IMDB Movies Analysis for New Movie Studio

Finally, I will evaluate my results and make recommendations to Microsoft’s new movie studio about what types of movies will be successful in today’s atmosphere.

Microsoft wants to get into the movie business, and I have been tasked with making recommedations about what types of films to create. Following are questions we will answer:

1- What characteristics are associated with the most successful movies?

2- What genres are most profitable and highly rated overall and over time?

3- Who are the people who make the most successful films?

I will only use movies from the dataset that contain gross income, production budget, user and critic ratings, and were released in the United States from the year 2000 — present.

I calculated profit ($M) to use as some of my parameters to measure movie success. The variables that will be used to evaluate a movie’s success will be profit ($M), audience reviews, and critic reviews. I will compare the mean of these variables to movie length, release month, production budgets, genres, directors, and actors.

The movie length most liked by users is 152 minutes, while the movie length most liked by critics in 165 minutes, and the most profitable movie length is 162 minutes. I recommend making movies that are between 152–165 minutes long.

This bar graph shows average profits gained to be the highest in December at 114 million dollars. May is the second best month to release a movie where average profits gained are 68 million dollars. I recommend to release movies in December to maximize profits.

There is a moderate positive relationship between the 2 variables, budget and profit. Higher budget films could get higher profit, but there is some risk involved.

The relationship between user and critic reviews and production budget have a moderate positive relationship as well. High budget films may lead to more profits and higher user and critic reviews.

In order to answer this question, we must split our genres into multiple columns for movies that are classified into multiple genres. Pandas .explode() method is a great way to do this.

Our most profitable genres typically get higher user and critic reviews as well. Sci-Fi gets the highest overall ratings with Adventure second. Animation generally does not get high ratings from users or critics. Let’s take a look a closer look at our top genres.

In the boxplot above, we can see the overall mean, which includes data from all genres represented by the black hyphen line. The 3 genres that generate average profits higher than the mean are Animation, Adventure and Sci-Fi. There are also several outliers in the Adventure and Sci-Fi genre that skew the mean higher as some films generated massive profits. Animation has a tighter range of profit generated, and most is higher than the mean of overall genre profit.

The most profitable directors are also the directors with the highest user and critic ratings. Michael Bay slipped out of the top 3 by critic reviews. Therefore, the top directors by profit and ratings are Gore Verbinski and Sam Raimi. Paul Thomas Anderson and Clint Eastwood are good choices of director if looking to make critically acclaimed films.

Paul Bettany is at the top of every list for profit, user and critic ratings, so he is our actor most likely to generate high profit and ratings. Robert Downey Jr was also high ranked on profit and critic ratings list, so he is therefore our second highest overall actor, followed by Chris Hemsworth. Natalie Portman and Gwyneth Paltrow are the actors with highest critic reviews not appearing in the Avengers and Frozen movies, so they are top actors if interested in creating critically acclaimed films.

We have determined some of the properties and characteristics that make a movie successful recently. I will propose some recommendations and guidelines to start a movie studio based on the work of this project as follows:

1) The studio should create high budget films that are 152–165 minutes long and release these films in December.

2) The studio should focus on creating Animation and Adventure films. Animation is a good choice if a less risky investment is preferred, as higher profits are seen with less outliers in the data (Movies that generated huge profits). If developing a global presence while maintaining high profits is preferred, I recommend creating Adventure films. There is more risk involved in making Adventure films, but there is also the potential to make huge profits and produce critically acclaimed films.

3) The studio should look at the results of the director and actor analysis and hire a director and actors based on the end goal of the film.

Determining top directors and actors by genre would be an interesting extension to this project. This was a small sample of movies that were selected based on the new movie studio’s current situation. There are thousands upon thousands more films that could be analyzed to give us a true global picture of what makes movies successful. We are also evolving to a new world where streaming services are the new box office. We would have to come up with an effective way to quantify the profits each individual movie released through streaming services generates. This would be an interesting followup project when more data is available.

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