This is an exploration of The Movie Database (TMDB) data by Alvira Swalin and Kishan Panchal.

A commercially successful movie not only entertains the audience but also enables film makers to generate significant profits. Several factors such as good directors, experienced actors, and release time are important for profitability, but they do not always guarantee how highly a movie will be rated. In this project, we sought to understand temporal patterns affecting movie profitability, see how popular genres change over years, identify important actors and directors, and observe changes in movie ratings and vote averages over time.

Temporal Patterns

From this heatmap, we can see that the average profitability has increased in the recent years with months like June followed by November & December are particularly important for movie releases. The average profit in the month of June is 100 million dollars which is 10 times more than the average profit in the month of January.

The below plot displays the trend in movie profit over time for different genres. It appears that movies of the 'Family' genre are becoming increasingly more profitable recently. Also, it is important to note that Drama movies have been generating less profit recently.

The wordcloud below displays the most frequent genres of movies across our data set. Movies of the genres Drama and Comedy were most prevalent over the years.

The following two plots show that the number of votes have increased drastically from the 20th century to 21st century (3 fold increase) because of increased ease of voting due to access of internet facilities. It is equally important to notice that people have become more critical recently with the vote average constantly decreasing in each decade.

Impact of Cast, Crew, and Movie Characteristics

These are the directors who have directed more than 5 movies with the highest average profit.

And these are the directors who have directed more than 5 movies with the highest average movie rating.

The below plot displays the profit of a movie versus its budget. The color and size of the markers depends on the average rating out of 10 given to the movie. There is some positive correlation between profit and budget. It looks like companies who spend a lot of money in movie-making actually get a benefit in terms of profit.

Similarly, we can also examine how a movie's runtime in minutes affects its profit as well. The marker size and color again depends on the average rating that the movie received.

To create this network, we have selected some 270 actors who have appeared in more than 3 movies as main actors (Actor 1 or 2) and we have created the network of these actors. Each edge in this network shows that the two actors have collaborated in the same movie as main actors. Number of connection are represented through color with the highest connections belonging to Robert De Niro.

From the above 270 actors, we have selected the top 15 actors on the basis of their number of collaborations with other important actors and compared their performance using metrics like Vote Average, Profitability and Popularity of the movies they have acted in. You can choose these metrics form the dropdown menu. Numbers in the parenthesis next to the actors names shows their connections.