News, Politics and Anything Else I Want to Say

I love statistics, graphs and movies so I was extra thrilled a few months ago when I ran across this awesome graph of movie box office revenues from 1986 to February 2008. From this graph you can really see how concentrated the big money maker releases are in the summer and over Christmas.

Looking at individual movies is also pretty interesting. The Shawshank Redemption, for instance, is rated 9.2 out of 10 and is ranked as the 2nd best movie ever on IMDB but had a poor performance in theaters.


Another interesting movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding was released in April 2002 and never had a big weekend. It started out making next to nothing but in the end it made money for a full year. According to the IMDB trivia page, "it surpassed Dances with Wolves (1990) as the highest grossing movie never to have hit number one at the box office".


Last but not least we have one of the worst movies ever made, Gigli (pronounced as Jee-lee). I've never actually seen it but it's reputation is enough for me. From the graph for this movie (I had to search to find it) you can see it had a semi decent opening weekend before everyone realized how bad it was and it was taken out of theaters. This movie opened in 2,215 theaters but by the third weekend it was only showing in 73 (IMDB trivia page). Gigli also did well in the Razzie Awards that year with 6 wins.



What have we learned? Good movies don't always do very well in theaters and bad movies sometimes can, at least at first. Go find your favorite and least favorite movies on the graph too.