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.
