Disney vs Fox: Movie Performance Comparison

A few weeks ago 'Dark Phoenix' was a very hot conversation topic in the movie business, not for the movie itself, but because it symbolized the difficult Fox acquisition by Disney.

While Disney movies have done fairly well in 2019 to put it lightly (5 movies generating over $1Billion so far, and it's only August with "Frozen 2" and "Star Wars 9" still due....), Fox is under very tight scrutiny and 'Dark Phoenix' has been heralded as the barometer for Fox movie success/failure. Especially after Disney CEO Bob Iger declared during quarterly earnings call that “the Fox studio performance … was well below where it had been and well below where we hoped it would be when we made the acquisition.”

While technically profitable thanks to higher-than-expected international results (latest IMDB results have $250M gross worldwide revenue with analyst forecasts around $280M for an estimated budget of $200M), 'Dark Phoenix''s performance will continue to be observed and scrutinized.

But this is just one movie we're talking about! Is it really fair to reduce a movie studio the size of Fox to a single movie? 20th Century Fox has been around for a while, and I was curious to compare their historical performance compared to Disney's.

First things first, data is required! I pulled all of Disney's and Fox's movies from IMDB, including key metrics in the process: IMDB rating, metascore, duration, genre, estimated budget, gross revenue...

Naturally some filtering was required to focus solely on non-short non-documentary movies released after 2000 with non-missing data.

In addition to Fox and Disney movies, I created a third category for movies produced by both.

The next plot compares the performance of each of the 512 movies that matched are criteria (331 Fox, 181 Disney), the x-axis is the worldwide revenue, y-axis is IMDB rating. Bubbles are color-coded by company and the size of the bubble is proportional to the movie's ROI (gross worldwide revenue / estimated budget):

A log-transform of the x-axis provides more insight into the lefthand-side blob, but loses the magnitude of the super high-performing movies:

It would appear that Disney dominates the high revenue end of the spectrum, with 22 out of 23 of movies generating over a billion dollars coming from Disney, the sole exception being 'Transformers: Age of Extinction', things are much more murky under that threshold.

Given the difficulty of separating the two classes I tried fitting an XGBoost model which was capable of classifying movies from each company solely based on IMDB rating, metascore, budget, world revenue and movie duration with over 75% accuracy on the test dataset, pretty remarkable, wouldn't you agree? Although to be fair, a simple logistic regression was capable of achieving a reasonable 65% accuracy.

It'll be interesting to see how the next wave of Fox movies perform, perhaps attempt a before/after comparison of the Disney acquisition...

Are remakes in the producers' interests?

Two-bullet summary:

• Similarly to sequels, remakes perform significantly worse than originals from a rating perspective
• If you want to predict a remake's IMDB rating, a quick method is to multiply the original movie's rating by 0.84

In three previous posts (first, second, third) I looked at Hollywood's lack of creation and general risk-aversion by taking a closer look at the increasing number of sequels being produced despite the fact that their IMDB rating is significantly worse than the original installment.

We were able to confirm the expected result that sequels typically have worse ratings than the original (only 20% have a better rating), and the average rating drop is 0.9.

Those posts would not have been complete without looking at another obvious manifestation of limited creativity: remakes!

Before plunging into the data, a few comments:

• finding the right data was instrumental. Because remakes don't necessarily have the same title or because movies may have the same title without being remakes, the data needed to be carefully selected. I finally settled for Wikipedia's mapping Wikipedia. I did however find some errors along the way so bear in mind that the data is not 100% accurate nor exhaustive;
• one of the greatest drops in ratings was for Hitchcock's classic Psycho (there should be a law against attempting remakes of such classics!), with Gus Van Sant's version getting a 4.6, compared to Hitchcock's 8.6;
• adapting Night of the Living Dead to 3D saw a drop from 8.0 to 3.1;
• the best improvement for remake rating was for Reefer Madness, originally a 1936 propaganda on the dangers of Marijuana (3.6), but the tongue-in-cheek 2005 musical remake with Kristin Bell got a 6.7;
• Ocean's Eleven was originally a 1960 movie with Frank Sinatra, but the exceptional casting for the version we all know with Damon, Clooney and Pitt led to a nice rating improvement (from 6.6 to 7.7)

Let's take a quick look at the data, comparing original rating to remake rating, the red line corresponds to y = x, meaning that any dot above the line corresponds to a remake that did better than the original, whereas anything under is when the original did better:

The distribution of the difference between remake and original is also quite telling:

The first obvious observation is that, as expected, remakes tend to do worse than the original movie. Only 14% do better (compared to 20% for sequels) and the average rating difference is -1.1 (compared to -0.9 for sequels).

The other observation is that the correlation is not as good as we had seen for sequels. This could make sense as in sequels many parameters are the same as for the original movie (actors, directors, writers). One reason parameters are much more similar for sequels than remakes is the timing between original and remake/sequel: 77% of sequels come less than 5 years after the original installment, whereas 50% of remakes come within 25 years! Parameters are more similar and your fan base has remained mostly intact.

From a more statistical point a view, a paired t-test allowed us to determine that the rating decrease of -1.1 was statistically significant at the 95% level (+/- 0.1).

In terms of modeling, a simple linear model gave us some insight for prediction purposes. In case you want to make some predictions to impress your friends, your best guess to estimate a remake's rating is to multiply the original movie's rating by 0.84.

The original Carrie movie from 1974 had a rating of 7.4, whereas the remake that just came out has a current rating of 6.5 (forecast would be 0.84 * 7.4 = 6.2). Given that movie ratings tend to drop a little after first few weeks of release, that's a pretty good forecast we had there! The stat purists will argue that this results is somewhat biased as Carrie was included in the original dataset...

Taking a step back, why does Hollywood continue making these movies despite anticipating a lower quality movie?

The answer is the same as for sequels: the risks are significantly reduced with remakes, you are almost guaranteed to bring back some fanatics of the original.

And less writers are required as the script is already there! However, it appears that sequels are a safer bet: the fan base is more guaranteed. As we previously saw, release dates are much closer for sequels and movies share many more characteristics.

Originals and Remakes: Who's copying who?

In the previous post ("Are remakes in the producers' interests?"), I compared the IMDB rating of remake movies to that of the original movie. We found that in the very large majority of cases the rating was significantly lower.

One aspect I did not look at was who-copied-whom from a country perspective. Do certain countries export their originals really well to other countries? Do certain countries have little imagination and import remake ideas from oversees movies?

Using the exact same database as for the previous post (approx. 600 pairs of original-remake movies), I created a database which detailed for each country the following metrics:

• number of original movies it created
• number of remake movies it created
• number of original movies it exported (country is listed for the original, not for the remake)
• number of remake movies it imported (country is not listed for the original, but for the remake)

Top originals
Nothing very surprising with the US claiming the first place for original movies created, with 325 movies for which remakes were made. The next positions are more interesting, with France and India tied for second place with 36, closely followed by Japan with 30.

Top remakes
Again, nothing very surprising with the US claiming the first place again for number of remakes made, with 370. India is again in second position with 38, followed by UK (14) and Japan (10). Surprising to see France (6) in a distant position for this category given it's second place in the previous category.

Top exporters
Who manages to have their originals get picked up abroad the most? The US is in first position again with (49) with France in relatively very close second place with 32. Japan (21) and UK (14) are in third and fourth positions.


Top importers
Who are the biggest copiers? US is way ahead of everyone with 94, with multiple countries tied at 2 (France, UK, Japan...). Recall that UK, Japan and France were all among the top remake countries, the fact that they are low on the import list indicates that these countries tend to do their own in-house remakes instead of looking abroad for inspiration.

It is difficult to look at other metrics , especially in terms of ratios as many countries have 0 for either category. We could filter to only include countries that have at least 10 movies produced, or at least 5 imported and 5 exported, but even so we would be keeping only a handful movies.


