In the last couple of weeks, I have looked at a number of topics around movie budgets.
To complete this trilogy, I am turning to the connection between a movie’s budget and the amount of money it collects at the box office. Specifically, I’ll be looking at the “Domestic” gross, i.e. all the money spent on movie tickets in US and Canadian cinemas.
I’ll be using my dataset of 5,713 feature films released domestically for which I could find a public budget figure. See the Notes section for details and caveats of budget information. To measure the extent to which the budget and box office gross are correlated, I’ll be using the Pearson correlation coefficient.
A coefficient of minus one means they’re perfectly negatively correlated (i.e. when one goes up, the other always goes down) and a result of one means they’re perfectly correlated (i.e. they both rise/fall together). To be statistically significant, we are only interested in figures below -0.2 or above 0.2.
Are budgets and box office grosses connected?
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The first result is that there is a connection – a strong one. Across all movies released in the past twenty years, there is a Pearson correlation of 0.744 between budget and domestic gross.
Interestingly, this has been rising over the years, albeit slowly. In the chart below I have added an average trendline to make the change easier to spot.
Which genres have the strongest link between budget and theatrical success?
The previous chart lumps all movies together so we should dig a little deeper and see how different types of films fare.
It turns out that there are some pretty big differences between genres. The strongest correlations are found among Musicals (0.974), Westerns (0.965) and Music-based films (0.884). This means that in the vast majority of cases, a bigger budget has also meant a bigger domestic box office gross.
At the other end of the spectrum are films with a weak connection, including Horror (0.282), Sport (0.456) and Romance (0.457).
How are genres changing over time?
In the same way that each genre has a different overall figure, the 20-year trends differ between genres. Two genres which are more correlated are Comedy and Action.
The trends for Romance and Fantasy movies are static (although within a fairly volatile year-on-year picture).
And both Horror and Drama movies are seeing a weakening of the connection between their budgets and cinema takings.
Notes
The data for today’s research came from the OpusData / The Numbers, IMDb, Wikipedia, Box Office Mojo and the film trade press. I manually fixed any suspect figures I found, such as the Chinese war epic which IMDb claims cost $18.
There are a few notes and caveats over today’s research which are worth bearing in mind: