What I Found After Downloading Data For The Last 8,000 Movies Made…
Just like all other human beings, I value entertainment, so much so, that I aspire to be a wannabe movie critic with my Letterboxd account and 27 followers.
Last Saturday morning I woke up at 4:30 am (mostly because of my age and diet) thinking… “I should really scrape all the wide-release movies from IMDB for the years 1950 to 2021 with their reviews, year produced, total revenue and maturity ratings. Then load it all into Power Bi for some Saturday fun analyzing the history of movies from the perspective of someone with two masters degrees and a full-time job in finance. My wife was pissed.
This is what I found.
Rule #1: If you ever produce a movie, never produce an R rated sci-fi film.
I assume producers are in the business of making money or they won’t make many movies. If someone came to me and pitched an R rated film idea, I would tell them that we are not interested in making such a movie and the odds are against you if you want to make it profitable. If it is just an art piece and the goal is to get a certain message out, I would tell them that revenue is a measure of how well that message is propagated since it is a measure of how many people actually watched it.
Rule #2: If you are going to make a movie, make it as long as you can.
Every part of my being wants to resist this and scream “HOW CAN THIS BE TRUE?”. But… the numbers don’t lie. The only explanation is that everyone else is a psychopath and I am the only sane person left in the world. The data tells us that the longer the movie, the more average revenue it brings in. Here is the data for all movies. Then the data for just PG-13 movies.
ALL MOVIES
PG-13 MOVIES ONLY
I avoid movies over 2 hours like the plague. If they are over 90 minutes then I treat it like COVID19 and just put up with it. My fear is that if I get into a 3 hour movie and it starts to suck, then I run the risk of being trapped for a period of time while my eyes are bombarded with bad acting and terrible story telling.
Rule #3: Movie producers are terrible business people.
With the newly minted knowledge of where to invest in movie-making, you would think that producers would produce lots of G and PG and PG-13 movies. Well, you are partly right. Over the past 70 years, there has been growth in the PG-13 rated movies. But all significant movie growth has been in R rated movies.
G-RATED MOVIE PRODUCTION BY YEAR AGAINST TOTAL MOVIE PRODUCTION
PG RATED MOVIE PRODUCTION BY YEAR AGAINST TOTAL MOVIE PRODUCTION
PG-13 RATED MOVIE PRODUCTION BY YEAR AGAINST TOTAL MOVIE PRODUCTION
R RATED MOVIE PRODUCTION BY YEAR AGAINST TOTAL MOVIE PRODUCTION
It is obvious that the vast majority of movie growth has been in R rated movies. Regardless of R rated movies making the least amount of money. It leaves me scratching my head… why do producers knowingly make movies that will not earn the revenues of the PG and PG-13 rated movies?
