Measuring Box Office Success
During a discussion with my wife about the Batman vs. Superman film from earlier this year, the question came up as to whether the box office drop from the opening to the 2nd weekend was normal, or whether it dropped more than it should have due to bad word of mouth.
I decided to get hold of some data from the BoxOffice Mojo website to try and answer this question, and it then also evolved into an exercise in data visualization.
The data was all obtained from BoxOfficeMojo using a couple of web scraping scripts. For additional details, as well as known issues, see more at https://github.com/simonb83/DataScienceIntensive/tree/master/projects/box-office
What does success mean
In reality we see that films can be successful in different ways depending on the metric we use.
If we look at box office takings for the opening weekend then, as expected, Sci-Fi, Action and Animated are the genres that typically dominate.
However if we also take budget into account, then it turns out that Horror films are particularly successful.
When we look into why this might be, we see that on average Horror films have a budget one quarter of the size of that for Action, SciFi and Animated films, so it is much easier for them to make their money back.
When we look further into budgets we see that they have increased steadily since the 1980s in both nominal and adjusted terms.
At the same time, the average opening weekend takings seem to have been on a slight downward trend since 2000.
This could be because the total number of films released has almost doubled since 2000, pushing down the box office average.
In terms of total takings, the vast majority of releases make less than $25 million in their opening weekend.
Whilst ‘blockbusters’ continue to break box office records on a regular basis.
On average, films drop by about 40% in Box Office takings between their opening and second weekends.
That said, there are films that actually increase their box office takings in their second weekend, although these are typically from more obscure genres.
Batman vs Superman
Now we look at the Batman vs Superman film in more detail and compare with two specific films:
- Avengers: Civil War
- Batman: Dark Knight Rises
We also use a general group consisting of 89 Sci-Fi and Action/Adventure films, with budget > 100 million USD, released since 2010.Batman vs. Superman performed very well in its opening weekend.
It was also within the top 10 films with a highest grossing opening weekend based on our comparison group:
However, by the second weekend it did a lot worse than its peers, dropping nearly 70% vs. an average drop of 50% for similar films.
Finally, we look at a couple of very simple scenarios for how well BvS could have performed in its second weekend, had it not dropped more than average vs. its peer group.
We find that it could have made an additional $12-30 million in its second weekend had it performed similar to comparative films.
