Spoiler Threat Level: High

Gage recently added a comment to my review of Akira (the one anime that made anime famous as anime in the West) and this one made me think. He mainly writes about Kaori who is the girlfriend of Tetsuo i.e. the Guy Who Goes Horribly Nuts. Gage not only correctly points out that Kaori is only on screen in two scenes in Akira but also that in each segment Kaori is in a living hell and no one seems to care. I addressed his second point in a comment of mine in the original post, so I will use this space to address the first point: the role of Kaori in Akira since her two moments seem to be not that important at all.

Before I start please note that you need to have watched Akira at least once to understand what I’m writing about. If you didn’t, you can gladly skip this blog post if you like.

Originally I planned to address all of Gage’s points in a short comment and be done with it, yet I just couldn’t wrap my mind around the whole matter. Why is Kaori in Akira? What’s her purpose? What I certainly know is that her role in the manga is much more important than in the movie. I know this because I bought two volumes of the manga years ago in which she was part of the plot. Yet, in the movie?

Her role at first doesn’t feel important at all in the animated version. I was constantly thinking and wondering why Kaori was in the movie. Certainly you could’ve reached the same plot points with a different character. The only thing I knew from the start was that another character was necessary so that Tetsuo has someone to interact with.

Yet the more I thought about it the more I got lost because I couldn’t really find an answer. Well, until I started remembering one of the scenes in which Kaori was in. This was the moment when it made ‘click’ and for the first time ever I grasped the purpose of her character in Akira completely.

So, what am I talking about? To emphasize this point, let me start with some of the other girls that appear in the movie. There are two scenes in particular I want to talk about. The first scene takes place after Kaneda’s gang is sent back to school and get a good beating from a teacher:

As you can see, the three gang’s chicks on the right can be fully described as biker’s girls. Colorful dresses, makeup and an almost slutty way of talking. If I’d be an asshole, I’d describe them as the pitch perfect bitches of the gang.

Then there’s another scene which is even more important:

The appearance of the other girl on the telephone is not that outrageous but you can see that she has a good tan and wears tight clothes which reveal her figure in any way possible. Moreover she’s some kind of gossip girl who seemingly talks all day on the phone. In a way I got the feeling she’s just the same as the biker’s gang girls.

Now compare everything I mentioned with Kaori:

Kaori’s appearance is the opposite most of the minor girls shown in Akira up to that point. She doesn’t wear makeup; she doesn’t have dyed hair. And she wears rather bland if not slightly colorful yet totally mismatching clothes. She might show some skin, but that’s on a normal level (arms and legs), moreover her clothes are not tight at all as it’s the case with every other girl.

I almost feel like a stupid idiot because both girls appear in the same scene. I never spotted this fact or thought much about it. And I feel massively stupid because of this since the whole purpose of the scene is just to show the contrast between both girls, especially on the level of behavior. One is flashy, the other not. One behaves outrageous, the other one timid and shy. It’s as if two worlds clash.

And this is the moment I understood Kaori and her purpose in Akira. Because when I shifted the outer appearance of the girl onto the symbolic level, everything became crystal clear: Kaori is the symbol of normality, of a normal life. So her role in terms of movie minutes might be minor but that doesn’t mean that her role isn’t truly significant.

The following scene in which she meets Tetsuo drives this point already home: Tetsuo didn’t run to his gang, but to her. Why? Because he wants to run away with her. On the symbolic level this means that he wants to leave his current life behind and start living normally. Remember that he comes straight from the hospital, so he doesn’t have any belongings with him. He even doesn’t want to. He wants to start over.

Minutes later this takes a turn for the tragic in which Kaori plays an extremely important role. She is the trigger of the madness that breaks out in Tetsuo and his lust for power and domination. The reason is the fact, that he wasn’t able to save or protect Kaori, his normal life, from the clowns. He didn’t have the power. But Kaneda did. Kaneda saved the day. This leads to some extreme frustrations inside him. So he not only beats the clown almost to death but also starts to get aggressive towards Kaneda. In a way, Kaneda took Tetsuo’s pride and his face, which is also why he hides his face when Kaori comes close to him and tells her to stay away. He’s ashamed of himself. Seconds later his awakening fully starts and we know that there’s no turning back anymore.

Tetsuo was extremely close to start over living normally, but his old life destroyed everything. The normal life symbolized by Kaori is further away than ever. And the same happens with Kaori as a character: she’s not a part of the following fights and conflicts in Akira.

