Movie box office charts
I had an idea for displaying box office data graphically and here
are the results. It's inspired
by stream
graphs and the works of
Edward Tufte
Click any picture to get a really big detailed breakdown for the year.
Each page displays trends in the top 25 movies at the box office for each weekend in a year. The color is based on the movie's debut week. Because of that, long-running movies will gradually start to stand out from newer movies with different colors.
2008 (through December 23)
No Country for Old Men gets an interesting trajectory from its Oscar run-up and win. The Dark Knight was the first movie to stay at #1 for four weeks.
I'll update the 2008 chart every Monday when the weekend actuals
are released. You can follow along with the
feed
.
2007
Night at the Museum runs from January to May, and Transformers is unsurprisingly huge. But was Wild Hogs really that popular? Wow.
2006
Pirates of the Caribbean has a long run, and even reappears in the top 25 late in the year.
2005
Million Dollar Baby and March of the Penguins really stand out with long runs.
1998 (top ten)
1988 (top ten)
A Fish Called Wanda took a record six weeks to reach #1 on an otherwise-dead September weekend. It did beat out Die Hard, though!
Reaction
When these charts were published on July 30th, the pattern of links over the next few days was pretty interesting. You can see a chart here.
About
These pages (HTML and PNG images) were created by a Common Lisp program. The Vecto library was used for the vector graphics.
If you have any questions or comments, please email me, Zach Beane.
Movie gross information is from Box Office Mojo, one of the best movie sites ever.