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Report on Choosing Movies Based on Movie Box-Office

Data

By Sitinin Thedark

I work in a movie theater as a manager responsible for scheduling the movies that we will show in our 12theater complex.  I have access to some data on the all-time movie box office receipts since the days of Gone with the Wind (1939).  I wanted to see if I could find some patterns in the data.  I have reduced the data down to the following categories:

•       Title

•       Year Released

•       U.S. Box Office Receipts (inflation adjusted Millions $)

•       Rating

•       Genre

•       Budget (noninflation adjusted Millions $)

•       World Box Office Receipts (noninflation-adjusted Millions $)

•       U. S. Box Office Receipts (noninflation-adjusted Millions $)

Here is a screen shot of the first part of the data that I created that includes 50 of the biggest blockbusters ever:

A scatter chart showing the relationship between year released and inflation-adjusted U.S. box office receipts is shown below.

This scatter chart indicates that box office receipts for the Top 50 movies have been relatively flat to slightly declining over time (adjusted for inflation). The value for Gone with the Wind is somewhat of an outlier here, but even if we remove Gone with the Wind, the trend is flat to slightly decreasing. Because this represents the receipts for top movies, this seems to indicate that either the total revenues of box office movies are not increasing over time or that there is greater competition for box-office recepits among movies so the top movies are not dominating the total box-office receipts.

A scatter chart showing the relationship between budget and world box office receipts appears below.

This scatter chart cleary shows a positive relation between budget and world box office receipts. Top 50 movies with larger budgets appear to be correlated with higher box office receipts. Some of this relation may be driven by the fact that movie studios need to recoup their investment so movies with larger production budgets also receive greater marketing budgets and receive wider releases which lead to greater box office receipts, particularly worldwide.

Solutions to Case Problems

U.S. Box Office

                                             Receipts (Inflation                                          Percent

                                              Adjusted Millions $)         Frequency         Frequency

The distribution of inflation-adjusted U.S. box office receipts is skewed to the right. Most of the Top 50 movies have inflation-adjusted box office receipts that are less than $700 million dollars. However, there are a few movies that have much greater inflation-adjusted box office receipts. In particular, the movies Gone With the Wind ($1.65 billion) and Star Wars ($1.43 billion) appear to be outliers.

A PivotTable used to create the crosstabulation appears below.

The crosstabulation shows that eight animated movies rated G are in the Top 50 movies. This is more than any other combination of genre and rating for a movie. SciFi/Fantasy movies also appear frequently in the Top 50 movies with six SciFi/Fantasy movies rated PG appearing in the Top 50 list and six rated PG-13.

Filtering the data to show only movies released in 1980 and later produces the PivotTable below.

The filtered PivotTable indicates that after 1980 the most common type of movie appearing in the Top 50 is PG-13 rated SciFi/Fantasy and only one G rated animated movie in the dataset was released after 1980. It appears that top box office receipt generating movies have changed from movies aimed at children to those aimed at older movie goers.

The PivotTable below displays the average of inflation-adjusted U.S. box office receipts for each movie rating-genre pair.

This PivotTable shows that G-rated dramas generated the highest average inflation-adjusted box office receipts. Overall, musicals generated the highest average inflation-adjusted box office receipts, but this includes only a single data point. Comedies and westerns (also only a single data point) have the lowest average inflation-adjusted box office receipts. G and PG rated movies appear to have higher inflationadjusted box office receipts in this data set than R rated and UR movies; this makes sense because G and PG movies can be seen by wider audiences.