It’s popular to criticize Big Media and say stop whining about this into mediation we are falling profits or whatever, if you just made better quality content you would be making more money. Hmm I’ve always secretly wondered if that latter statement was true and so when I was, for some unknown impulse, browsing last weekend’s North American box office numbers, this relationship seemed to jump right out at me and made me laugh. (cry?)
So here you have a scatter plot of the top 12 grossing movies (vertical scale) this weekend versus the RottenTomatoes rating (a measure of critic approval) for each of those same movies (horizontal scale). The pinkish line represents excels best guess at the linear regression for this relationship.
sigh. what does this tell us? possible theories:
1. People don’t actually like good content. In practice, they prefer not to be overly challenged by their entertainment and rather prefer the trashy stuff.
2. Bad content is actually good, or viceversa — a longstanding conspiracy of critics if you will.
or…
3. It’s All About the Distribution Stupid. Consumers will consume industry portion amounts those products which are disproportionately put in front of their noses.
It’s all about the distribution, is I feel a point the new economy Web2.0 hypesters tend to forget about. Sure information technology should be helping to level the playing field, but if so, why are we still lining up in droves to see these terrible movies?
Or say I’m wrong and distribution scale advantages or not, say these are all the movies we really did want to see. What does that say about the wisdom of crowds? Another cherished tenet of the web 2.0 ethos…
Now caveat caveat these are only 12 data points from one weekend and there are all kind of statistical biases at work here so, for the time being, consider these “stat’s” as for entertainment purposes only. Also I realize the movie business is more complicated than this, one would hope that good movies make more money over time etc etc. Still, this should be worth investigating a little further don’t you think?
for the record, here is the data set I used, courtesy of RottenTomatoes.com
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25% 
89%
Tom,
I think what many people don’t realize is there are two different factions at work when it comes to mass release movies.
The business side of things and the art side of things.
A movie that is good business is usually not art, and a movie that is art is usually not good business.
BTW, registering to comment is a real pain…
Tom,
I think what many people don’t realize is there are two different factions at work when it comes to mass release movies.
The business side of things and the art side of things.
A movie that is good business is usually not art, and a movie that is art is usually not good business.
BTW, registering to comment is a real pain…
Ah… that’s weird, did my comment make it in? Are comments also moderated in addition to having to be forced to logged in? Hmm….
Ah… that’s weird, did my comment make it in? Are comments also moderated in addition to having to be forced to logged in? Hmm….
Thanks for your comments. Yes well I think there’s still point is that it’s a shame that art doesn’t make better business…
sorry for the comments hassle. I *think* I’ve got it fixed now. [you’re the first person to leave a comment!]
Thanks for your comments. Yes well I think there’s still point is that it’s a shame that art doesn’t make better business…
sorry for the comments hassle. I *think* I’ve got it fixed now. [you’re the first person to leave a comment!]
These are only the top 12 movies so we really are still only talking about the very short end of the tail. No real art house films you would think are aimed at the top 12.
It was somewhat arbitrary that I used rotten tomatoes, but it’s also interesting measure because a lot of the “better” Arty films don’t score highest in rotton tomatoes because there will generally be debate about them even among critics, not everyone will like them. It takes a relatively more harmless movie that *nobody* dislikes to score a 100 in the tomatoe rating.
it could just be a coincidence that this weekend’s data showed a negative correlation between revenues and reviews. One would hope that a proper study would show more balanced results but who knows…
These are only the top 12 movies so we really are still only talking about the very short end of the tail. No real art house films you would think are aimed at the top 12.
It was somewhat arbitrary that I used rotten tomatoes, but it’s also interesting measure because a lot of the “better” Arty films don’t score highest in rotton tomatoes because there will generally be debate about them even among critics, not everyone will like them. It takes a relatively more harmless movie that *nobody* dislikes to score a 100 in the tomatoe rating.
it could just be a coincidence that this weekend’s data showed a negative correlation between revenues and reviews. One would hope that a proper study would show more balanced results but who knows…
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