Movies, america’s favorite pass time.
According to statista the box office revenues for north america were more than $11 Billion in 2019. Clearly, we like our movies. I take a look at movie ratings based on audience and critic reviews with varying movie budgets.
Mining Op.
I gathered my data and code examples from superdatascience who in turn got it from rotten tomatoes. I used Seaborn, Numpy, Pandas and Matplotlib again to compile the data analysis and create the plots. My python code and a lot more insights can be found on github
Paying off the critics?
A big question I had was, do higher budget movies tend to get a better critic rating? Well, based on this data it would appear critics are no respecter of budgets, so to speak. With the heat map you can tell that only a few high budget movies get approximately 90%. Most high budget movies get lumped into 80%, 50% and 20%.
The critics give movies with a budget of nearly $30 million a pretty even rating. There’s a slight skew toward higher rating if the budget is under approximately $90 million. The critics seem to give a lot of movies in the $30 million budget range a rating of less than about 50%. This is good to know. Based on critic ratings, having a huge movie budget doesn’t guarantee you anything.
Can you buy your fans?
It should be noted that the scales differ on each these plots. The details in the audience plot were more tightly clustered. This made it hard to make inferences bases on the plot, therefore I effectively “zoomed in” on the X-axis to be able to interpret the plot better.
It seems the audience tends to be harsher and more forgiving, strangely. This dichotomous statement is visualized by the smaller rounder shape of the plot. There are so few 100%s and 0%s that they don’t even register on this plot. The audience seems to be on the fence for more movies.
The gravity of the heat map is closer to the centroid of the entire plot. Whereas, in the critics plot it was more evenly spread out. The audience tends to give a disproportionately large amount of movies 50%, whereas the critics definitely felt that there were plenty of movies that rated much lower than 50%.
No, the audience can’t be bought either, however we’re more forgiving for the lower rated movies and expect much more on the top rated end of the spectrum.
Critics v. audience
I wanted to look at the age old question, at least amongst my inner circle, of whether or not the audience matches up with what the critics say.
At first glance it might appear so, however on further inspection we already know that the audience doesn’t quite match up. The first observation is that most of the 0%s that the critics gave, the audience gave about 20%. We already knew that though. A more interesting point is in the 60% ratings. Critics and the audience seem to match up nicely from 60% - 70%, then the audience ratings’ begin to taper off.
To answer the question; the audience and critics do agree for the majority of movies within a degree of tolerance. As the movies get worse or better the audience tends to diverge from the critics.
Key take-aways
If the critics give a movie a 100%, or nearly that, be skeptical. The movie might not hold up to your expectations. Furthermore, if the movie did very poorly you’re likely to be more forgiving. For everything else, it would appear it’s pretty similar.
Sources
Banner and thumbnail taken from Evan Michalski
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