I was curious to see the relationship between Rotten Tomatoes ratings and box office earnings, and limited my analysis to film directors under 50 years old to narrow down the field.

First up, here’s a list of the directors with their average Rotten Tomatoes ratings:

Next, Rotten Tomatoes rating and average box office by director:

It’s interesting that the two directors with the lowest ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, Guy Ritchie & Neill Blomkamp, were among the top 5 in terms of average box office. However, Ben Affleck, who had the highest average Rotten Tomatoes rating, also made the top 5 as well. So, no clear patterns arise here.

I also wanted to know what film garnered the highest box office total for each director, and capture the Rotten Tomatoes rating for each of those films on the same viz:

Again, a similar contradictory pattern arises. Two of the top three films, Sherlock Holmes & Les Mis, had the two lowest Rotten Tomatoes ratings at 70%. But, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which had over 2.5x as much box office as the next highest film, has a 94% rating. Again, emphasizing that a film does not necessarily need to be well received in order to make a lot of money.

One of the most obvious call outs in the data set is how much higher Christopher Nolan films earn on average box office wise, so I created the following, which is the top 5 directors in terms of total box office earnings, with the remaining 15 bucketed under “rest”:

It’s a bit shocking that Nolan has higher lifetime box office earnings than the bottom 15 directors combined. The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises together combined for just under $1 billion. That’s right, billion, with a B. Over half of Nolan’s lifetime box office earnings came from those two films. Batman begins earned just over $200M, so the entire Batman trilogy makes up for 65% of Nolan’s earnings. This is indeed a testament to the value of Hollywood blockbusters, but, given the high average Rotten Tomatoes ratings (84%, which is above the average), Nolan is able to create highly successful films both in terms of earnings and ratings.

Data was scraped from Rotten Tomatoes using import.io and edited in Tableau.