Let’s say we were a movie production company and we wanted to explore some past data in order to determine which genre of movie we should next produce to maximize chances of getting good audience and critic ratings.

Here is an extract of that data:

Film Genre CriticRating AudienceRating BudgetMillions Year
  1. Days of Summer
Comedy 87 81 8 2009
10000 B.C. Adventure 9 44 105 2008
12 Rounds Action 30 52 20 2009
127 Hours Adventure 93 84 18 2010
17 Again Comedy 55 70 20 2009
2012 Action 39 63 200 2009
27 Dresses Comedy 40 71 30 2008
30 Days of Night Horror 50 57 32 2007
30 Minutes or Less Comedy 43 48 28 2011
50/50 Comedy 93 93 8 2011

Though this will not directly help answer our question, maybe the first thing that we would like to know is how many movies there are in each category:

We see that comedy and action movies are the most common and romance and adventure movies are the least common ones.

Now, to start answering our question, let’s look at the audience ratings for each movie genre:

This plot shows us the median ratings for each genre (the thick line in the middle) as well as the 1st and 3rd quartile ratings (bottom and top line). We can see that Drama movies have the highest 1st quartile rating (only 25% of ratings are below 52) as well as the highest 3rd quartile rating (25% of movies had a rating above 77%). Based on this graph, we can already see that we will probably not want to produce Action movies, Horror movies or Comedies due to the overall low ratings. The top candidates for now are Dramas, Romances and Thrillers.

But how do these audience ratings correlate with critic ratings?

Interestingly, for each genre, the critic ratings span the full range of ratings (from 0 to 100). We can also see that if we have a drama movie with a very low critic rating (less than 10), we can still expect audience ratings above 50! Whereas with Romance and Thriller movies, if we have low critic ratings, we will also have low audience ratings (less than 30). If our movie fails (which we are not planning but we never know), we’d best best off producting a Drama.

But how has this trend evolved over the years?

The curve for Dramas is quite stable over the years and actually last year, critic ratings didn’t go below 30 for a single movie.

Based on this simple analysis, we would recommend to produce a Drama movie.