Worldwide Box Office (millions)
1. Star Wars ($4,211.1)
2. James Bond ($3,669.2)*
3. Harry Potter ($3,508.9)**
4. Lord of the Rings ($2,916.6)
5. Jurassic Park ($1,902.1)
6. Batman ($1,624.7)
7. Matrix ($1,624.0)
8. Spider-Man ($1,605.7)
9. Shrek ($1,405.1)
10. Indiana Jones ($1,191.4)
* worldwide totals from third party source (hsbr.net - which is unfortunately off line right now)
** in release
Domestic Box Office (millions)
1. Star Wars ($2,182.9)
2. James Bond ($1,217.1)
3. Harry Potter ($1,112.5) **
4. Lord of the Rings ($1,030.2)
5. Batman ($910.6)
6. Spider-Man ($777.3)
7. Jurassic Park ($767.4)
8. Star Trek ($755.7)
9. Shrek ($708.9)
10. Indiana Jones ($619.5)
Domestic Ticket Sales (millions of tickets)
1. Star Wars (568.1)
2. James Bond (527.1)
3. Star Trek (204.2)
4. Batman (200.0)
5. Indiana Jones (191.1)
6. Harry Potter (185.5) **
7. Jaws (182.6)
8. Rocky (177.2)
9. Lord of the Rings (173.9)
10. Jurassic Park (168.1)
Worldwide Box Office per film (millions)
1. Lord of the Rings ($972.2)
2. Harry Potter ($877.2) **
3. Spider-Man ($802.9)
4. Shrek ($702.6)
5. Star Wars ($701.9)
6. Jurassic Park ($634.0)
7. Matrix ($541.3)
8. Men in Black ($515.6)
9. Mission: Impossible ($501.2)
10. Toy Story ($423.5)
Domestic Box Office per film (millions)
1. Spider-Man ($388.7)
2. Star Wars ($363.8)
3. Shrek ($354.5)
4. Lord of the Rings ($343.4)
5. Harry Potter ($278.1) **
6. Jurassic Park ($255.8)
7. Meet the Parents/Fokkers ($222.8)
8. Men in Black ($220.6)
9. Toy Story ($218.9)
10. Indiana Jones ($206.5)
Domestic Ticket Sales per film (millions of tickets)
1. Star Wars (94.7)
2. Spider-Man (64.8)
3. Indiana Jones (63.7)
4. Shrek (59.2)
5. Lord of the Rings (58.0)
6. Jurassic Park (56.0)
7. Ghostbusters (49.5)
8. Harry Potter (46.4) **
9. Toy Story (46.0)
10. Jaws (45.6)
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Movie franchise tracking: why and how and what
I'm going to step back from the previous post.
Why am I tracking box office returns for selected movie franchises? Well, I started paying attention to movie money back when the Fellowship of the Rings came out. I was reading a lot of hype about how life changing this movie was going to be and I was interested if the money made would reflect that. That's when I first found out about the amazingly useful tracking site Box Office Mojo. And it was great fun to watch the daily returns and see the movie climb the charts rapidly and try to figure out whether Fellowship of the Ring or The Sorcerer's Stone would end up with more money (Harry Potter 1 beat out Lord of the Rings 1 by $2.8 million domestically and $105.1 million worldwide - all $ amounts are US$).
Since I had so much fun watching the competition (and it was so easy to do) I hung around for round 2. This time the tables were turned and The Two Towers outperformed The Chamber of Secrets (by $79.8 million domestically and $49.6 million worldwide). Round 3 didn't happen simultaneously, The Return of the King came out in 2003 and The Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004. Even with the slight disparity in average ticket prices, Lord of the Rings 3 handily defeated Harry Potter 3 (by $127.0 million domestically and $329.1 million worldwide). Amazingly, The Return of the King became only the second movie in history to gross over $1 billion worldwide (the first movie was Titanic, which is so far out ahead of any other movie when it comes to box office gross that it's not funny).
One side effect of this obsession with the all-time charts (domestic and worldwide) was the observation that most of the movies at the top of the charts were part of a franchise - 7 out of the top 10 domestically and 9 of 10 worldwide. This got me thinking, "Well, how do those franchises stack up against each other?" Which automatically led to the creation of a spreadsheet.
