Relationship between Different Cinematographical Factors and
Opening Weekend Revenue
After almost two years of not going to the cinema because of the global pandemic, in December,
a movie was released that managed to bring me, and many of my acquaintances, back to its seats:
namely, Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).
release, which during conversations with friends I noticed was mainly connected to three
characteristics of it:
1. Talented and well-known actors such as Tom Holland starred in it.
2. The project had had an impressive production budget.
3. -Man saga meant that there
about what had happened next to the
characters in the story.
the box-office revenue the movie made during its
opening weekend was the second greatest in history.1 As the lover of cinema that I am,
trajectory, production budget, and position of the film in the saga) was correlated in any way to
the profit that movies made during their opening weekend at the box-office, and also which one of
the three was the most relevant to it. Consequently, the aim of this exploration is to analyze
possible relationships between the mentioned variables in the film industry.
1
The Numbers, accessed March 9,
2022, https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/domestic/all-movies/weekend/opening.
, In order to achieve my purpose, I used data that can be found on the movie-bussiness website The
Numbers.2 It is important to note that I only considered the first three films of the 15 highest-
grossing North American franchises that had this data available. These were then analyzed with
the help of different statistical methods: scatter plots, the Least Squares Regression Line, and
Investigation
First of all, I collected the data and organized it in a table, which is included in the appendix
(table 3). You can see a summary with the mean values for each category in each saga in table 1.
The mean x is calculated with the following formula:
x=
where n is the total number of terms, and xi the value of each of those terms.
Table 1: Summary of the data used for the calculations.
Name of the Saga Mean of the Mean number of Mean box-office
Production films the actor in revenue in opening
Budget of the first the leading role weekend (xc)
three films in the had starred in (xa
saga (xb) )
Star Wars $22,166,667 3 $9,828,192
Spider-Man $199,000,000 14 $118,038,953
Harry Potter $118,333,333 2 $90,779,825
2
The Numbers, accessed March 9, 2022, https://www.the-
numbers.com/movies/franchises.
