Most of the people think that a film with a big budget will be successful and will bring a lot of money to its producers. In this first project, we will use visualizations to discuss this preconceived idea. We have used a database based on gathered information about films from the nineties. Also, using the powerful visualization tool IBM Many Eyes, we have created two visualizations in order to represent the interesting data.
The dataset we have chosen, is composed of the titles of 36 movies, their year of diffusion, their rating (public restriction), the budget and gross (both in millions $), their length (in minutes) and the viewer rating. We wanted to concentrate on the viewer rating, the budget and the gross in order to define a possible connection between these parameters. In fact we feel concerned on the viewer rating, because we can be part of it when we go watching a movie, but it’s interesting to see what is hidden behind a movie.
Our first visualization is entitled “Are movies with big budget more appreciated? “. Its aim is to determine whether there is a link between the budget invested in a film and the viewer rate. To represent the data a bubble chart has be drawn. Every movie is represented by a bubble whose size is proportional to the budget spent in it (in millions of dollars). To define the viewer rating, we have defined six categories going from “waste of time” for a viewer rate whose value is between 4 and 5 to “amazing” for a value higher than 9. It’s a way to interpret the viewer rating values and to describe them with different colors. So this chart helps the viewer to see the link between budget (size of the circles) and viewer rating (colors). The viewer can choose to see the movies of only one category (“waste of time”, “good”…) by clicking on the name of the category. When the user clicks on some circle, he can have more precise information about the movie: title, budget and viewer rating category.
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Are movies with big budget more apreciated?
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Our first visualization is entitled “Are movies with big budget more appreciated? “. Its aim is to determine whether there is a link between the budget invested in a film and the viewer rate. To represent the data a bubble chart has be drawn. Every movie is represented by a bubble whose size is proportional to the budget spent in it (in millions of dollars). To define the viewer rating, we have defined six categories going from “waste of time” for a viewer rate whose value is between 4 and 5 to “amazing” for a value higher than 9. It’s a way to interpret the viewer rating values and to describe them with different colors. So this chart helps the viewer to see the link between budget (size of the circles) and viewer rating (colors). The viewer can choose to see the movies of only one category (“waste of time”, “good”…) by clicking on the name of the category. When the user clicks on some circle, he can have more precise information about the movie: title, budget and viewer rating category.
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Are movies with big budget more apreciated? Example of "good" movies.
The first thing one can notice is that the colors are not linked with the size of the circles. The color of same-sized circles can illustrate a good (blue ones) or a bad rating (green ones). Even “Titanic” which has the biggest budget (200 million $) has not the best viewer rating (very good). Besides, “Chasing Amy” has the lowest budget (0,2 million $) but is considered as good according to the viewer rating. By clicking on “good” we can also see that the circles’ sizes vary from circle to circle. To sum up, we can conclude that this chart is adapted to show that budget and viewer rating are not linked for the movies of the dataset.
However, we are aware that the colors chosen for representing the viewer rating categories are not adapted in a real effective way. This is an issue and it is an interesting topic for software’s improvement. We, as intermediate users, are not able to change the colors on IBM Many Eye. Undoubtedly, we prefer to apply better the use of color intensity. Accordingly to Murch G. paper (“Physiological Principles for the Effective Use of Color”, November 1984) we would have use a bright color for the “amazing” movies. Then the colors’ brightness would have linearly decreased until “waste of time” so-called movies.
Furthermore, there are many commentators who claim that the bigger the budget spent on a movie, the better profit gross there will be. In regard to the producers who fund a movie, they also spent a huge capital on advertising. As the number of sold cinema tickets increases, so does investor’s profit. In most of the cases, media, advertisements and a “catchy” movie trailer may be a reason of attracting more and more viewers. Expensive special effects, well paid actors, a nice soundtrack, external scenes’ shooting, may rise the cost and create a movie that seems appealing to the public. But the question is: does the producers earn more considering to all this brainwashing? 
Movies, is there a link between Budget and Gross?
Watch the interactive visualization by clicking here! (Use Internet Explorer) According to the graph “Movies, is there a link between Budget and Gross?”, the bigger the square the higher the budget initially spent. The color represents the amount of profit gross related to the budget. Whereas, orange illustrates cost effective production, blue represents failures. White/ light colored boxes show a neutral cost to profit ratio. So, if someone plans to invest money in a movie he should try to avoid imitating productions enclosed in these blue squares!
Let us begin with the blue boxes. What information do they include? The most striking feature of failure is the movie entitled “Hard rain” (1998) that cost 70 million $ and brought only 19.8 million $ as a profit gross. The difference is -71.8% of their potential profit. This difference can be seen by clicking on the square of interest.
On the contrary, what happens with orange shades?
The most expensive movie ever is definitely the “Titanic” (1997). It had an outstanding budget of 200 million $ and it yielded earnings of 601 million $ which is accepted. That’s why its color is light orange. On the other hand, we should mention the movie “Gone with the wind”, in strong orange, that cost only 3.9 million $ and brought the amazing gross of 199 million $ which almost close to the Titanic’s gross!
The smallest budget spent ever, was for the movie “Chasing Army” (1997). The movie had a budget of 0.2 million $ only. It hardly can be noticed because of its tiny square, which is an issue with this kind of graph.
Undoubtedly, the most amazing cost effective movie was “Halloween” (1978) that had the amazing difference of + 14,362%! That is why it is colored in dark orange.
So, in a nutshell, this graph shows that if you are interested in investing money in a movie, try to avoid big productions like “Hard rain” (1998). Simple and cheap productions such as Halloween” (1978) may prove more beneficial and generate money out of nothing!
As a conclusion, these two visualizations are useful to answer the question: are the movies with a big budget more successful and bring a lot of money to their producers. We pointed out the most striking features of our dataset to prove that there is not a real link between budget, viewer rating and gross. Do you still believe what people say?
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