Chris Anderson discusses the hit that is Pirates of The Caribbean 2.
Well, first of all I've always said that Hollywood was going to be the last bastion of the blockbuster (most of the hits-in-decline examples I've been focusing on are in music and TV), so I'm not surprised that the hit-making machine still manages to fire off a few sparks.
If you take BoxOfficeMojo's data ranking movies by their weekend takings and plot the number of hits per year, you get a view of the data that suggests hits are not simply a phenomenon that is clinging on, but something that is increasing rapidly.
This graph actually shows the number of hits per month per year. I've normalized the values to account for the fact that we are only half way through this year.
The graph is a little tricky to interpret as it represents the number of entries in the ranked list of weekend takings and so may simply be reflecting the number of movies released or some other bias (which I actually don't think it does). Chris points out that revenues on movies are in decline. If this is the case, and record breaking weekends are on the increase, that means that Hollywood is getting more and more accurate at hit making.
There are plots of different data which may clear up this apparent contradiction - please suggest what they might be.
Finally, here is the obligatory BlogPulse graph:
Some additional context: Mixing Structured and Unstructured Data, Lion v Ape. Note the percentage of blog posts on the different movies from these older posts.
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