Movies and Data Visualization

Check out this amazing chart (or is it a graph? Maybe I'll just call it an interactive graphic) @ the New York Times. Box office earnings of every movie since 1986 represented graphically. At first glance, it just shows what one would suspect: summers and holidays are when the hit movies come out. But if you look closer, you can follow the paths of each film as its earnings rise and drop. You can quickly see which movies had "long tails." Its interesting to think about what those movies might have in common with one another.

Just looking at this, I start to see the flawed, delayed feedback system that movie creation and distribution is based on, all due to something that is becoming increasingly irrelevant: "shelf space" (or in this case, theater space). Studios release big movies at certain times b/c more people go to the movies then (summer/holidays), but people have started going to movies more at those times b/c that's when the big movies are out, not necessarily b/c that's the only time they want to go see movies. But b/c they're making huge, bloated-budget movies that have to compete with one another, studios have to make us starve for any half-way decent movies during the off-months (this April is pretty bad), not b/c its what we actually want, but b/c of finite shelf-space and bloated budgets, both of which could be (and perhaps are being) eliminated. Here's hoping everyone stays home this summer and watches hulu and YouTube.

Promotional space is still finite, though, so its still the movies with the biggest promo budgets that have the big numbers (they tend to peak faster and drop off faster than indy word-of-mouth hits). I really want to see how well films could do on their own merit. It would be easy enough to make a graph that corrected for promotional budgets, if only you could that information, if only studios weren't so protective of that data. I'm starting some work with a professor here at Michigan on the amount of information that flows into our households each day. Perhaps it would be easier to just track the amount of ads one can see instead of trying to get those stats from the people who put them out there. Advertising and promotion, by definition, is visible. Its trying to be seen, has nowhere to hide. You could just do a web-search for a movie, see how many hits you got, code explicit promos separately from mentions on blogs, etc. If one movie is more visible in its explicit and unofficial promotion than another movie that makes the same amount of money over the course of a similar time period, then you might conclude that the first movie actually succeeded based on its own merits and not on extensive promotion.

Long-term sales of DVDs might also get around the promotion issue, getting us closer to what people actually like.

Specific stats (things like "smallest drop from 5th to 6th week") are available in numerical form on sites like Box Office Mojo. In some cases, you're looking at the graphic representation to find specific things, in which case you'd be better off with a list of numbers. But still, images give you a bunch of patterns to notice that you can't notice right away by looking at numbers.