Movie & How to Collect Them
1. Quality of the Movie
The first major factor affecting the box office is the quality of the film, how much effort the team put into it, and how most people think about it after watching. Considering that this is more of a subjective factor, the data collection will be a bit harder. However, since a lot of applications will have the function for people to rate the movies and add comments to them, it is possible to gather the data for all the movies by the score they were given after a large number of audiences rated them, seen in Fig. 2. This is considered the primary data of the quality of the movies but it is hard to efficiently organize all the data as checking every movie’s rating will have to take up some time.
2. Popularity of the Actors/Actresses
The second factor that’s related to the box office is how popular the actors/actresses who took part in the movie are. This cause has a large impact on the box office of a movie because the fans of these famous stars will purchase tickets to support the film regardless of its quality, and some of the fans will buy more than one ticket to support their idol. The primary data of this factor can be collected easily because all the data is related to the followers these stars have. The number of fans an actor or actress has can be seen without any obstacles on social media such as Instagram and Weibo.
3. Theme of the Movie
Despite how well the film is produced and how famous the people involved are, the theme or the main message it is about might be the strongest factor affecting how people will like the movie and, therefore, the number of the box office. The primary data set for this is to collect the data for the theme part is scanning through all the well-known applications or websites that have the majority of worldwide movies. At the section in these media, there’ll always be a part that automatically divides all the films by their theme, as seen in Fig. 3.
Another way to gather data for the themes is to go to the official websites of the institutions where the movies must go through before they are published because the producers will have to report the theme of their movies to these organizations.
Potentials for This Topic
This topic strongly relates to the movie industry in the future as it can help predict the box office of a film before its release. Also, it will be very helpful for the investors to determine which movie to put money in as the difference in the people in the movies or how the film is produced may cause a large difference in their income.
References
Box office definition & meaning. (2023). Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/box-office
Rentrak Corporation — products, competitors, financials, employees, headquarters locations. (2022). CB Insights. https://www.cbinsights.com/company/rentrak-corporation
Sledge, P. (2022, January 28). 8 Netflix hacks to get the most out of your subscription. Cinemablend. https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2492743/how-to-best-use-netflix-tips-to-get-the-most-out-of-the-streaming-service
