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:
- Titanic
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
- Forrest Gump
- Gladiator
- The King’s Speech
- Dances with Wolves
- Gone with the Wind
- Slumdog Millionaire
- American Beauty
- Rain Man
- Schindler’s List
- Green Book
- A Beautiful Mind
- Chicago
- The Departed
- Shakespeare in Love
- The Silence of the Lambs
- Parasite
- The Godfather
- Argo
- The English Patient
- Out of Africa
- Million Dollar Baby
- Braveheart
- The Shape of Water
- 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.
- CODA
- Nomadland
- Moonlight
- Spotlight
- Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
- The Artist
- The Hurt Locker
- No Country for Old Men
- Crash
- Unforgiven
- Driving Miss Daisy
- The Last Emperor
- Platoon
- Amadeus
- Terms of Endearment
- Gandhi
- Chariots of Fire
- Ordinary People
- Kramer vs. Kramer
- The Deer Hunter
- Annie Hall
- Rocky
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- The Godfather Part II
- The Sting
- The French Connection
- Patton
- Midnight Cowboy
- Oliver!
- In the Heat of the Night
- A Man for All Seasons
- The Sound of Music
- My Fair Lady
- Tom Jones
- Lawrence of Arabia
- West Side Story
- The Apartment
- Ben-Hur
- Gigi
- The Bridge on the River Kwai
- Around the World in 80 Days
- Marty
- On the Waterfront
- From Here to Eternity
- The Greatest Show on Earth
- An American in Paris
- All About Eve
- All the King’s Men
- Hamlet
- Gentleman’s Agreement
- The Best Years of Our Lives
- The Lost Weekend
- Going My Way
- Mrs. Miniver
- Casablanca
- How Green Was My Valley
- Rebecca
- You Can’t Take It with You
- The Life of Emile Zola
- The Great Ziegfeld
- Mutiny on the Bounty
- It Happened One Night
- Cavalcade
- Grand Hotel
- Cimarron
- All Quiet on the Western Front
- The Broadway Melody
- 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).