Success of Movie Genres based on IMDB Data

Source: www.imperialtheatre.com

Though we usually strive to focus on specific areas or a niche zone for in depth analysis, this time wanted to direct your attention towards a bigger picture. We believe that talking about this particular topic would help you to understand many of our future analysis, and also gives us a way to introduce you to the idea that on-the-surface stats are rarely descriptive enough to understand the situations.

Today, we are going to show you a little bit of how movies have been doing over the years since records have been kept, or rather, records that IMDB has. For our analysis, we have used the list of movies in IMDB’s records till the end of 2016. Though the original dataset has 5043 movies, we had to remove duplicate entries, and even remove movies that had insufficient information and would not contribute well to our analysis. Even though there are many different categorizing levels for genres, we decided to use only a handful of primary level genres to give an initial understanding of what we want to convey.

As a result, our final data consists a little less than 4000 movies spanning from 1920 till 2016. We will talk about profits, budget and even the progression of IMDB scores.

1. Profit by Year

Average Profit of Films by Year (excluding some movies with data errors)

The highest peak within our time frame belongs to 1937, the year when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came out, the first Walt Disney Animation Studios film to hit the theaters. The movie was such a revolutionary success, and changed the film industry so much, it's impact will be talked about for decades and centuries. 

Since then however, the average profit rose till about 1975, and then has been on decline. Experts believe this is mostly due to the increasing number of movies getting released every year due to more affordable equipment and the greater number of production studios. Interestingly though, the number has started rising again since the economic recession of 2008.

2. IMDB Score by Year

Average IMDB Rating by Year

Very interestingly, IMDB ratings have seen a declining trend from the 1950s to the early 1990s. Is it because people's expectations have grown? Or is it because movies were made in a haste without the meticulous planning? It very well could be because of increasing number of alternate media options that started becoming available. We may never truly understand the reason completely, but we do know for sure that the average scores these days are pretty much constant from year to year, a trend that will seemingly continue in the near future.

3. IMDB Score by Genre (2001-2016)

Average IMDB Rating per Genre in the 2000s

Looking further into the constant IMDB ratings in recent year, we decided to split the scores by our primary genres. From the looks of it, Horrors and Comedies continue to face a tough challenge in pleasing consumers, while Documentaries and Dramas, though not extremely popular, continues to receive high rating from audience.

4. Budget by Genre (All of History vs the 21st Century)

Average Film Budget of Movie Genres

Average Film Budget of Movie Genres (2001-2016)

Though the proportions haven't really changed over the years, Action and Family films are receiving larger budgets in the recent years. We will see in a while why producers are so much willing to dump their resources in these films.

5. Gross by Genre (All of History vs the 21st Century)

Domestic Gross of Films by Genre

Clearly, Actions and Family films continue to pull in huge revenues from the US and Canada domestic markets. Joining them are the "Others" category which includes many Adventure genre films. This trend exists in both the centuries and is expected to continue well into the future. More so because of the recent evident success of action blockbusters and superhero films. However, do these high grossers pull the most profit? The colors scale in our graph represent the average profit made by these films. Most interesting of the lot is the Horror genre. Due to their very low budget and moderately medium crowd appeal, they truly are the most profitable genre based on average profit.

6. Profit by Genre (All of History vs the 21st Century)

Average Film Profit by Genre

Average Film Profit by Genre (2001-2016)

Looking closely into the profits alone, we can see that actions films have surprisingly seen a drop in their average profit. However, experts and movie industry analysts say that this is not alarming at all. Considering the huge number of action movies that are made every year, very few go on to be huge hits. Most of these films only manage a moderate profit, while numerous others become financial losses due to poor planning and execution. Still however, producers and investors willingly put more money since this genre provides audience with simple storytelling and visual spectacles, that does not need careful planning like many other genres. 

The one worrying factor however, is that for the Family films. They have been on a downward spiral for quite some time. Though there are sleeper family hits every year, the overall sector needs a serious boost and revamped strategy to be successful within the plethora of competition.

Dataset: https://data.world/data-society/imdb-5000-movie-dataset

Data Cleaning Guide: http://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/342210_7c8d57cfdd784cf58dc077d3eb7a2ca3.html