The Life-cycle of the American Box Office (Cinematicus multimillionius)

The helpful movie men at CHUD recently posted several handy graphic charts displaying some very cool movie-related info.

The one I found most interesting is this chart by the New York Times showing the waxing and waning of weekly box-office receipts from January of 1986 to February of 2008; it also lets you select particular films to highlight how much money each made over what period of time. The crazy thing is, it looks almost like a living organism or other natural phenomenon, rhythmically expanding and contracting throughout the seasons. It confirms, in visual form, what we knew about the movie seasons: The big movies are released in the late spring/early summer and late fall/early winter, and there are noticeable lulls (in revenue and, usually, quality) January through April and again August through October. (There are examples, however, of break-out hits that create spikes in the midst of those seasonal valleys, like Liar Liar in March of 1997, The Matrix in March of 1999, Monsters, Inc. in October of 2001, The Passion of the Christ in February of 2004, and 300 in March of 2007.) In addition to the bulges being higher and sharper at the later end of the chart than at the earlier end, you can see how some films in the '80s were able to bring in a lot of money through a moderate but steady stream over a long time—Top Gun and "Crocodile" Dundee in 1986 are good examples of this—instead of the contemporary paradigm of a film's having to make most of its money during the first week or two of its release before dropping off precipitously. It's interesting to see the changes not only in how much money films made over the course of this period, but also in how they made that money.

Another cool chart depicts IMDb's Top 250 as a subway map, with genres as different lines and films that fit in multiple genres as transfer stations (for instance, Bonnie and Clyde lies at the intersection of Gangster and Romance, and King Kong sits atop World/Adventure, Thriller/Horror/Monster, and "Universally Acclaimed Masterpiece"). It really makes me want to watch (or re-watch) all of them by "riding the rails" along the various genres.

They've also got a chart depicting character interactions over the course of the story (the one for The Lord of the Rings is insanely convoluted for anyone but a Tolkien-nerd like me, while the one for 12 Angry Men is hilariously simple), one showing the time-traveling journeys of various characters (though nothing for the fifth season of Lost; you can find that here), and one giving a size comparison of several movie monsters, from tiny Chucky to the ginormous Cloverfield monster.

There you have it. Don't say I never did anything for you.