Team Elegant Evee

INFO 2950 Project

Abstract

Everyone is a critic when it comes to films, and this adage holds especially true for IMDb ratings, which are based on crowdsourced reviews. Our work aims to assess the relationship between a film’s finances, ratings, and time, helping to dissect what factors impact a film’s reception as measured by box office figures and user reviews. More specifically, we aim to identify which film release dates see the greatest profits, as well as how to characterize the relationship between a film’s release year and income versus its iMDB rating. To this end, we use hypothesis testing, bootstrapping, and linear modeling with data collected from Kaggle to assess the relationship between these metrics. We find that film profits have generally risen annually, albeit with dips in recent years—potentially due to economic factors like recessions and COVID-19—and we further find that the months that see the greatest profits are May, June, July, and, December. Lastly, we present evidence that movies with high box office incomes tend to earn higher IMDb ratings and that film quality has not markedly declined over time. Our submission challenges conventional wisdom about films and provides new intuitions that may help to explain post-pandemic trends.