Three Keys to Hollywood Success

An Analysis of Hollywood Movie Box Office Data from 2000–2018

Introduction to Movie Data

I’ve always been fascinated by the movie business. When I was a kid I read the entertainment section of the newspaper every Monday to check box office returns. I watched shows and documentaries which explained how movies got made. I joined the Hollywood Stock Exchange to invest fake money in actors that I thought would make it big. For myself and millions of other people, the business of film was interesting in a way that the business of, say paper, wasn’t.

With the advent of the internet, we can do a lot more than scan weekly box office returns. Wikipedia has data on all movies to come out of Hollywood in a given year¹. The amount of money those films made, as well as who wrote, starred, directed, and produced them is all there in Wikipedia infoboxes.

After writing some scripts to collect and clean this movie data, I was able to suss out a few key factors to Hollywood success. The sort of thing that would make one rich if the Hollywood Stock Exchange was real.

Key #1 — Get a Franchise

It’s conventional wisdom these days, but Hollywood loves a franchise. In the era where movies must make their…