Cinemath

Cinemath: A Year-End Report on the 2011 Box Office

by Brendan Bettinger    Posted: January 10th, 2012 at 3:42 pm

I know it’s 2012 and you’re ready to look forward to the new year. But if you can spare a few more minutes to look at 2011, I have a few things to show you about the yearly box office. What it lacks in timeliness, it makes up for in comprehensiveness. That’s the Cinemath way!

I looked at the domestic and international grosses of the wide releases of 2011 with a few questions in mind: Which movies had greater appeal overseas? Which genres were the most profitable? Which releases had “legs,” and kept audiences coming back week after week? After the jump, I break down the past year in box office every which way I can think of: by total gross, staying power, budget, studio, release date, genre, and MPAA rating. From Abduction ($28 million) to Zookeeper ($80 million):

Cinemath: What Makes a Best Picture? A Look at Rating, Runtime, and Genre Over 80 Years of Oscars

by Brendan Bettinger    Posted: December 27th, 2011 at 5:52 pm

While we are in the heart of awards season, I wanted to do something about the Oscars for Cinemath, our semi-regular feature that combines the wonder of movies with the tedium of mathematical analysis.  This edition is inspired by something Eric D. Snider wrote in his writeup on Marty, the shortest Best Picture in Oscar history:

“Don’t expect that record to be broken anytime soon, either. Oscar winners are gettin’ longer, not shorter.”

That got me curious.  That sounds reasonable, but could it also be statistically true?  I went over to IMDB to check out the runtimes of Oscar Best Picture nominees from 1928-2010—while I was there, I grabbed data on the genres and public ratings to see what it takes to win Hollywood’s top honor.  Hit the jump for the analysis.

Cinemath: Do I Agree With IMDB Users? A Statistical Analysis of My IMDB Ratings

by Brendan Bettinger    Posted: November 27th, 2011 at 8:56 am

I obsessively rate every movie I’ve ever seen on IMDB.  I started doing this when I was about 20 years old, so there are gaps between my memory of my adolescent viewing habits and this list.  But the record says I have seen 1,165 feature films, which must account for pretty much all of them.  At the very least, it’s a lot of data, and I’d like to do something with it for Cinemath, my semi-regular* feature that combines the wonder of movies with the tedium of mathematical analysis.

Since the list is stored on IMDB, every movie I rated conveniently has the public rating right next to it.  I am curious how often I agree with the public, and lucky for me, there are statistical tools to evaluate exactly that.  So after the jump, see how my ratings compare to those of the IMDB voting public, along with a few graphs of my viewing habits.

Cinemath: The Game Theory Behind the Snow White War [Updated]

by Brendan Bettinger    Posted: May 23rd, 2011 at 11:22 am

It’s probably clear to you from my nightly journalistic incompetence, but my day job (at which I’m equally incompetent) is student research based in math and statistics.  I’ve been looking for an opportunity to introduce a semiregular feature that combines the two worlds (Cinemath!), and Hollywood obliged this past week.

Universal Pictures and Relativity Media each spent the last year developing movies based on the Snow White fairy tale, both targeting a 2012 release.  Relativity scheduled The Brothers Grimm: Snow White to be the first audiences see on June 29, 2012.  Last Tuesday, Universal made the bold — and quite possibly idiotic — move of rescheduling Snow White and the Huntsman from December to June 1, 2012.  This brand of cutthroat competition is hardly novel among movie studios, but the Snow White war serves as an illustrative case study for the strategic reasoning described in game theory.

After the jump, I explain how the battle between Universal and Relativity is mathematically identical to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[Update: Relativity moved The Brothers Grimm to March 16, 2012.  We must discuss this after the jump.]

A Breakdown of the 2010 Box Office

by Brendan Bettinger    Posted: January 3rd, 2011 at 12:15 am

I have to use words to write for Collider, but my heart will always belong to the numbers. And few things cinematic provide the sheer numeric power of the box office.

I wanted to take a look at how the 2010 releases performed at the box the box office. We report on the totals each weekend, but that doesn’t always tell the whole story. Which movies had greater appeal overseas? Which genres were the most profitable? Which releases had “legs,” and kept audiences coming back week after week?

And so, after the jump, I sort and break down the past year in box office into charts and graphs every which way I can think of: by total gross, opening weekend, genre, release date, studio, MPAA rating, and staying power. From Alice in Wonderland ($334 million) to Youth in Revolt ($15 million):

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