In terms of structure this scene is the first major turning point of Akira, the moment everything really starts and Tetsuo begins to fully awaken. And Kaori’s a part of it. The exact same thing happens again, this time almost at the end of Akira, at the second major turning point in terms of Testuo’s awakening. And again, Kaori, the normal life, is part of it.

If you remember, Kaori appears out of the blue in the stadium after the big fights are over and Tetsuo more or less found Akira:

In this scene the character interactions are important as again is the role of Kaori, the symbol of normality. Minutes after the reunion of Tetsuo and Kaori the Colonel offers him help by giving him the medicine that’s necessary to control this power. Tetsuo refuses. But then the marvelous thing happens: he walks towards Kaori and seeks her help. He wants the medicine from her, not the Colonel:

Remember: this is the guy who killed hundreds of people, even his old gang members. He should’ve killed her or attacked her in an instant but he didn’t (he even let Kaori help him walking as the screenshot above shows). Again, on the symbolic level, he was reminded of the normal life he could have lived after finally seeing Kaori again.  This triggered again his wish for just that. A normal life. He still wants to reach and find it accompanied by all the normality we live in. This time, though, his wish is utterly tragic because there is no way he can turn back anymore. Kaori, the normal life, is out of reach and stays out of reach – Kaori backs off. Seconds later his final transformation begins.

In the course of this transformation he still clings to his wish to return to normality. He frantically grabs Kaori not thinking about her safety at all. He swallows her in his body and moments later she’s killed by it. Tetsuo doesn’t want this to happen but his body – his power – is out of control. He’ll never be able to reach normality because his own body “killed” it. In a way those events in Akira are absolutely logic on the symbolic level. Imagine what would have happened if the kids didn’t awake Akira and Testuo somehow would’ve controlled his body. Do you think he’d still be able to live a normal life? Of course not, simply because his grotesque form would’ve prevailed in one way or another. There’s no way he would’ve gained any form of normality. But even if he would’ve manage to regain his body, he’d still be having those massive psychokinetic powers. Nobody would ever dare to get close to him. He would have been shut out from society. After his powers awakened he lost his path to normality forever.

But back to Kaori as the symbol of normality. As Gage mentions in this comment, everyone seems to treat her coldly or doesn’t care about her death at all. I think that her symbolic role in a way explains, why almost everyone in the movie act the way they do. She – the symbol of normality – is the outsider in Akira simply because everyone else long time ago left this path and nobody wants to return. They don’t want normality, they don’t seek it. Hence nobody interacts with her. In other words: she’s too normal for them.

I am not sure if I overlooked some important scene or moment in Akira but even if I did I for the first time ever get the feeling I fully grasped Kaori and her role in this post-apocalyptic movie. It took some time but I think it was worth it.

What do you think of my interpretation? Let us know!

Spoiler Threat Level: Medium

Did you know that out of the Top 10 movies listed on IMDB three are in fact sequels?

Just imagine my indifferent reaction to that obvious yet epically useless discovery – until I figured out that only a mere 3500 movies out of millions are considered sequels at all.

Following this shock I did something normal people caring for their sanity should never do: for a moment I perceived sequels as a Genre; and suddenly I was impressed with the success this “genre” achieved.

Following that shock another question came to mind: what are the top sequels of all time in terms of commercial and critical success? After many hours of work this post will give you the answer you never wanted to know to begin with.

To make surfing and reading easier, the following list is split up into several sub-pages each containing ten movies. The rank of every movie sequel is based on a “movie score” that ranges from 0.3 to 300. This is due to the fact that the score is calculated using IMDB rating and US box office respectively, so naturally the numbers vary a lot.

Have fun clicking and reading!

Some additional notes: to make the list more varied I’ve decided to limit the list to contain only first sequels (i.e. Superman 2). As you have read above, the maximum score is 300. I didn’t change this to 100 because by doing so too many movies would have got the same score (using one decimal place).

Unfortunately it doesn’t cool down fast enough.

Don’t get me wrong: I like 3D animated movies – if they’re well made and tell a great story. Heck, with the possibilities the producers have at their hands it is a true shame they don’t go full way.

Yes, Final Fantasy was a flop and rightfully so. The story was a mess of pseudo-esoteric scifi crap which would have better fit a 3D game. But at least they went for something “new”. They realized a somehow serious story involving normal looking people and not talking animals (for example Shrek, Shark Tale, Antz, Ice Age, Madagascar, Surf’s Up, Chicken Little, Kung Fu Panda, Barnyard, Open Season, Bee Movie, Bolt, Flushed Away and Up). For a genre that young it’s quite a number we have here.

