(5 minute read)
That bumpy subject matter may very well be the reason for less popularity than a Parasite (2019), which was universally lauded (99% Rotten Tomatoes currently).
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| Oscars.org |
2027 will mark 100 films that have received the coveted Academy Award for Best Picture. Currently with 92 movies, millions of votes have been cast and the tradition continues, and with so much history, it begs the question, what sort of patterns have emerged over the years?
To preface that question, it's important to know that unlike finance, healthcare, and tech, there is not an abundant amount of public data out there to analyze the quality of a movie. Movie reviews are scattered through word of mouth, blog posts, standalone Rotten Tomatoes scores, and countless paragraphs of opinions. We know a movie is more than a single IMDb score, and let's not forget that scores are arguably biased. Like any form of art, it is up to the viewer's discretion and tastes that ultimately shape the experience.
How then can we quantify movie quality to make it interesting to the average layperson and legitimate to an analyst?
Well you're about to see below that even with what little we have, there is opportunity for data storytelling.
The data below is sourced from the Open Movie Database which aggregates data from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. At the end of this post you can play with the data and see all of the movies in one view. Here are some things we can learn:
Romances have Won Big but No Love for Fantasy
Counting Best Picture films by Genre has some revealing truth to it. 33 movies are categorized by Romance, and 30 out of those 33 movies were released before the Year 2000. Some of the most notable ones include Titanic (1997), Forrest Gump (1994), and Casablanca (1943).
Biographies have been long-lasting favorites with recent ones including Green Book (2018), Spotlight (2015), and Argo (2012). Before the year 2000, we had some absolute classic biographical films in Braveheart (1995) and Schindler's List (1993).
Fantasy films have only won twice at the Oscars' Best Picture awards: Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003) and The Shape of Water (2017). With movie technology seeing unprecedented growth in the past three decades, I hope movies like these get the recognition they deserve. While it's clear people register better with realistic genres such as romance, biography, and war, fiction stories do not have a history of holding up at the Oscars.
Avatar (2009) was beat by The Hurt Locker during the 82nd Academy Awards despite the former hitting milestones and receiving 9 total nominations. Both were great films but the end result may signal something greater about which genres of films are preferred.
Action is a very vague genre. Does a movie where a guy runs and points a gun count as action? Or does it have to be Mission Impossible all the way through? Neither Lord of the Rings nor any War movie Best Picture end up in the Action bin. The definition thus might be pretty strict to only include films that have a specified DEGREE of action: Gladiator (2000) and The French Connection (1971).
BTW if you're wondering why the total count of films is more than 92, it's because movies can fall into more than one genre.
And that is how much we learned from 11 rows of data. On to the next,
All-in on Romances from 1927-1964, No New Musicals or Westerns, Some Hope for Fantasies, Thrillers and Biographies are IN
When we look at awards per year by genre, we see all sorts of trends:
1. Biography, Comedy, History, Romances, and War Movies have been consistently popular and well-received. Interesting to note that Biography, History, and War as genres have a lot of overlap in general.
2. Romances were like the New York Yankees early on, dominating the World in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Then they stopped winning after the 60s for about a decade. While this genre continues to perform well, it's taken quite a big step down from its early days of dominating the Oscars.
3. Musical Best Pictures are practically dead with the last winner in 2002's Chicago. A quick search reveals that this really might be true: "The new, pugilistic musicals, in losing that grace, have lost their voice, and their pulse. The musical is dead."
4. You don't hear a lot about Western Films anymore and some of the best/most favored ones are over 50 years old now. This article has an interesting take that westerns have shifted towards superhero films, which are pretty much a fantasized version of westerns.
5. Fantasy Best Pictures were awarded in the 21st century only.
6. Biographies and more so Thrillers are dominating the Oscars. 7 films in the last 15 years have been Thrillers from The Departed to Parasite. And with the popularity of Get Out, which did not win but may as well have in many people's minds, Thrillers are most likely going to be in-style in the 2020s.
Time Creates Huge Differences in Y2K vs. pre-Y2K Films
I segmented all 92 films based on where they fall within the Average Popularity (measured by IMDb votes) and General Favorability (Rotten Tomato Scores).
Tier 1: Mass Hits - Films that are popular and received strong positive reviews overall.
Tier 2: Mass Mix - Films that are popular but received mixed reviews overall.
Tier 3: Small Hits - Films that are less popular but received strong reviews overall.
Tier 4: Small Mix - Films that are less popular and received mixed reviews.
Tiers 3 and 4 are predominantly older films (pre-2000), clearly, and most of which I have yet to see. Who has seen or would want to see How Green was My Valley (1932)?
Since most older films didn't have the technology we have now, were not as easily accessible, and had an audience size much lower than today (7.7 billion people in the world now versus 2.6 billion in 1951), this graph makes sense.
We can use these four quadrants strategically and filter for movies from 2000 on.
Early Y2K Films have been the Most Popular
By filtering for movies released from 2000 and on, we see that all the most popular movies on the right were from before 2010 - Gladiator, Lord of the Rings, The Departed, A Beautiful Mind, No Country for Old Men, and Slumdog Millionaire.
Eleven recent movies occupy close to the Tier 3: Small Hits quadrant border. Most of the films in that cluster were released in 2010 or after, which suggests that older movies are more popular because more people have time to watch and review them. Although some films released in the early 2000s have other reasons why they didn't reach maximum popularity.
The three unlabeled blue dots on the left from top to bottom respectively are Moonlight (2016), The Artist (2011), and Chicago (2002). Those three plus Green Book (2018) interestingly are in the less popular quadrants, and there are definitely reasons for that.
The Artist most likely because it was an anachronistic black-and-white film released in 2011. Moonlight (2016) meanwhile has two heavily scrutinized demographics, Black and LGBT, which is not going to be universally popular across all of America. Chicago (2002) was possibly a rare gem that people were not expecting to be good, as we can see from the previous charts that Musicals are considered "dead" (but La-La Land tho). Finally, while Green Book (2018) is fairly current, this film's lower numbers could be hinted from Rotten Tomatoes' critics' consensus: "Green Book takes audiences on an excessively smooth ride through bumpy subject matter,"
Another interesting thought is that since IMDb was founded in 1990, people that are likely active on IMDb are boomers to millennials. Those demographics would certainly gravitate towards films in their adolescent memories. Boomers had the chance to watch Rocky and The Godfather films in theaters while Millennials grew up with Lord of the Rings, Gladiator, and The Hurt Locker. A classic film to a Gen Z person is much different from a classic to a Baby Boomer, so I'm thinking we are left with historical data recorded by the preferences of Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y folks.
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I hope this was interesting and makes you hungry to learn more. Below are some dashboards for y'all to play with. Have fun!
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