Exploring Trends in Holiday Movies

INFO 523 - Spring 2024 - Project 1

Surya Vardhan Dama
Rajitha Reddy Tiruthani
Melika Sharifi
Maksim Kulik
Toluwanimi Adegboyega Olorunnisola
Gowtham Gopalakrishnan

Introduction

• Our Project explores a dataset covering holiday-themed films from 1929 to 2022, including details like movie titles, release years, runtime, genres, ratings, and holiday associations.
• The dataset includes crucial information such as movie titles, release years, runtime, genres, ratings, and indicators for major holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.
• Our analysis looked at how popular holiday movies have changed from the 1920s to the 2020s, showing how audience tastes and movie styles evolved.
• We also examined, which types of holiday movies tend to earn the most money, helping filmmakers and studios understand what audiences are willing to pay for.

Question 1:

How have popular movies changed over the decades?

Approach

1.Quartile approach ensures representative observations by identifying popular films based on average ratings.

2.To identify changes in the popularity of a genre, a multifaceted bar chart shows the genre distribution in the top quartiles across several decades.

3.The scatter plot illustrates trends in preferred movie lengths and title lengths throughout time by correlating movie duration and average rating, color-coded by title length.

4.Combining approaches reveals changes in industry trends and consumer tastes over decades in well-known Christmas films.

Most popular genres in highest-rated holiday films

• Plot
• Insights

• From the genre distribution bar plot, we can observe that Comedy and Drama are the most common genres among top-rated holiday movies.
• This predominance might suggest that audiences tend to prefer lighter and more emotionally resonant stories during holiday seasons, which aligns with the festive and familial spirit of such times.
• Family and Romance genres follow, which further emphasizes the desire for movies that bring people together, reflecting typical holiday themes centered around love, family, and togetherness.

The distribution of movie runtimes across different rating quartiles

• Plot
• Insights

• The plot showcasing the relationship between movie runtime and rating quartile indicates that there isn’t a strong preference for movie length within the top rating quartiles.
• While there is a concentration of movies with runtimes around 100 minutes (typical for standard feature films), the presence of highly-rated movies with longer runtimes suggests that a film’s duration is less significant to its reception compared to other factors such as story, acting, and direction.
• However, the spread of runtimes in the 3rd quartile is narrower than in the 4th, hinting that exceptionally well-received movies might have a tighter consistency in their duration.

The relationship between the length of movie titles and their average ratings

• Plot
• Insights

• The line plot correlating title length with average rating shows a more erratic relationship.
• While no clear trend is discernible, there appears to be a slight tendency for movies with shorter titles to have higher ratings, although there are exceptions at various points.
• This might imply that conciseness in a title could be associated with a film’s memorability or marketing effectiveness, but the numerous outliers make it difficult to draw a definitive conclusion.

Question 2:

What kind of holiday movies earn the most money?

Approach

1. We investigated correlations between movie features and earnings, and by utilizing IMDb’s API to supplement dataset with box office information.

2. which Populated a new “earnings” column using IMDb’s API and unique movie identifiers (tconst), enabling analysis without exposing API key or executing real-time calls.

3. Generate earnings data once and update a copy of the dataset in the /data folder to avoid repeated API calls and ensure efficiency.

4. Ensure data security by not exposing the API key and minimize processing time by pre-fetching earnings data.

Year-earnings relationship 1940-2020

• Plot
• Insights

• By observing, in the plot pre-1980 movies exhibit a higher frequency of outliers.
• These outliers represent films with either exceptionally high earnings or minimal returns.

Relation between the average rating and its earnings

• Plot
• Insights

• As we may intuitively expect from the above plot, there indeed seems to be a correlation between the average rating of a movie and its earnings.
• The more people like the movie, the more tickets it sells.

Average Earnings by Movie Genre

• Plot
• Insights

• The chart displays a range of genres from “Reality-TV” at the top, suggesting the highest average earnings, to “Thriller” at the bottom, indicating the lowest earnings within this visual.

Average Earnings by Holiday Type

• Plot
• Insights

• The bar chart illustrates that hanukkah-themed movies are the highest earners, followed by films about christmas in general.
• Movies about Holiday and Kwanzaa have notably lower average earnings, suggesting that hanukkah films are the most commercially successful within holiday genres.

Conclusion

As holiday film trends changed, comedy and drama took center stage. The duration of the film did not greatly affect the ratings.

The highest-grossing movies are those with Hanukkah themes, followed by traditional Christmas blockbusters. Films with a Kwanzaa or holiday theme made less money. Particular seasonal themes seem to be the most profitable, particularly Hanukkah and Christmas.

References

[1] Title: Holiday Movies, Source: tidytuesday, Link: https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/master/data/2023/2023-12-12/readme.md

[2] Quarto, For documentation and presentation - Quarto

[3] Our Presentation Background Image - Link: https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/takeaway-drinking-glass-with-straw-3d-glasses-cinema-tickets-popcorn-box-against-white-backdrop_4822391.htm

[4] Our thank you Image - https://boslean.weebly.com/blog/powerpoint-transparent-png-thank-you-gif