Did you went to see Star Wars VII? Probably yes. Star Wars is questionless the most successful movie in term of gross income. But have you and idea how much has earned compared with Avatar?

The data used for this visualizations was extracted from the http://www.boxofficemojo.com/, a site maintained by imbd.com). If you dont know this site have the daily gross income since was released in theaters for almost every movie. For example: in this link you’ll find the data for the movie Avatar.

Now, with the data how we can compare the gross incomes between the movies? The first and safe approach would be a
bar chart but let us be a little more risky, ambitious and consider the daily information. We can chart for every movie the time series considering the cumulative gross income.

The result is really interesnting because we can visualize the gross incomes (like a bar chart) but at the same time we can see when the movie was released how much highest-grossing films are separated among them in time. In particular we see ET and Jurassic Park have almost the same income but 10 year after. We enabled the zoom in this highcharts visualization so we can explore with more detail particular date.

Movies don’t have necessarily the same exposure in the theaters and the previous chart, due time scale, don’t help us too much to get this information so we can consider the time variables the days since the realease and all the movies will have the same origin:

With this chart is may be easier to compare the income the income, but we have a lot data overlaped in the right bottom corner so the chart is not very informative this area, but by other hand it is very explicit showing the movies with more days in theaters: Jurassic Park were near of 500 days.

As we see there’s no only way to see the data. Every representation show a particular feature just choose which one tell your story.