Rather than deal with every single franchise I decided to set some limits on my data collection. I decided on these limits based on expediency. I went through the worldwide all-time chart and pulled out all movies that were part of a franchise which led to the first rule: for a franchise to be tracked one of the movies has to have made over $200 million worldwide (the lower limit of Box Office Mojo's chart). Then I realized that Box Office Mojo has a franchise page. However, some of these franchises are pretty weeny (The four American Ninja movies made a total of less than $20 million domestically. Not too interesting). So I decided to track a franchise only if one of the movies made more than $100 million domestically (this is the lower limit for Box Office Mojo's all-time domestic chart). But after applying this rule, I found there were still some franchises I felt should be part of the comparison that hadn't made the cut. So I decided to add in any franchise where the domestic total exceeded $200 million (which allowed me to bring longstanding franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th into the mix). All told, I ended up with 82 movie franchises.
The last bit of supporting information is what data I was paying attention to. Domestic and Worldwide gross were a given but, due to increasing ticket prices, this gives undue (in my opinion) weight to more recent movies. So I also included a column that calculated domestic ticket sales (based on the average ticket prices per year found on this page). And I could also calculate franchise averages for all three of these values.
There you have it. Later I'll talk about some general observations.
Why am I tracking box office returns for selected movie franchises? Well, I started paying attention to movie money back when the Fellowship of the Rings came out. I was reading a lot of hype about how life changing this movie was going to be and I was interested if the money made would reflect that. That's when I first found out about the amazingly useful tracking site Box Office Mojo. And it was great fun to watch the daily returns and see the movie climb the charts rapidly and try to figure out whether Fellowship of the Ring or The Sorcerer's Stone would end up with more money (Harry Potter 1 beat out Lord of the Rings 1 by $2.8 million domestically and $105.1 million worldwide - all $ amounts are US$).
Since I had so much fun watching the competition (and it was so easy to do) I hung around for round 2. This time the tables were turned and The Two Towers outperformed The Chamber of Secrets (by $79.8 million domestically and $49.6 million worldwide). Round 3 didn't happen simultaneously, The Return of the King came out in 2003 and The Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004. Even with the slight disparity in average ticket prices, Lord of the Rings 3 handily defeated Harry Potter 3 (by $127.0 million domestically and $329.1 million worldwide). Amazingly, The Return of the King became only the second movie in history to gross over $1 billion worldwide (the first movie was Titanic, which is so far out ahead of any other movie when it comes to box office gross that it's not funny).
One side effect of this obsession with the all-time charts (domestic and worldwide) was the observation that most of the movies at the top of the charts were part of a franchise - 7 out of the top 10 domestically and 9 of 10 worldwide. This got me thinking, "Well, how do those franchises stack up against each other?" Which automatically led to the creation of a spreadsheet.
Rather than deal with every single franchise I decided to set some limits on my data collection. I decided on these limits based on expediency. I went through the worldwide all-time chart and pulled out all movies that were part of a franchise which led to the first rule: for a franchise to be tracked one of the movies has to have made over $200 million worldwide (the lower limit of Box Office Mojo's chart). Then I realized that Box Office Mojo has a franchise page. However, some of these franchises are pretty weeny (The four American Ninja movies made a total of less than $20 million domestically. Not too interesting). So I decided to track a franchise only if one of the movies made more than $100 million domestically (this is the lower limit for Box Office Mojo's all-time domestic chart). But after applying this rule, I found there were still some franchises I felt should be part of the comparison that hadn't made the cut. So I decided to add in any franchise where the domestic total exceeded $200 million (which allowed me to bring longstanding franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th into the mix). All told, I ended up with 82 movie franchises.
The last bit of supporting information is what data I was paying attention to. Domestic and Worldwide gross were a given but, due to increasing ticket prices, this gives undue (in my opinion) weight to more recent movies. So I also included a column that calculated domestic ticket sales (based on the average ticket prices per year found on this page). And I could also calculate franchise averages for all three of these values.
There you have it. Later I'll talk about some general observations.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Eagerly awaited upcoming movies (for a slightly odd reason)
Hmmm, look what I found… Let’s dust this off a bit. And add some disjointed ramblings.
We don’t go to the movies much anymore. For a variety of reasons: ticket prices too expensive, not much out there we’re interested in seeing, too much of a time commitment, movie going experience kind of sucks, etc. But there are a few movies that I’m looking forward to this year. Not because I plan on watching them. Rather, I’m curious to watch the box office performance.
One of my hobbies is keeping track of the box office performance of selected movie franchises. There are eighty-one franchises that, for a variety of reasons, I collect information on. The numbers that I look at are: the domestic box-office (includes the United States and Canada), the worldwide box-office and the number of tickets sold in the domestic market (I feel this allows a better comparison across years than the dollar figure).