Well, Final Fantasy is one of the worst faring 3D animated movies ever so I don’t think we will see something serious (which does not come from Pixar) anytime soon. In other words: more talking animals.

Or not?

If you look at the chart below you’ll see that there is a slight but nevertheless constant decline of the grosses of our beloved 3D animated movies:

On the first hand, it does look good, but if you take away the last two spikes (Shrek the Third and Up) it gets obvious that the former days of glory seem over.

Is that a bad thing? No. In fact, to me it’s quite positive because the chart indicates that the hype of 3D is over in which producers could give us any shit and we swallowed it. Perhaps they will soon start to think about doing something else than talking animals and your usual comedy about self-esteem and friendship.

…

On the other hand, our beloved 2D animation went down the drain and now returns with the usual girly princess fairy tales I’m so fed up with.

Am I too pessimistic? And too optimistic regarding my hope of better stories to come?

(Update: Thanks to Daniel’s important hint in the comments l I added Brother Bear and Home on the Range to my analysis – which I initially totally forgot. Interestingly, the text doesn’t even need a change, since both movies did nothing exceptional on the box office front and continued the trends I write about.)

Soon, Disney will try to redeem its name in the world of 2D animation with The Princess and the Frog. Personally and frankly I couldn’t care less since I’ve begun to dive into the world of anime and watched some highly creative stuff they’ve done. But that’s only me, one little blogger with a mad mind, so that’s okay.

Not regarding my personal taste regarding Disney movies I’ve done some “research” and put together all important numbers from all Disney (Update: 2D/classical) animated flicks since Little Mermaid.

Well, what can I say: it can only go up…

If I were one Disney exec living in the high skies of power at that time, I clearly would have had some nightmares regarding those numbers in the later years. And of course I also would have had massive parties with sex, drugs, Rock’n roll and all the other nasty stuff at the beginning of the so called Disney Renaissance.

Seriously, the revenues of the four first animated movies starting with Little Mermaid are mesmerizing, it goes up and up and up – until it so strikes out in a slope any skier dreams of. Pocahontas – in combination with the rise of 3D – ruined everything for Disney animated movies forever. The only spikes at the end of the line are Tarzan as well as Lilo & Stitch. And those two spiked don’t even come close to the old days of glory.

But it gets even worse for the Disney execs:

The graph above shows the ratio of production costs to grosses. This means that if a movie has a ratio of 200% it earned double the amount of money as it cost (not counting marketing costs or DVD/VHS).

The first big surprise is the fact that Aladdin made much more money for Disney than Lion King – which is kinda obvious since Lion King cost more than twice than Aladdin. The other big surprise is the downhill slope which seemingly never ends after Aladdin. With one exception late in the game it only goes down and I wouldn’t be surprised if any exec would have consulted his psychiatric counselor of choice on a daily basis.

Seeing those numbers I hoped for some kind of Deus ex machina regarding those numbers. Just as the viruses and bacteria wiped out the aliens in The War of the Worlds, I hoped that at least the international revenues would reverse everything.

Yeah, sure, world…hate me. My hopes were utterly destroyed, of course. As you can obviously see, everything on the international market (including USA) is more or less the same with only minor differences. Nevertheless there is one interesting detail: Treasure Planet is the only animated Disney movie ever to not even come close to the one hundred percent ratio. This movie truly bombed horribly. Home on the Range is the second lowest movie which almost reaches the mark.

But there is even more for your reading pleasure. Up to now I was working solely with pure economic values for the analysis, yet there are of course other factors like viewer opinion. So the following chart connects both revenues and respective IMDB ratings:

As you can see this graphs at least gives a possible hint to some connection that might exist between ratings and revenues. Since I am still in training to read tea leaves, I leave this chart to your interpretation.

Conclusion

So, what have we learned from these statistics?

One thing is clear: after Aladdin and Lion King, animated movies from Disney went south economically, which Disney never was able to overcome. Although some later movies as Tarzan gained more money than their predecessors, higher production costs diminished potential revenues for Disney, hence reducing the ratio further instead of increasing.

Pocahontas, in every way possible, is the big sin of the Disney Corporation (although the last movie – Home on the Range – ranks even worse regarding IMDB rating). If I were an exec who lived through the hells and horrors of that time and found out those numbers, I certainly would have slugged anyone responsible for Pocahontas.

But that’s only me thinking hypothetically.

In any way, I’m eager to see whether or not The Princess and the Frog will be able to end this Cycle of Doom.

What are your expectations?

