Box Office Analysis Intro
This dataset contains the top 100 movies based upon total box office success as taken from this website, https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cumulative/all-time. The data breaks down the box office by total box office, domestic, and international revenues. I thought that it would be interesting to take a look at some basic statistics and compare movie revenues and preferences between domestic and the international audiences.
Quick Data Overview
This searchable table has all of the box office data that we will be working with
This gives us a sense of the top movies all time by box office and their box office sales
What does the distribution of
Here we see a really right tailed distribution with most movies being in the $1.5 billion or less for total box office sales and very few movies have earned more than that in the history of film.
Lets see the leaders in Total Box Office
It is interesting that the movies are all made around different times and there are definetely some surprises here such as Jurassic World and the new live action Lion King.
Which Years have the most movies in the top 100
As we can see, 2017 had the largest number of movies on the list with 12 of the top 100 all time in total box office coming in that year. 2014 is an interesting data point as this year only saw two in the top 100 There were also only seven movies in the top 100 made before the year 2000.
International Box Office Analysis
How is the share of international sales changed in the top 100 movies across the years? 
The results are kind of surprising to me in that international box office revenue takes up so much of the overall revenue for movies. I knew that the markets outside of the U.S. were big but I didn’t realize how much the companies rely upon the international revenues.
Top International vs. Top Domestic Movies
Here the focus will be on the top ten in each country and we can see that the leader board is quite different between the top grossing domestic and international movies. The “rank” column is the overall total box office ranking that combines the domestic and international revenues. What we see here is that two Fast and Furious movies in “Furious 7” and “The Fate of the Furious” and “Lion King” are not on the top ten domestically. Similarly the three movies that are on the domestic top ten that are not on the international are “Black Panther”, “The Avengers” (original) and “Star Wars Ep. VIII: The Last Jedi”. This is an interesting comparison between tastes and franchises as internationally they love the Fast and Furious franchise and in America Star Wars is a bigger deal.
Conclusion and Possible Next Steps
After analyzing overall statistics and getting a feel for the data it was interesting to look at the overall, total international box office rankings. Stacking the domestic and international sales showed that international revenues made up much more of total box office revenues than domestic. Overall, the international sales were surprising and the types of franchises that were popular domestically vs. international. I always wondered why they made so many Fast and Furious movies but that franchise has two of the top ten international movies all time.
The next steps would be to adjust the numbers for inflation, some of the older movies might be higher on the list if inflation was taken into account. I think that it would be interesting to do a regression analysis to help predict the sales of the movie based upon inputs such as year and maybe add a dummy variable for genre and things.