New York Times Movies Graphic

Many people have pointed to this interesting visualization in the New York Times which shows data describing movie hits (and misses) over a long time period. Neoformix also has a nice composition which stitches the entire line of data together to form a complete picture. But there are some question marks against this type of view. Take a look at the sample below.

The problem - to me - is that absolute height has weight here. So it looks like National Treasure: Book of Secrets is really, really important. National Treasure's first two weekends brought in $45MM and $65MM ($110MM) where as I Am Legend brought in $77MM and $33MM ($110MM). This problem, however, is something of a have-cake-and-eat-it issue. The graphic is primarily intended to show the aggregate view of the entire space. It then uses in situ mechanism to allow the user to browse down to the details (thus making comparison hard, but achieving the overall goal).

Comments

[Jeff Clark]

Thanks for the link Matthew and I agree with your point about the absolute height giving undue attention to certain movies.

One minor correction to your statement about my graphic. My stitched version only shows 4 years of data - the NYT lets you scroll and see 21 years worth.

[Daryl Tay]

Great visualisation. I had a course where one topic was how a lot of media culture is based on hits and misses (movies, art, music) and this gives a great visual aid to that.

[Ed Freeman]

Cool graphic -- but why does it go both above and below the 0-line? Granted, it looks beautiful but going above and below the 0-line also makes it harder to compare different peaks and troughs.

[primate]

In order to mitigate the undue influence that ordering provides they should add a rule along the lines of:

For each week, the opening movies should be ordered along the y-axis inversely to their opening weekend box office revenues.

With such a rule, the "blockbuster" movies which typically have big opening weekends would be clustered toward the center of the graph. "I am Legend" would still be on the interior relative to "National Treasure". However, the four other movies would be exterior now relative to "National Treasure". This would do a better job of visually comparing "blockbusters" imho.

I second Daryl's comment -- what's the point of extending above/below x-axis?