France -> US Movie Relationship
France seemed to be an interesting example here given the high number of original movies produced, the fact that many of those were remade abroad and France's tendency of importing very little ideas. I therefore looked at the French-US relationship in matters of movies.
Wikipedia lists 24 original movies made in France for which a US remake was. In 22 cases the remake had a worst rating, and in the other two cases there was some improvement. 2 out of 24 is about 8.3%, somewhat worse than the overall effect for all original-remake pairs where we had seen improvement in 14% of the cases. Similarly, the average decline of 1.35 for IMDB rating is also somewhat worse than the average across all pairs which we had found to be around 1.1.
The worst remake is without a doubt Les Diaboliques, the French classic was Simone Signoret having a rating of 8.2 while the Sharon Stone remake had 5.1. And who would have thought that Arnold Schwarzennegger would have his name associated with the best remake improvement: his 1994 True Lies (7.2) was much better than the original 1991 La Totale! (6.1).


What about the reverse US -> France effect?
Well it turns out that France only made two remakes of US movies which leaves us with little observations for strong extrapolations. However, the huge surprise is that in both cases the French remake had a better IMDB rating than the original american version. 1978 Fingers had 6.9 while the 2005 The Beat that my Heart skipped is currently rated at 7.3. As for Irma la Douce, it jumped from 7.3 to 8.0.
It's hard, if not impossible, to determine if France is better at directing or whether they are better at pre-selecting the right scripts. What makes it even more head-scratching is the fact that out of the 6 remakes France did, the two US originals are the only ones where the remake did better. The other four were already French originals, and in all four cases the remake was worse.

This France-USA re-adaptation dynamics sheds some light as to why the French were extremely disappointed to hear about Danny Boon signing off rights to his record-breaking Bienvenue chez les Chti's to Will Smith for a Welcome to the Sticks remake. But as always, IMDB ratings are not the driving force at work here, and if Bienvenue chez les Chti's broke attendance and revenue records in France, it could prove to be a cash cow in the US without challenging being a big threat at the Oscars.


Should more cross-country adaptation be encouraged?
The France example should make us pause. 6 remakes. 4 original French movies, all rated worse when remade. 2 original US movies, all rated better when remade.
Is this a general trend?
I split the data in two, one subset where the country for the original and remake are the same (~80% of the data), and another subset where they are not (~20% of the data).
Here are the distributions for the rating difference between remake and original:

The two distributions are very similar, but it still seems that the rating drop is not as bad when the country of origin is the one making the remake than when another country takes the remake into its own hands.
Given the proximities in distributions, a quick two-sample t-test was performed on the means and the difference turns out to be borderline significant with a p-value of 0.0542.
Arguments could go both ways as to whether the remake would have higher rating if done by the same country or another one: movies can be very tied to the national culture and only that country would be able to translate the hidden cultural elements into the remake to make it successful. But one could argue that the same country would be tempted to do something too similar which would not appeal to the public. A foreign director might be inspired and want to bring a new twist to the storyline bring a different culture into the picture.

Looking back at France that does much better adapting foreign movies unlike the rest of the world, we have here witnessed another beautiful case of the French exception!

Easy tips for Hollywood Producers 101: Cast Leonardo DiCaprio! (but cast him quick!)

My wife and I were thinking of going out to see "The Wolf of Wall Street" the other day. Why did this movie catch our eye more than the other twelve or such showing at our local movie theatre?

Had we heard great reviews about it? Nope. Had word-of-mouth finally reached us? Nope. Had we fallen prey to a cleverly engineered marketing campaign? Well yes and no.

Not owning a TV at home, so the least you could say is that our TV ad exposure was quite minimal. And as far as I can remember (although one could argue that this is exactly the purpose of sophisticated inception-style marketing) we din't see that many out-of-home ads nor hear any radio ones. Marketing was involved, but the genius of the marketers behind "The Wolf of Wall Street" was restricted to creating the poster, and not because of the monkey in a business suit nor the naked women, but simply by putting Leonardo DiCaprio right there. My wife and I's reasoning was simply that any movie with Leonardo had to be good.

Now don't go and write us off as Titanic groupies/junkies. I won't deny we both enjoyed that movie, but we don't have posters of him plastered all over our house. But here's the question we found ourselves asking: Can you name a bad movie with Leonardo in it? And harder yet: a bad recent movie with him in it?

Made you pause for a second there didn't it? Few people will argue against the fact that Leonardo is a very good actor and that his movies are generally pretty darn good. But are we being totally objective here? How does Leonardo's filmography compare to that of other big stars? The Marlon Brandos, Al Pacinos, De Niros, Brad Pitts...?

In order to compare actors' filmographies, I turned to my favorite database from IMDB. IMDB has a rather peculiar way of listing actors, directors, producers in its database, and I was unable to find a logic between the individual and the index in the database. But I did notice that all the big actors I wanted to compare Leonardo to had a low index (never above 400), so decided to pull data for all indices less than 1000. Now in the process I got some directors or actors with very few movies, so excluded from the analysis anybody have acted in less than 10 movies. The advantage of pulling this way was the fact that it provided a very wide range of diversity in gender, geography and time. So we have Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, Louis de Funès, Elvis Presley...And to get an even broader picture, I added 30 young rising new stars to the mix. All in all, 826 actors to compare Leonardo to.

Going back to our original question of how good Leonardo is, I've looked at two simple metrics: ratio of movies with an IMDB rating greater than 7, and ratio of movies with an IMDB greater than 8. So how well did Leonardo do? The mean fraction across the actors was 22% for the 7+ rating (median 20%). Leonardo had... 55%! That's 16 out of his 29 movies! Only 15 actors have a higher score. Top of the list? Bette Davis, with 76 of her 91 movies (83.5% having a 7+ rating). The recently deceased Philip Seymour Hoffman also beat Leonardo with 31 out of 52 (59.6%). Fun fact, what male actor of all times has the best ratio here? You have to think out of the box for this one as he's more famous for directing than acting, yet makes an appearance in almost every one of his movies. That's right, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, has 28 of 36 movies (77.8%) rated higher than 7.

Name	Number of movies	Number of 7+ movies	Ratio of 7+ movies
Bette Davis	91	76	83.5%
Alfred Hitchcock	36	28	77.8%
François Truffaut	14	10	71.4%
Emma Watson	14	10	71.4%
Bruce Lee	25	16	64.0%
Terry Gilliam	16	10	62.5%
Andrew Garfield	13	8	61.5%
Alan Rickman	44	27	61.4%
Frank Oz	31	19	61.3%
Daniel Day-Lewis	20	12	60.0%

What about for movies rated higher than 8? Leonardo does even better according to this metric! The average actor has only 2.7% (median 1.7%) of movies with such a high rating. Leonardo has 5 out of 29, 17.2%! And only 8 actors do better with this metric. No more Bette Davis (plummets to 3.2%), but replaced by Grace Kelly (3 out of 11, 27.3%) who tops the chart. Sir Alfred is impressive once again with 9 out of 36 (25%).

Name	Number of movies	Number of 8+ movies	Ratio of 8+ movies
Grace Kelly	11	3	27.3%
Alfred Hitchcock	36	9	25.0%
Anthony Daniels	12	3	25.0%
Chris Hemsworth	12	3	25.0%
Terry Gilliam	16	3	18.8%
Elizabeth Berridge	11	2	18.2%
Elijah Wood	56	10	17.9%
Groucho Marx	23	4	17.4%
Leonardo DiCaprio	29	5	17.2%
Quentin Tarantino	24	4	16.7%

Now the big stars we mentioned earlier do pretty well, just not as good as Leonardo:

Name	Number of movies	Number of 7+ movies	Number of 8+ movies	Ratio of 7+ movies	Ratio of 8+ movies
Marlon Brando	40	18	4	45.0%	10.0%
Brad Pitt	48	23	6	47.9%	12.5%
Robert De Niro	91	32	8	35.2%	8.8%
Leonardo DiCaprio	29	16	5	55.2%	17.2%
Clint Eastwood	59	19	6	32.2%	10.2%
Morgan Freeman	69	24	7	34.8%	10.1%
Robert Downey Jr.	68	17	1	25.0%	1.5%

Another thing worth repeating to put these numbers in perspective: we are not comparing Leonardo to your "average" Hollywood actor. Because of the way IMDB has matched actors with indices, we are comparing Leonardo to some of the greatest of all times here!

Remember how earlier one we mentioned that it was even harder to find a recent bad movie by Leonardo? Let's look at his movie ratings over time to confirm this impression:

Wow. With the exception of J.Edgar in 2011, every single one of his movies since 2002 (that's over this last decade !) has had a rating greater than 7! 12 movies!

Now one might argue that there is a virtuous circle here: the more you become a star, the easier it is to get scripts and parts for great movies and do the easier it becomes to continue being a super star. For each actor in my dataset, I ran a quick linear regression to see improvement of movie rating over time. Leonardo stands out here quite a bit too, for he is among the rare actors to have positive improvement. The "average" actor's movie lose 0.01 IMDB rating points per year, Leonardo gains 0.1 per year, putting him in the top 15 of the data set:

Name	Number of movies	Number of 8+ movies	Number of 7+ movies	Improvement
Taylor Kitsch	11	1	2	0.26
Rooney Mara	11	1	4	0.26
Justin Timberlake	18	0	3	0.23
Chloe Moretz	24	1	6	0.19
Bradley Cooper	26	0	7	0.18
Juliet Anderson	50	1	12	0.17
Mila Kunis	23	1	3	0.16
Chris Hemsworth	12	3	7	0.15
Tom Hardy	27	3	12	0.14
Andrew Garfield	13	0	8	0.12
Mia Wasikowska	21	0	9	0.12
Barbara Bain	14	1	2	0.11
George Clooney	38	1	15	0.11
Jason Bateman	32	2	9	0.11
Leonardo DiCaprio	29	5	16	0.10

What's quite surprising in the last table is that those topping the list in terms of year over year improvement are not the old well-established actors having great choice in scripts, but the new hot generation in Hollywood!

What happens to the megastars? Well let us look at the rating evolution of some of these stars:

Fred Astaire:

Marlon Brando:

Bette Davis:

It appears that they all go through some glory days. Remember Leonardo with his 12 years of 12 movies greater than 7 aside from J. Edgar? Well Bette Davis had 46 such movies, without any exceptions, over a span of 29 years! But not a great way to end a career... Same goes for Fred Astaire and Marlon Brando, started off doing well but end of careers are tough even for big stars, or might I say especially for big stars. Naturally, the hidden question is whether ratings of later movies go down because actors aren't as good as they were, or because good roles don't come as much, because they only get casted for grumpy grandparents in bad comedies. Correlation vs causation...

So back to Leonardo. He's still young, so the primary impulse my wife and I had of "Leonardo's in it so it's got to be good" was not completely irrational, but it might be in 5/10 years from now. Same goes for all the rising top stars. Cast them while they're hot, cause nothing is eternal in Hollywood.

The Dark Night Released

Today I wanted to take a closer look at the evolution of a movie's metrics around its release time. Do ratings go up, down? How long does it take for the ratings to stabilize? What about a movie's metascore (aggregated score from www.metacritic.com based on "official" critics)?

To kick this off, I looked at three movies for which I had sufficient data: Ice Age 3, Savages and the Dark Knight Rises. I was also interested in the Dark Knight Rises to see if the events surrounding the Aurora shooting had any impact.

Ice Age 3: Continental Drift

For this move the number of voters really jumped the week after the release (dashed vertical line).

As for the rating it dropped from a 7.1 pre-release "hype" to stabilize itself at 6.9. Interesting to see how quickly it stabilized (aside from the mini bump the second week, the rating of 6.9 was achieved the same weekend the movie was released).

Metascore followed a similar evolution with a sharp decrease right around release date. The stabilization in rating makes more sense as not many magazines and newspapers review the movie after its release.

Savages

Unfortunately I was not able to gather any pre-release data for this movie, but interesting to see again that the biggest jump in IMDB voters occurred two weeks after release.

Again, the rating very quickly stabilized a few days after release to 6.8.

 The metascore dropped fairly late although only by one point.

The Dark Knight Rises

 Despite trying to pull IMDB data up to two weeks in advance I was not able to collect any pre-release data for the third installment of the Dark Knight series.

Ratings dropped steadily from 9.2 to 8.9 over two weeks, again suggesting a fairly quick stabilization, especially as the number of voters increases.

The metascore had a sharp dropoff right around the release date, and the shooting, although it is unclear if there is any type of relation. Based on our very limited sample size it seems that metascore and rating always tend to drop around the release.

I am currently pulling more data for these movies and 15 others, so come back to check updated and new results. I will also try a meta-analysis to see if there is some common pattern in the evolution of the metrics across all movies.