Star Trek made a lot of money this weekend and The Movie Blog just compared this success with the rest of the movie franchise. And do you want to know what my first thought was, when I read this post? No?

Well, I didn’t think about a franchise that finally made it and fully deserved it or thought about the abysmal quality in recent years. And I didn’t felt compelled to watch Star Trek now.

No. My first thought simply was: did they adjust the opening grosses for inflation?

After opening my last Star Trek Excel and entering the numbers mostly was done with it and would have patted my inner wisenheimer for this nitpicking grandeur – if there wouldn’t be a little major discovery on Mount Obvious:

Sometimes I read about the fact that Star Trek was a franchise that aimed for its fans and mostly made money with them. Frankly spoken I didn’t care that much about this information.

But these results seem to prove it at least on some level. As you can see, the adjusted box offices didn’t vary that much from Star Trek: The Motion Picture to Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. I would even say they were the same regarding a certain inaccuracy of adjustments methods you cannot prevent (I used the average ticket price to get the results, for example). This indicates that most of the movie goers in the first few days of each respective entry were mostly trekkies or trekkers, while the size of this fanbase seemed to be constant over the years.

Another tidbit that gets visible is the rise of grosses that starts with the first Next Generation movie and kept its momentum until Star Trek: Insurrection more or less ruined it. Unfortunately, as most of us know, Star Trek: Nemesis didn’t help that much either, for being one of the worst entry of this genre.

Number games can be quite interesting some times, even if it’s almost one o’clock in the night.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot: even with the opening weekends adjusted, the lastest installment of Star Trek still made tons more money than the rest (perhaps except First Contact, but that would be nitpicky and the Paramount of Obvious. ……oh my…what a lame pun…).

Star Trek seems to be everywhere at the moment – which is no wonder regarding the fact that the premiere just took place and the worldwide release is only days ahead.

So, I thought I add my part to the crowd, do some statistical analysis and put together all numbers for almost the whole franchise. The results are two charts into which all those numbers are condensed.

For one, I took the box offices of all movies of the Star Trek franchise, adjusted them to today’s ticket prices and put them into one chart.

For the other, I searched for all Nielsen Ratings of all episodes of all Star Trek series from The Next Generation to Enterprise and put them together. The result you will see below is in many ways the ultimate series chart of Star Trek any Trekkie should love and hate at the same time.

The Movies

Let’s begin our analysis with a look at the box offices of all Star Trek movies. To get a better impression I adjusted the box office to the average ticket prices of 2008, which – according to BoxOfficeMojo – are at $7.18. How much will the new Star Trek movie make? We’ll see in the future…

Update May 7th: According to ScreenRant, the ticket pre-sales indicate that Star Trek is true blockbuster material. Taking the ticket sales of Wolverine into account, Star Trek might very well reach or even break the 100 Million mark on its first weekend, blasting ahead two other Trek movies at least.

Update May 9th: The movie earned around $29 million, so Star Trek doesn’t seem to be able to break the 100 immediately (Update: indeed it couldn’t – my prediction was right. Yay.).

Update May 17th: Another Yay! the numbers I work with in my internal Excel sheet seem to be right. The ranking based on sold tickets is exactly the same!

Final Update: Star Trek is officially the second most grossing entry of the franchise (see updated chart below).

Star Trek 2009 aside, this chart got me by surprise. According to these numbers the most successful Star Trek movie of all time neither was The Wrath of Khan nor the fourth installment with the whales (although it comes close). No, it’s the first movie called Star Trek: The Motion Picture with an adjusted box office of 235 Million USD. Admitted, I would have never guessed this.

This chart also shows that although the second movie might get much love from the audience and fans it didn’t break the record of the first movie. Luckily, it came close. At least my impression of the success of The Voyage Home was not wrong as wrong as with Wrath of Khan. Whew.

But there is also one nasty thing that gets obviously visible: after a good dive of The Final Frontier, Star Trek never managed to reach its former heights again. Although the movies indeed increased their respective box offices again, we can say that from Star Trek 6 to Star Trek 9 the numbers didn’t vary very much. Star Trek: First Contact is a small exception to this rule yet the quality of the movie didn’t result in an enormously increased box office.

Well, after First Contact there was only one way for the franchise: down. Can J.J. break this curse? The next few weeks will tell us.

The Episodes

Star Trek is not Star Trek without its episodes. Of course, the movies play an important role (especially in today’s times where J.J. Abram’s take is the only thing “trekkie”) but Star Trek was and is primarily a TV franchise.

