The Ebb and Flow of Movies

This image was taken by me from the New York Times website - called The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 - 2007.

Yep, it’s another post on data representation/visualization. This one is pretty too, and right up the alley of Edward Tufte. In case you don’t know who Edward Tufte is, he’s the expert on representing data.

In my opinion, the New York Times did quite a good job of representing massive amounts of data into something simple, though it was quite interesting to note that 28 Weeks later made about as much money as Spiderman 3, but yet they put it right beside Spidey 3, making the bump representing 28 weeks later quite invisible.

Other, than that, no complains. Quite easy to see that the movies that made the most money are the summer blockbusters, and quite obvious waves can be seen. 2007 was a rather ‘bumpy’ summer, with multiple big box office winners.

Not too sure if the earnings were inflation adjusted or not… but still, it’s quite interesting to see. Oh yea… one more thing… 1989 was the year when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out. 2008… prepare yourselves for the last Indiana Jones! Whee!

Update:

MrPhlip has corrected me on a few things -

1. The box office earnings have been inflation adjusted

2. …the graph is cumulative - the weekly earnings for a given movie is the vertical distance between two curves, not between a curve and the axis… so the fact that the area representing 28 Weeks Later is much thinner than the one representing Spider-Man 3 is simply because that film made significantly less money (about a twelfth of the gross, if the figures on Wikipedia are accurate). The fact that its peak is a similar distance from the axis to Spider-Man 3’s doesn’t mean anything…

   Indeed. The box office earnings are represented by the area under the graph. In mathematics, what you usually do is to integrate the function of the graph. My bad in thinking 28 Weeks Later has roughly the same earnings as Spidey 3, leading to the confusion.

I now stand corrected. Thank you MrPhlip