Studios usually make more than their budget, with only 17% of films earning less than their investment (ROI = Return Of Investment). Most films earn 172% of their original investment. But… The median audience rating is still only 6.5/10… Why aren’t these high ROI films being rated as “masterpieces”?
Bigger budgets are strongly linked to higher revenues.The cloud of points rises as budget rises. The more you invest, the more you can improve and expand, so revenue scales. But… This only says people paid to see it. It does not say people liked it. So does higher budgets mean higher ratings?
Spend doesn’t buy love. Even at the top budgets, most films sit in the 6.5/10 range. Ratings plateau. There’s no clean “more budget → better movie” pattern. Big spend stabilizes quality, it doesn’t guarantee greatness. What does this mean? Studios can buy reach and revenue. They can’t force audiences to adore the film.
Darker countries = higher average audience score. Scores are vote-weighted, so countries with just one tiny successful film don’t shoot to the top. Some regions consistently deliver films that land well with audiences, not just financially, but in terms of actual approval. But which countries specifically have the highest average ratings?
These are the countries whose films get the strongest audience ratings on average. Because we weight by vote count, this reflects broad approval, not just one niche favorite with 12 superfans. It suggests that the quality of movie culture differs across markers. The top 3 countries being Qatar, Israel and New Zealand. Surprising? So quality cinema isn’t just Hollywood.
Some genres are way more efficient than others. Even after capping ROI at 5× for readability, we still see huge spread meaning some genres can return multiples of their budgets while others struggle to recover costs. High-ROI genres here are the ones that can generate returns far greater than their investment not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. We see that films with the highest ROI on average come from genres such as Documentary, Horror and Family.
More popular films aren’t necessarily better rated. The relationship between popularity and rating is only weakly positive (ρ ≈ 0.2), which means hype helps a bit, but “widely watched” does not always mean “well loved.” Which supports the overall story: reach can be bought, love cannot.
status == "Released".budget,
revenue, vote_count,
vote_average, were treated as numeric. Zeros and rows with
missing values were dropped.roi = revenue / budget, log_budget,
log_revenue, decade and first-listed
primary_genre, primary_country.vote_average per primary production country.References
Banik, R. (n.d.). The Movies Dataset. Www.kaggle.com. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/rounakbanik/the-movies-dataset/data
GroupLens. (2019, April 26). MovieLens. GroupLens. https://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/