What Makes a Hit Film?

The Smart Money is on Horror — and other lessons from Wikipedia Movie Data (2000–2018)

Movies unlike music, don’t have a Billboard-style chart that ranks the best performers. That leaves box office results — or revenue in capitalist terms — as the easiest way to figure out what makes a hit. Luckily, Wikipedia¹ provides both the budget and box office gross of most Hollywood films. I’ve written some scripts to grab and analyze this information to see what the most successful films have in common.

I’ve focused on two metrics, profit, and rate of return. For the mathematically inclined:

profit = (box office revenue) — (budget)

rate of return = (profit)/(budget)

Using these two metrics, we can find the movies that made the most money, as well as those that provided the greatest return to their investors. Let’s look at the most profitable films first and see what trends emerge.

1 — Trends in the Most Profitable Movies

1- We’re all Nerds/Children Now

If we look at the movies that made the most money, we see that they’re all targeted at nerds and/or children. Moreover, pretty much all of them feature a lot of action. Besides the…