What Makes a Hit Movie? Part 1 of 3: Box Office
For some time now I’ve been compiling a ton of data for last year’s top movies. I was initially curious about comparing box office performance to critical reviews (more on that later), but during my research I also came across some other interesting trends.
So, who are the ‘hits’ I studied? I decided to limit the study to the top 100 films, per total total grossing at the U.S. Box Office. By focusing just on the U.S. market, I was able to work with more detailed data including weekend performance changes, critical reviews and gross per theater averages. The following is a graphical representation of the total U.S. gross for these 100 movies.
What stands out is the sharp spike from the top performers. The top movie, The Dark Knight, made a third more than it’s two closest competitors. The top 10 movies earned an average of $261.6 million, over three times as much as the total average for the top 100.
Top 10 Movies of 2008 per Total U.S. Box Office Gross
- The Dark Knight: $529.7 million
- Iron Man: $318.3 million
- Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: $317.0 million
- Hancock: $227.9 million
- Wall-E: $223.5 million
- Kung-Fu Panda: $215.4 million
- Twilight: $186.2 million
- Madgascar: Escape 2 Africa: $169.9 million
- Quantum of Solace: $166.8 million
- Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!: $154.5 million
The success and broad marketability of these titles reminds me of a strategy mentioned by Tim Palen, Co-President of Theatrical Marketing at Lionsgate, in a recent New Yorker article; a successful tent-pole movie must aim at the four main market quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five and older women.
Looking at the weekend box office performance also revealed some interesting differences. On average, the top 100 movies made about a third of its total gross the first weekend. So, if a movie grossed $33 million the first weekend, it could expect to make a total of $100 million. The movies that made the most, proportionally, during their first weekend could be deemed ‘sprinters’; titles like Cloverfield (57.7%), Saw V (53.0%) and Meet the Spartans (45.2%) attracted audiences quickly, but seemed to lack a certain pace. Considering that these movies were targeted towards teens and young adults, their ‘fadish’ nature made sense. The target audiences was more likely to see the movies very soon, and perhaps only once.
Inversely, movies that made the least, proportionally, during their first weekend were movies that were either intially released on a limited basis like Slumdog Millionaire (0.6%) and Changeling (1.4%), or were ‘marathon’ movies that ‘had legs’ like Yes Man (19.1%), Mamma Mia! (19.3%) and The Bank Job (25.3%). These movies seemed to find their audiences later rather than immediately, and perhaps also attracted repeat viewings.
This posting is the first in a series. Next up I am going to compare the box office peformance to the reviews these movies got from the critics, utilizing Rotten Tomatoes Scores as a proxy. After that I’ll be comparing the production budget to total grosses and profits.