Ice Age Sequels: Diminishing Popularity, Maintaining Profits

On recent episodes of Filmspotting (one of my absolute favorite radio shows/podcasts), the hosts have joked about how they have lost track of exactly how many films in the Ice Age franchise there have been. They have also joked about how critics' and audiences' responses to them appear to have steadily declined over time.

I decided to make this statement quantitative using aggregated review data taken from Rotten Tomatoes , Metacritic , and IMDB . See if you can spot the trend.

What's even more interesting is what you see when you look at how much money the different Ice Age movies have made.

The US domestic opening weekend sales do appear to correlate with critics' and audiences' reception - with the major exception being Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. I interpret this to reflect the first installment's popularity, and how audiences were extra excited to see the sequel. The worldwide gross has shot up dramatically and has stayed high despite steadily declining reviews and domestic opening weekend success. A lot has changed about how American movies are distributed and sold worldwide since 2002 (Cf. here and here), so it looks like the Ice Age producers have embraced a strategy that allows them to maintain ticket sales worldwide despite decreasing domestic popularity.

You can find the code that I used to generate these plots on Github here.