If a lot of people go to the movies, does that mean it’s a good movie? Maybe. If a movie wins Best Picture, does that mean the movie is actually good or performed well in the Box Office? Maybe. Let’s take a look at the data.

One of the fun parts of this project is just getting the data. There isn’t a nice “export” button on IMDb. So I needed to webscrape with rvest and after doing that, I put all the data in a nice little table. Look at my GitHub for more information on my strategy of web scraping. The major benefit of webscraping is allowing easier reproducibility. Rather than copy pasting a table into Excel and then cleaning it by hand and taking that time to make human error, webscraping will bypass all of that as long as the website stays in the same format.

Best Pictures (Web Scraping Script)

Top 1000 Box Office Movies (Web Scraping Script)

Lifetime Gross for Best Picture vs Top 1000 Box Office

Hover over with your mouse or tap some of the points to view some info!

Please note there are 26 movies which are both Best Picture winners and are in the Top 1000 Box Office Movies of All Time. Those include:

  1. Titanic
  2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
  3. Forrest Gump
  4. Gladiator
  5. The King’s Speech
  6. Dances with Wolves
  7. Gone with the Wind
  8. Slumdog Millionaire
  9. American Beauty
  10. Rain Man
  11. Schindler’s List
  12. Green Book
  13. A Beautiful Mind
  14. Chicago
  15. The Departed
  16. Shakespeare in Love
  17. The Silence of the Lambs
  18. Parasite
  19. The Godfather
  20. Argo
  21. The English Patient
  22. Out of Africa
  23. Million Dollar Baby
  24. Braveheart
  25. The Shape of Water
  26. 12 Years a Slave

Also note, there are 68 movies without a lifetime gross listed in IMDb. I know a lot of these are listed in Wikipedia, but I’m only concentrating on data from IMDb. Feeling lazy right now.

  1. CODA
  2. Nomadland
  3. Moonlight
  4. Spotlight
  5. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
  6. The Artist
  7. The Hurt Locker
  8. No Country for Old Men
  9. Crash
  10. Unforgiven
  11. Driving Miss Daisy
  12. The Last Emperor
  13. Platoon
  14. Amadeus
  15. Terms of Endearment
  16. Gandhi
  17. Chariots of Fire
  18. Ordinary People
  19. Kramer vs. Kramer
  20. The Deer Hunter
  21. Annie Hall
  22. Rocky
  23. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  24. The Godfather Part II
  25. The Sting
  26. The French Connection
  27. Patton
  28. Midnight Cowboy
  29. Oliver!
  30. In the Heat of the Night
  31. A Man for All Seasons
  32. The Sound of Music
  33. My Fair Lady
  34. Tom Jones
  35. Lawrence of Arabia
  36. West Side Story
  37. The Apartment
  38. Ben-Hur
  39. Gigi
  40. The Bridge on the River Kwai
  41. Around the World in 80 Days
  42. Marty
  43. On the Waterfront
  44. From Here to Eternity
  45. The Greatest Show on Earth
  46. An American in Paris
  47. All About Eve
  48. All the King’s Men
  49. Hamlet
  50. Gentleman’s Agreement
  51. The Best Years of Our Lives
  52. The Lost Weekend
  53. Going My Way
  54. Mrs. Miniver
  55. Casablanca
  56. How Green Was My Valley
  57. Rebecca
  58. You Can’t Take It with You
  59. The Life of Emile Zola
  60. The Great Ziegfeld
  61. Mutiny on the Bounty
  62. It Happened One Night
  63. Cavalcade
  64. Grand Hotel
  65. Cimarron
  66. All Quiet on the Western Front
  67. The Broadway Melody
  68. Wings

Very obviously, on average Best Picture Winners are a lagging a little bit at the box office (Best Pictures: NA vs Top Box Office: $410,606,583).

IMDb Rating for Best Picture vs Top 1000 Box Office

How fun! It looks like a manta ray!

Also notice how IMDb rates Best Picture Winners higher on average than the Top 1000 Box Office Movies (Best Picture: 7.8 vs Top Box Office: 6.8).