Analyzing the Success of ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ with Wikipedia Data
Entertainment has always been a staple of American culture. TV shows and movies are always topics of conversation and the creator of many bonds between people. Specifically, action movies have always held the hearts and attention of Americans over the years. There’s something about a fast paced story and plenty of gore that we can’t take our eyes off of. One particular franchise has been blazing the trail for modern action since 2014. I’m of course talking about John Wick. In what was a highly anticipated release, John Wick: Chapter 4, came out on March 24th, just about two weeks ago. ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ was the eight most popular article on Wikipedia in March 2023. With 3,885,623 pageviews, 186 editors, and 430 edits.
There is hardly another action movie franchise in modern memory as popular as John Wick. This begs the question though, how does John Wick 4 stack up against the other movies and could there be data indicating that it’s on track to be the most successful film of the series?
To find answers I turned my sights to data from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for a variety of reasons. The first is that the website is used by millions of people. This means it’s a very indicative measure of a topic or item’s popularity. Furthermore, Wikipedia data allows the user to see action overtime. This is extremely important when looking for trends. Through Wikipedia I was able to track pageviews, edits, and editors. I looked specifically at John Wick 4 and John Wick, the franchise.
The first and most obvious thing to note is that page views for ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ absolutely blew up around the release date. On a single day well over 400,000 people visited the Wikipedia article.
This visualization also reveals some other interesting patterns. As can be seen above, there were some page visits for John Wick 4 dating all the way back to the summer of 2021. This tells me that there must have been heavy anticipation around the film. I would be willing to bet that July 2021 is when ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ was announced. There are some other small spikes like July of 2022. This could potentially be when the trailer was released.
This John Wick franchise visualization also has some interesting trends. This chart makes it clear when movies are being released. There are spikes in 2017 and 2019. In both of these years John Wick movies were released. There are also little spikes preceding the larger ones. This, again, is likely an indication that a trailer came out promoting the upcoming film.
Another trend that I discovered centered around revisions. I was surprised to find that editing revisions on the John Wick 4 page started in 2020, three years before the movie was released. This raised some questions for me. Were there designated people responsible for movie page creation before release? Was it a fan page of someone speculating about John Wick 4? Or was it related to when the film was announced? I ultimately feel that revisions started then because the filming was announced. I’ve seen pages on Wikipedia before that read like, “John Wick: Chapter 4 is an upcoming film starring…”.
To answer my proposed question though, I needed to compare John Wick to John Wick 4. To determine the potential success of the newest movie, I only analyzed page views. I felt that page views were the strongest metric to predict something’s success.
From the data I’ve determined that John Wick 4 is slated for huge success. In terms of page views, John Wick 4 is blowing the franchise page out of the water. The max hits ‘John Wick’ has gotten in a day is around 100,000. John Wick 4 received over 400,000. This says to me that ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ is on track to reach levels of success on par with the other movies, if not surpass them significantly.
