2. What Other Factors Correlate With Successful Independent Dramas?

So, quality matters. But what other factors go into making a drama relatively successful?

Looking in The Numbers’ dataset, we pulled out all US-produced dramas made since 2000 with a budget less than $10 million that received a theatrical release and examined the ratio between their domestic box office and production budget. In order to avoid skewing the data too much, we excluded films that grossed more than 10 times their budget, and the ones that grossed less than 1% of their budget. (The total sample size after applying these rules was 228 films.)

Contemporary fiction generates the best box office return among creative types, with nearly double the return of historical fiction and dramatizations. Does this mean that contemporary is twice as popular among audiences? We don’t think so. Instead, we think that historical fiction and dramatizations (which by definition are also set in the past) are more expensive to make: think of the props, staging, period-appropriate vehicles, and so on. That doesn’t mean that films set in the past can’t be successful—far from it—but setting a film in the past for the sake of it probably isn’t a good idea.

Among sources, original screenplays perform slightly better than films based on fictional books, and better again than films based on real-life events (a category that includes films based on factual books). This is probably related to the expense of making films set in the right time period again, but another possible factor is that the author of a book isn’t constrained by thoughts of how much their creation might cost to film. If a pivotal scene in a book takes place in a snowstorm, a film adaptation of the book will probably need to include a snowstorm… and the expense that goes with shooting it.

For MPAA rating, there’s less of an effect. R-rated films tend to do slightly better than PG-13 rated films and PG-13 slightly better than PG. But the difference isn’t so great that we would assign a particular weight to one rating over another—it’s probably better to make the film authentically, rather than worry about adding or removing particular content. This isn’t true at higher budgets (which is why virtually all studio films are PG or PG-13), but for independent drama, the target audience is over 18, and most likely isn’t basing its movie-going decisions on the rating of a film. If you’re starting from scratch, this analysis suggests that contemporary, R-rated, original screenplay dramas perform slightly better.

But there are huge variations for individual films, and, digging a little deeper, there are really a few rules that stand out: