God, COVID really ruins everything! I feel like my biggest achievement with this project is conceiving of something that could have been really powerful with better data available but that wasn’t necessarily feasible as what I wanted it to be right now, and then doing the best I could with it. Box office data is easy to come by, and so rendering a bunch of graphics about what happened to the theatrical experience (mostly in terms of financial success) was pretty easy. But what I was really fascinated by is the rise of streaming and premium VOD releases and how that changed this year. Because that increasingly seems like the future of movies, if there is one.
The first significant problem that I ran into there is just that that data wasn’t readily available. Frustrating! Essentially, there are lots of websites that report weekly numbers of VOD box office rankings, but don’t give the specific numbers to compare between platforms (when “Mulan” released, say, it would have been interesting to compare its number one ranking on Disney plus to a less expensive movie’s number one on a different platform) or a source for where to get more info on that.
So I was stuck with this. I was able to use IMDB and Box Office Mojo to construct a trifecta of graphs that cover box office grosses, the comparison of the biggest 2020 tentpoles to the biggest 2019 tentpoles, and the release formats of this year’s biggest movies. That was pretty limited, but it worked well enough. There are, of course, problems with that because it would have been impossible to get accurate release information on every movie that released this year to have a fuller sample size from which to calculate percentages of each release type (and even within those, characterizing each type was tricky because you’ve got movies like The Invisible Man that released theatrically and then were put on VOD for $20 rentals when theaters closed, which I noted as a hybrid, but you’ve also got plenty of movies that released for premium rental rates with very limited drive-in engagements – so is that hybrid because it’s multi-format or virtual because the vast majority of that film’s box office take came from rentals. Or is it something else entirely! Do I need a Kinsey scale for 2020 release formats?) And the bar chart is obviously not perfect because it’s hard to compare the numbers for all of last year’s big movies to those of the movies that have released this year so far — but my train of thought there was that most of this year’s chart toppers (9 of 10) are movies that began or completed their theatrical runs early in the year pre-COVID and so likely won’t be topped by anything coming out between now and the end of the year; and with that in mind it’s about as close a comparison of this year to last year that I could get without waiting until 2021.
Visually, I tried to lay things out in a way that draws you through the graphic in the order that things occurred or became significant. That is you skim through the explainer text, then follow the line chart on the bottom of the graphic as it walks you through the year of chaos week-by-week so that you get a portrait of how significant the changes are. Then, to show the magnitude of that mapped out across an entire year, you get to the bar chart on the right, which is slanted biggest to smallest left to right so that the incline pushes your eyes back up to maybe the least significant graphic, the release format pie chart. And for the color palette, because nothing specific really jumped out at me, I drew colors from a frame from one of my favorite films, Wong Kar Wai’s ethereally moody and all around exquisite “In the Mood for Love.”