How to make money out of a movie?

Intro

Are you interested in making a new movie? Do you need some ideas about what kind of movie will help you to make a profit? Then, this post might give you a direction or two on where to begin.

Movie Information

Budget and Profit

To make a profit, we need to get profit information. The Numbers is a good source for the information.

The below table is a part of the data.

production_budget    worldwide_gross$425,000,000         $2,776,345,279$300,000,000         $2,048,134,200$306,000,000         $2,053,311,220$215,000,000         $1,648,854,864$190,000,000         $1,518,722,794

Unfortunately, the data does not include profit, but it can easily be calculated by subtracting the budget from the gross.

production_budget    worldwide_gross    profit$425,000,000         $2,776,345,279     2351.35$300,000,000         $2,048,134,200     1748.13$306,000,000         $2,053,311,220     1747.31$215,000,000         $1,648,854,864     1433.85$190,000,000         $1,518,722,794     1328.72

The profit is formatted to be in millions. Now we have information for budget and profit. Let's look at a graph and see if there is any relationship between budget and profit.

I would go for a scatter plot, but this graph looks less intimidating. There are five blue boxes. Each box represents the median value of each profit range. Profit ranges help to make analysis look more organized. The profit range at the left shows below zero which means it has a negative profit. There are two lines above and below the blue boxes. They represent the fluctuation of the data. A range of the data sometimes can be handier than just one number, the median.

What we can see from the above graph is that the more money spent on a movie returns more profit. Now that sounds infinite. This can be overwhelming for someone with a new experience. Let's dive into other aspects of the movies.

Genre

I think everyone has a favorite movie genre or two. There are drama, action, fantasy, etc. Try naming them all. We can get good data from TMDB. While TMDB has good informationon the movie genres, the profit data is not included. This is handled by combining data from TMDB with data from The Numbers mentioned above.

Let's check how genres are distributed before relating genres to profit.

Wow! Look at drama. It is overwhelmingly at the top. We also can see comedy, thriller, and action at the top. It is might be a good idea to avoid those genres to avoid too much competition.

It is time to check how genres can be related to profit.

The elements in this graph are the same as the graph for budget and profit. This graph is just that the bars are in the horizontal direction. The blue box again shows the median while two lines show the fluctuation. Now, drama is at the bottom half. The most profitable genres are animation, adventure, fantasy, family, science fiction, and action. I have picked six instead of five. The reason is that the fluctuation of those six stays above zero profit.

This part does not sound infinite. I guess the animation genre should be taken into the account.

Why don't we look at another aspectthat is movie runtime?

Movie Runtime

Runtime data is obtained from IMDb. Since IMDb does not have profit information, the data is combined with data from The Numbers.

Let's go straight into the result.

The runtime between 80 to 100 minutes has the lowest profit while movies above 120 have the highest profit. Surprisingly movies with less than 60 minutes long have more profit than movies with 80 to 100 minutes long. If a new movie with a length of more than 2 hours is not affordable, why don't we target the movie length of fewer than 60 minutes?

Conclusion

This analysis should give you some ideas about where to begin before filming a new movie. We looked at information on budget, genre, and runtime. If you gained curiosity about other aspects of the movies, then it means this analysis did something right.