Thread by @infobeautiful

What is the most successful Hollywood movie of recent times? Everyone says and thinks Avatar right? But, as ever, it depends how you look at it.

We took a deep data dive and found some surprising, nay *horrifying* answers…(1/18)

#Avatar (2010) grossed close to $3bn worldwide, very closely followed by Avengers: Endgame at $2.8bn. Avatar 2 is currently at ~$2bn. While still climbing, it’s doubtful it will beat out its predecessor (2/18)

Note this steady, beautiful trend of films earning more and more… Might be a sign of rising returns. Or could be a side-effect of our old friend INFLATION 📈 So our first step: inflation adjust the data (3/18)

Ahhh that’s better. With inflation adjustment, a few things spring out. Legendary 70’s blockbusters – Star Wars, Jaws, E.T. – take their rightful place. And you also can suddenly see what a monster hit 🤮The Exorcist🤮 was.

But there’s an even bigger surprise… (4/18)

Look how incredibly close 25 year old #Titanic ($4.120bn adjusted gross) comes to taking the top spot from #Avatar – $4.121bn adjusted. Yes just $1M DOLLARS in it!

But wait. There’s another way of measuring the performance of a movie…

Using sheer box office gross privileges blockbuster movies with big marketing budgets.

Whereas tracking the return-on-investment, i.e. % OF BUDGET RECOVERED, surfaces different films… (6/18)

By this metric #Avatar still does pretty well (1,233% budget recovered) but Avatar 2 is struggling to transcend its mighty $400m budget with only 772% returned so far. (Even Titanic only recovers 1,101%).

But not sure @JimCameron is really losing sleep over this tbh. (7/18)

Several movies made so much back, they effectively broke our graph

📞 E.T. 7,552% budget recovered ($793m gross vs. $10.5m budget)

🚀 STAR WARS 7,049% ($775m v $11m)

🧴GREASE 6,605% ($396m v $6m)

🦈 JAWS 5,295% ($477m v $9m)

And some big surprises…(8/18)

Did you predict these top 10’ers?

🍾 MY FAT GREEK WEDDING (7,375%)
👑 THE KING'S SPEECH (2,849%)
😱 HOME ALONE (2,648%)

& breakout sleepers

🐊CROCODILE DUNDEE (3,282%)
💰SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2,523%)

and …. er 🩰 BLACK SWAN

Yep, hot-mess-Natalie-Portman-ballerina flick 🩰BLACK SWAN (2010) did *really* well. It was a literal black swan. $329m gross against a budget of $13m – a 2,534% return!

Kudos @DarrenAronofsky! (and Natalie Portman’s star power)

(10/18)

But more problems in our analysis loom.

% BUDGET RECOVERED is not a perfect measure.
Because it, in turn, privileges movies with small budgets.

In fact, if we scale our data points by budget, this broad, unmistakable pattern emerges. Can you see it?
(11/18)

Yep, lots of low budget films are the winners here. Because they have small budgets. And so they, unsurprisingly, make a *a lot* of their budget back. That’s circular causality for you 🔁

And that’s not the only problem… (12/18)

…we’ve also got a biased sample. We started with the top 500 *grossing* movies, so a few not-so-high earning (<$300m) yet very profitable (700%+ budget recovered) movies are missing.

If we add some back in, another distinct pattern emerges. Again, can you see it? (13/18)

Please allow us to highlight it for you.

(14/18)

WHY IS HOLLYWOOD SO OBSESSED WITH HORROR MOVIES?

Because they make a **massive** return on their investment.

Of the 55 films in our sample that have earned back more than 20x their budget, 45% were horror movies 😱 (15/18)

In fact, by this metric, the most successful Hollywood film ever is… can you guess?…

(16/18)

… 😱 Paranormal Activity 😱 (2007)

It made 1,293,333% of its piffling $15K budget back.

Allow us to visualise that for you…

(17/18)

That’s one scary blockbuster!
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