I'm going to have to add a few franchises to the spreadsheet this year. This is because the first movie performed good enough to gain admittance (in all of these cases the particular metric is that at least one movie in the franchise has to make more than $200 million worldwide) and they were just waiting for the sequel to come along. So I'll be tracking Basic Instinct 2, Ice Age 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 but it's more of a formality than anything else.
Of more interest to me are franchises that are on the bubble and may make the cut depending on the performance of the next installment. None of these movies are expected to go crazy worldwide so the particular requirement that I'll be looking at here is a franchise domestic box office total of more than $200 million. Some of these movies are good bets: all Big Momma's House 2, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Origin, The Grudge 2 and Saw III have to do is maintain the previously established box office (70%, 67%, 81% and 67% of the domestic take of the last movie, respectively). Others are long shots and would have to perform significantly better than the first movie (Final Destination 3, Garfield 2, Sin City 2 and Jackass 2). There are a few that really don't have a chance in hell - both Underworld: Evolution and Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion would have to triple the first installment. And then there's The Omen 666 which is triply damned because it would have to make more than the highest grossing movie of the set, the franchise has made less money with each installment and it's been more than two decades since a movie in the series was released. So we'll see.
But the movies that I'm looking forward to most are from series that I'm already tracking. Depending on how well the next installment does, these movies could (and should, in some cases) rise in the rankings. I'll have to go into more detail at a later date but, for the record, these movies are: Scary Movie 4, Mission: Impossible 3, X-Men 3, The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift, Superman Returns and Casino Royale. And I could pretty easily be arm-twisted into going to see a couple of these (hint: This message will self destruct in 10 seconds, or, What's Captain Picard doing in a wheel-chair?). It's the summer sucker in me. Although I guess May isn't technically summer.
Hmmm, all this number talk sure sounds like "sound and fury, signifying nothing", doesn't it? Whatever keeps me off the street, I guess...
We don’t go to the movies much anymore. For a variety of reasons: ticket prices too expensive, not much out there we’re interested in seeing, too much of a time commitment, movie going experience kind of sucks, etc. But there are a few movies that I’m looking forward to this year. Not because I plan on watching them. Rather, I’m curious to watch the box office performance.
One of my hobbies is keeping track of the box office performance of selected movie franchises. There are eighty-one franchises that, for a variety of reasons, I collect information on. The numbers that I look at are: the domestic box-office (includes the United States and Canada), the worldwide box-office and the number of tickets sold in the domestic market (I feel this allows a better comparison across years than the dollar figure).
I'm going to have to add a few franchises to the spreadsheet this year. This is because the first movie performed good enough to gain admittance (in all of these cases the particular metric is that at least one movie in the franchise has to make more than $200 million worldwide) and they were just waiting for the sequel to come along. So I'll be tracking Basic Instinct 2, Ice Age 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 but it's more of a formality than anything else.
Of more interest to me are franchises that are on the bubble and may make the cut depending on the performance of the next installment. None of these movies are expected to go crazy worldwide so the particular requirement that I'll be looking at here is a franchise domestic box office total of more than $200 million. Some of these movies are good bets: all Big Momma's House 2, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Origin, The Grudge 2 and Saw III have to do is maintain the previously established box office (70%, 67%, 81% and 67% of the domestic take of the last movie, respectively). Others are long shots and would have to perform significantly better than the first movie (Final Destination 3, Garfield 2, Sin City 2 and Jackass 2). There are a few that really don't have a chance in hell - both Underworld: Evolution and Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion would have to triple the first installment. And then there's The Omen 666 which is triply damned because it would have to make more than the highest grossing movie of the set, the franchise has made less money with each installment and it's been more than two decades since a movie in the series was released. So we'll see.
But the movies that I'm looking forward to most are from series that I'm already tracking. Depending on how well the next installment does, these movies could (and should, in some cases) rise in the rankings. I'll have to go into more detail at a later date but, for the record, these movies are: Scary Movie 4, Mission: Impossible 3, X-Men 3, The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift, Superman Returns and Casino Royale. And I could pretty easily be arm-twisted into going to see a couple of these (hint: This message will self destruct in 10 seconds, or, What's Captain Picard doing in a wheel-chair?). It's the summer sucker in me. Although I guess May isn't technically summer.
Hmmm, all this number talk sure sounds like "sound and fury, signifying nothing", doesn't it? Whatever keeps me off the street, I guess...
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