I am not a fan of movies. Well, I am not a fan of watching movies at the theatre. Although I like the deep bass sound and stunning visuals which you only get in a theatre, I’ve seen far too many bad movies in them to create an aversion. But I do like to watch movies at home, comfortable and cozy. This prompted me to jump on the topic for this week. What insights can you gain from a movie database?

Which movie gave better returns? Which actor has starred in the most profitable movies?

So like most of us do, I logged in to imdb and rotten tomatoes to see if I can scrape some data for this. Someone at imdb must have thought of this idea, which reduced my work by giving me the data for the top 5000 movies according to its ranking. The only kink, it was from two years ago. I unsuccessfully tried looking for an updated file.

The data contained 5042 observations with 28 variables for each including budget, facebook likes and earnings.

With the recent success of Bahubali and how overall box office collections have now become a metric to judge if a movie is good or bad, let us start with the profit.

Disclaimer: Since we are analyzing movies, I skipped arranging the dataframes in order for a more theatrical and visual appeal. Most of the graphs in the article are arranged alphabetically rather than based on the Y-axis.

Star Wars IV was considered an expensive movie when it was made, which was 1977, but when it grossed 449935665 (it returned a profit of nearly 4200%), all the producers wiped their sweaty brows.

ET: The Extra Terrestrial raked in 424449459, a return of ~4150 % back in 1982!

The Lion King is the only animated movie in the top 10 with returns of ~940 %

Only 4 in this list were made after the turn of the century, which tells us about how returns have diminished, but it could also be due to rising budgets and competition from varying films.

Only of my favorite film of all times, The Dark Knight makes it to the list, to the very bottom of this list.

Now lets take a look at the directors, since he or she is the one who envisions the entire movie in their head before actually going to the floors and then, they command the ship.

So, the directors who returned the most profits for their films are:

George Lucas and James Cameron have two films each in the top 10 profitable movies.

George Lucas takes the cake with the returns for Star Wars Episode IV hitting a whopping 4190%, giving him a whole new hope, while Steven Spielberg comes in very close with ET at 4142%

James Cameron directed the two of the top grossing movies of all times, but they also had the largest budgets, which limit his returns to 330%.

Roger Allers directed the only fully animated movie to be featured in the top 10 at the time which returned nearly 940% its original budget.

The average returns for this list is huge at 1186%.

Now comes the interesting part, the belle of the ball, the men of the hour, the actors.

Robert De Niro has the most movies credited as the Lead Actor

Johnny Depp comes in second with 41 films as the lead actor and Nicolas Cage finishes the top 3 with 33 films to his credit.

Across being credited as first and second actor however, Bruce Willis leads with 39 films to his credit.

Morgan Freeman and his baritone take the lead as the second actor with 20 films to his credit.

No female actor appears in the list of First actors however Angelina Jolie (9), Charlize Theron (15), Judy Greer (9) and Meryl Streep (11) make the second list.

If you take a look at the earnings, Tom Hanks becomes the most profitable actor to work with his earnings topping above $1.5 billion!

Bradley Cooper is the only other actor whos films grossed over a billion dollars although Robert Pattinson comes very close to the figure.

Natalie Portman is the only female actor in the list with her career earnings around 900 million dollars.

J K Simmons is the only actor who appears in the both lists, most films as an actor and top earning actors.

The returns chart tells a completely different story however. All the actors in this list appear in no other list. Micah Sloat has just done 1 film as the lead actor and the returns were a whopping 72000 %. The film was Paranormal Activity which was made on a modest budget of $15000 only.

Greg Ayres and Heather Donahue complete the top 3. Ayres was part of the documentary Tarnation which was made on a measly budget of $218 and went on to gross more than 210 million. Heather Donahue on the other hand featured in the Blair Witch Project which came under the genre of Found footage, was made on a budget of $60,000 and grossed nearly $250 million.

More often than not, the directors opt for a combination of actors due to their chemistry which the people admire. So I decided to take a look at the top actors who worked together and their collective earnings.

J K Simmons and James Franco have worked in 3 films together, the Spider Man Series and finish at the top of the list

Chris Hemsworth and Robert Downey Jr come in a close second thanks to the 2 Avengers movies.

The top male-female actor pair is Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart who come in at number 5 in the list.

All but 1 pair have more than 1 film to their credit. That pair being CCH Pounder and Joel David Moore who feature with just 1 film together.

Now lets take a look at the movies as a whole again.

This chart is arranges based on the IMDB score of the movie.

The longest movie is Blood in, Blood out at 330 minutes but with a pretty high IMDB score of 8.

All 10 longest films rank above an IMDB score of 6.

Sea Rex 3D is the shortest movie at 41 minutes long and an IMDB score of 7.

The longest film with the highest IMDB score is Apocalypse Now at 289 minutes and a score of 8.5

The shortest film with the lowest score is Child’s Play 2 at 72 minutes and an IMDB score of 5.7

The length of Evil Dead 2 was erroneously reported at 37 minutes. It is actually 84 minutes long.

I also wanted to figure out the geographic distribution of the movies:

US, the largest movie industry in terms of budgets and earnings clearly seals the deal at 3806 movies of the 4794 observations.

The content based English and the artistic French make up the top 3.

India, the largest movie industry in terms of movies made per year has just 34 movies in the list, a few more than its neighbor China (30).

This was quite a fun code to write. I learnt a few things which I did not know before and got to practice a few things which I did know. I will upload the code to GitHub and share the link here soon if you guys want to take a look at it.

That’s all about the movies folks. If you have any feedback or suggestion, do let me know.