Best Picture Nominees Theater Performance
For the last data analysis I ended up having time to do before the show tonight I wanted to look at how well movies have performed in theaters and at the box office. Some people consider Oscar movies to be critically acclaimed but not necessarily well received by the general public.
Once again using the data from BoxOfficeMojo for Weekly Box Office Results, I looked at graphing the number of theaters shown in, weekly gross, and weekly rank. I only looked at Best Picture nominees due to the amount of data that was needed to plot would amount to being far too much if I tried to do every nominated movie.
Starting with the numbers of theaters shown in.
This graph shows the data from all of 2015 and up to this week in 2016. I chose to include 2016 data in all the graphs because a majority of the nominated movies are still out in theaters and 2016 performance appears to be very telling. As you can see, a majority of 2015 there’s no more than Best Picture movie out. Then, beginning in October, the first couple of films are released. Most interestingly, it’s not until January of 2016 where all the movies are really out in earnest; The Revenant only played in 4 theaters in all of 2015, with its nationwide release not happening until a couple weeks into 2016.
If we zoom in the graph on only the time period where there were movies out we can see it a little clearer.
Mad Max, The Martian, and Bridge of Spies all had relatively typical performances for big movies. In all three cases, their biggest weeks were the early weeks and then they declined over time.
In the next category are The Big Short and The Revenant. Both had strong nationwide showings, but they appear to have a sharp increase from nothing whereas the first 3 opened big. This is because both of these movies had very small limited releases where they played in 8 and 4 theaters respectively.
Then in the last category are Room, Brooklyn, and Spotlight. All three of these were small studio movies which benefit not from initial buzz, but good reviews, awards promise to be successful. Room in particular is interesting because it came out very early, barely playing in any theaters, even while Brooklyn and Spotlight were on the rise Room stayed pretty small, not experiencing much of a bump until the nominations came out.
It’s also interesting to note that all of the movies that were still out when the nominations came out increased in release.
The last view of theater showings I did plots each movie starting
The next attribute I decided to look at was weekly gross, under the same graph conditions as theater showings.
It’s interesting to see that the general of these curves are a lot more similar among movies, especially those of the same categories than the previous set of graphs.
The differences between successful movies also becomes much starker here than in the previous set as well. You can see that Mad Max and The Martian performed quite similarly, with The Martian having a bit of an edge, and The Revenant is pretty close by if you disregard the shift caused by the soft opening. But then the gap between those three and the next two; The Big Short and Bridge of Spies, is much bigger than it appeared based on just theater showings.
Sadly for the small movies, it’s almost impossible to even see them on any of these graphs due to the successes of the bigger movies, but you can still make out the swells that Spotlight and Brooklyn received once the positive reviews started circulating. And poor Room, bless its heart, is just a little line.
The last attribute I looked at was weekly rank. That is, where each movie ranked in box office performance compared to all movies. Note that in the following graphs the y axis is in decreasing order, so the higher up the line is, the higher ranked the movie is.
This statistic appears quite chaotic, in part due to how much the number appears to change from week to week, considering that every week new movies come out and shake everything up.
However this is also interesting because it does get at answering the question I was originally having: how well do Best Picture movies do compared to regular successful movies. The answer pretty much splits the movies up in the same way the previous statistics had. The blockbuster movies do quite well; The Revenant and The Martian both spent multiple weeks at #1, Mad Max and Bridge of Spies never reached #1 but they were in the top five for a few weeks each. The rest of the films follow a relatively similar pattern to their release and box office performance; starting small and increasing over time but not capable of challenging the more widespread, but nowhere near as good, movies. Like Daddy’s Home, for example.
It will be interesting who comes out on top Sunday night; one of the movies that was able to reach mainstream success (Mad Max, The Revenant, The Martian), one of the decently well performing but not huge movies (The Big Short, Bridge of Spies) or one of the small movies (Spotlight, Room, Brooklyn). Personally, I’m rooting for the little movies. I love a good underdog story.
