3896 movies released in France between 2010 and 2015

Data and movies (2010–2015)

Let’s see what we can understand by studying the 3896 movies released in France from 2010 and 2015. We will try to answer some questions like is the date important to release a movie? What’s the impact of weather on tickets sold? Are production budget and tickets sold related? What’s the best color of a poster for each kind of movies?

Fig. 1: Movies Released in France

Nearly 2 movies are released en France every single day! 650 movies are going to the market every year for few years now. As the number of theaters isn’t growing up so fast, it’s harder and harder for small movies to find theaters to be projected. We will see below that all these movies are very different from each other.

Fig. 2: Tickets sold in France

Around 200 million tickets are sold every year depending on some hyper successes like “Intouchables” in 2011 (19.5 million tickets) or “Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au bon dieu?” in 2014 (12.4 million tickets). Theses movies work like a train for the others and boost the global number of tickets sold.

Fig. 3: Average tickets sold per movie

The average number of tickets sold per movie is pretty stable all through the years, around 300K tickets per movie.

Is the average number of tickets sold relevant in the movie industry?

Let’s rank the movies by tickets sold and see where they stand with the average (in red).

Fig. 4: The movies tickets sold long tail

It’s a beautiful long tail. As we could have expected, the success of a movie doesn’t follow a normal law but is represented by a long tail. There is a huge gap between the tickets sold for the top movies and the others.

In 2015, the top ten movies tickets sold (52,608,823) are bigger than the number of tickets sold by the last 596 movies (50,560,111) of the ranking.
So 1.5% ( 10/671) of the movies released get a better market share than 89%(596/671).

The movie industry is highly concentrated in very few big blockbusters.

As there is a huge difference between movies, the same graph with a logarithm scale shows what happen in the ‘tail’:

Fig. 5: The movies tickets sold with logarithm scale

Are all movies targeted for the mass market?

1040 movies out of 3896 were released in less than 10 theaters wich represents 27% of the movies studied. It could be for a festival, a special event, a second release or a very low budget movie. We will remove theses movies for the next studies, in order to focus only on movies with a business potential.

All the code is available on Github.