Movie box office charts
Click any picture to get a really big detailed breakdown for the year.
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
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.
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
The Hunger Games, The Avengers, and The Dark Knight Rises, and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Park 2 have huge opening weekends.
2011
2010
2009
The Hangover hung around forever.
Paranormal Activity had an impressive run-up from almost nothing to the #1 movie.
Twilight opened huge, but fell off pretty quickly.
Avatar had an amazing two-week run to finish the year.
2008
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.
2008 (United Kingdom)
This chart shows the top 15 movies each week for the UK box office for 2008. It is scaled differently from the US box office charts, and the figures are in UK pounds. Data is from the UK Film Council.
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 first published on July 30th, 2008, 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.