Final_Project_Kerrigan
Are Expensive Films Good?
What films do you remember treading in the summer of 2023? You probably remember the cultural juggernaut that was Barbenheimer, the thematically polar double feature that overtook culture. However, did you know that same summer the fifth Indianan Jones film was released? Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny made an estimated $384 million with a budget of $387 million, and, in my opinion, has left little to no cultural impact. Is this expensive mediocre action film an indication that there is no correlation between the cost of a film and how much that film will make, or simply an outlier.
My data consisted of the top 2000 worldwide box office grossing films from 2015 until 2024. This data was whittled down to 855 individual films; each data point, film, had to include an estimated budget (USD), worldwide gross (USD), year, primary genre, and name. This data was analyzed using linear regression with the intent of discovering a linear relationship between a film’s IMDB rating, budget, and gross.
This data was collected from IMDb in hopes of answering three questions:
Is there a linear relationship between a film’s budgets and its box office gross?
Is there a linear relationship between a film’s box office gross and its IMDb star rating
Is there a linear relationship between a film’s budget and its IMDb star rating?
Covid-19 and Box Office Gross
The quantity of high grossing films reduced significantly in the year 2020 this is likely due to the Covid COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. In the following two years, 2021 and 2022, my data showed a steady rise in the amount of high grossing Movies. However, in the following two years, 2023 and 2024, the quantity of high grossing box office releases has stagnated at lower than their pre-pandemic level.
The pandemic likely affected the profitability and total gross of box office releases. My objective is not to observe the effect of pandemic lockdowns on box office gross. With this in mind I will be observing my data by looking at film genre, rather than film year. My intention with this dataset is to observe if more money makes better movies and if more people want to see better movies.
Median IMDb Star Ratings
At the root of my three research questions is one main query; does money make art ‘good’ and do people want to pay for ‘good’ art?
I am using the IMDb star rating to indicate if a movie can be considered to be good or bad. For clarification, IMDb ratings under 5.0 will be classified as ‘bad,’ ratings under 7.0 will be classified as ‘ok,’ and over 7.0 will be classified as ‘good.’ Any IMDb rating that is over 8.0 will be considered ‘great.’ This dataset does not include any other popular film rating systems, like Letterboxd or RottenTomatoes. Additionally, this dataset does not include the film distributors or projection companies.The median IMDb rating across all genres is 6.5 stars out of ten, the mean being 6.45. The highest median rating by genre is “Biography, at 7.2, the only rating to break 6 stars. Horror and the Fantasy tie for the lowest rated genres at 5.9 stars.
This indicates that, regardless of genre, most popular high grossing films are ‘ok’ to ‘good,’ according to IMDb ratings. While there is certainly variation between the genres, notably genres that have greater cultural capital (i.e. Biography and Drama), most of the films are around the mid 6 stars. I feel that it is also notable that most of the films within this dataset land between an above and below 8 star rating. Perhaps this is an indication that films that are widely circulated, and therefore make more money at the box office, are more likely to have a medium star rating. Additionally, this dispersion of stars may be reflective of film IMBd rating practices. I would have to observe a larger dataset to confirm this assumption.
Frequency of Film Genres
This dataset contains a total of eight film genres. Notably, when cleaning this data I removed four additional genres (Thriller, Mystery, Documentary, and Animation) as they each consisted of under five films. Of the genres Included Action is, by far, the most common in this dataset. This is not particularly surprising as many blockbusters, films that do financially well at the box office, are often Action movies. The least common genre is Fantasy, with only 8 films in this category.
Action movies have the highest median budget, but the second highest median worldwide gross. Films in the action and adventure genres dwarf the other six genres. Horror movies have the lowest median budget, and very little difference between the maximum and minimum budgets observed by this dataset. Horror films also have the lowest IMDb rating, tied with Fantasy, so this may show a correlation between production cost and a film’s rating. However, despite how much larger of a budget the median Action flix has to say the median, the genre’s median rating is only 6.4 stars. If money makes better films and theoretically, the Action genre should have the highest average IMDb rating, but it does not. This may be an indication that there may not be a positive, or any, relationship between a film’s budget and its quality.
Action movies have the highest median budget, but the second highest median worldwide gross. Films in the action and adventure genres dwarf the other six genres. Horror movies have the lowest median budget, and very little difference between the maximum and minimum budgets observed by this dataset. Horror films also have the lowest IMDb rating, tied with Fantasy, so this may show a correlation between production cost and a film’s rating. However, despite how much larger of a budget the median Action flicks has to say the median, the genre’s median rating is only 6.4 stars. If money makes better films and theoretically, the Action genre should have the highest average IMDb rating, but it does not. This may be an indication that there may not be a positive, or any, relationship between a film’s budget and its quality.
Despite having the largest median IMDb rating, at 5.9, “Horror” has the greatest positive difference between the median and mean estimated budget and worldwide box office gross. Using the horror genre as a case study it does not appear that there is a correlation between a film being ‘good’ and being profitable. Both this graph and the graph above call into question the idea that good art costs more and that people want to spend money on good films.
Gross, Budget, and IMDb Rating
There is no correlation between budget and the box office gross. At least not according to my dataset. The films with the highest profit margins also happen to be those with lower budgets. The bloated budgets of many action films result in giant spectacles that have to make enormous amounts of money to be profitable. “Action” movies have the highest median budget and worldwide gross, of the top five film budgets four of them were “Action” films. Action and Adventure films have both the highest estimated budgets and the highest worldwide box office gross. The most profitable films also happen to be those with the lowest budgets. The bloated budgets of many action films result in giant spectacles that have to make enormous amounts of money to be profitable.
When comparing profit margins to IMDb star ratings it is very obvious that there is little to no correlation between a film being good and a film making money.
Conclusion
- Is there a linear relationship between a film’s budgets and its box office gross?
No, there is no positive, nor negative, linear relationship between a film’s budget and its box office gross. Just because a movie costs
- Is there a linear relationship between a film’s box office gross and its IMDb star rating
No, there is no positive, nor negative, linear relationship between a film’s gross and its IMDb rating.
- Is there a linear relationship between a film’s budget and its IMDb star rating?
No, there is no positive, nor negative, linear relationship between a film’s budget and its IMDb rating.
Finally, my dataset seems to indicate that art doesn’t have to be expensive to be good and it doesn’t have to be good to be enjoyable. Taste, what a person finds good or bad, is so individual and so personal that I do not believe it is something that can be quantified on a larger scale. Taste is also highly complex, for example, one of the films on this list that I personally contributed to the worldwide gross of is Cats (2019). Despite being the lowest rated film within this data set and quantifiably ‘bad’ I like this Cats (2019) and am glad I spent money on it.
Action movies take a lot of money to make, according to my data, and people like them fine. Horror movies take, comparatively, little money to make, and people like them ok. Art and the human enjoyment of art, in regards to the purchasing of movie tickets and the rating of movies, cannot be quantified linearly. Or at least it cannot be quantified in those regards using this model.
While my model showed no linear correlation between a film’s budget, box office gross, and the IMDb rating, when observing high grossing films. Perhaps a larger model, which included lower grossing films, would have different found a relationship. Additionally, while I was unable to find a relationship between a film’s production cost and its gross, I did observe a relationship between a film’s genre and its budget.