So, I accepted the craziest job ever and searched the whole internet for every Nielsen TV Rating I could find and put those numbers in one big Excel sheet. It is well beyond crazy but very fitting for the title “madmind” I think. And I also think it was worth it because the result is the Ultimate Star Trek Chart:

This chart shows the sad but very well known truth about this franchise: with each new series, Star Trek went down a little bit further.

Admittedly, this chart above is a little bit confusing at first with all the tiny dots flying around. So here’s a different look at the franchise, this time the dots are replaced with an averaged curve of all Nielsen Ratings over the past:

This chart makes one thing even more obvious: with one notable exception – The Next Generation – each series followed a downward trend that couldn’t be stopped whatsoever. The begin of the big war in Deep Space Nine didn’t help, neither helped the exchange of a female crewmember with a sexed up alternative in Voyager. It’s somehow depressing to witness that nothing the producers tried really mattered in any way. Silly storylines and bullshit ideas in Enterprise? Not a chance, it kept declining. (Although this was a good thing in some ways)

As you can see, The Next Generation is the big exception of this rule. What’s astonishing is the rather small decline of viewership in the first two abysmal seasons. On the other hand, it is visible that even this series began a downward trend. In this case, however, the producers seemingly made the right decisions and managed to stop this trend at the beginning of the third season (to be precise with the episode called “The Bonding“, “Who watches the watchers” was the last one of the bottom).

It’s also noteworthy that each new series after TNG indeed had its chance. Every pilot had a massive Nielsen Rating compared to the rest of the respective seasons yet this factor wore out extremely fast. Basically, for every new series the Nielsen Ratings was in a free fall for at least one season.

It will be interesting to see whether a new Star Trek series will be able to reverse the numbers and reach the former heights.

At the moment it is highly unlikely, though, that a new series will reach us. Even if the new Star Trek movie will be a massive success, the numbers are too depressing and too obvious for producers to risk their money on.

But I could also be very wrong with this assumption. What do you think?

The live action movie adaptation of the best selling game-shooter (and soon to be franchise) Bioshock has been put on hold by Universal as you can read here and here.

To say I was dumbfounded by this news would be a massive understatement. I bought the game almost immediately after its release and it’s been an amazing and breathtaking ride. The atmosphere, the story of a utopia gone horribly wrong along with its citizen (“I’m gonna be a star. It’s not too late, not too late”) and the perfect execution make Bioshock one of the best games I ever played.

I couldn’t understand why Universal would put such a great story with massive potential on hold.

Well, after imagining myself being dressed up as a Big Daddy and paying them a visit I calmed down and started to do some research on the major video game adaptations of Hollywood and their respective Box Offices.

Frankly speaking after the visual results emerged: it looks bad. Really bad. Not only for the hopefully upcoming Bioshock movie but for the genre as a whole.

An investment of $160 Million for a possible A-Movie from Hollywood is not very much – it seems. Or to be more precise: it seems from our perspective, because most of the “big” movies make an enormous amount of money.

So, when we for example look at all those comic book adaptations we see: there is nothing that is not possible thanks to The Dark Knight, Spiderman and so on. Although I cannot prove this at the moment I am sure that many movie lovers think in this way.

But I think that this kind of thinking is wrong. You cannot compare a comic book movie with a video game movie although they seem to stem from seemingly similar niches because both are more or less a juvenile phenomena and visual by their nature.

The following chart illustrates my point by showing a simple curve of all box office grosses made by the “major” video game adaptations without their respective sequels:

As you can see it doesn’t look very promising for the genre of Video Game Adaptations.  Out of all 13 movies I have analyzed, only one – Lara Croft – made a substantial amount of money. But it gets even worse, because except for one another movie, Mortal Kombat, every other try didn’t even reach – let alone break – the 50 Million Dollar threshold.

Alone in the Dark by our extremely beloved Uwe Boll, House of the Dead and Wing Commander are the worst of the crowd, barely breaking the $10 Million mark. OK, the shit from Mr. Boll doesn’t even come close to even this.

Of course, one could say that many if not most of those movies weren’t that big, so the investment was not that high. This is absolutely true but let’s take a closer look and overlay the current graph with the investment made for each movie, shown by a dark-blue line. And boy, this is where the disaster fully kicks in:

As the image shows, only two video game adaptations made substantial more money compared to the investment so it doesn’t feel like a hiccup. These two movies are Mortal Kombat and Hitman. Yes, I am amazed myself. Lara Craft of course made tons of money – but it also cost tons of money. That 16 Million Dollar surplus at the box office almost is not worth mentioning.

On the other hand, there is a good bunch of movies in that crowd that didn’t even manage to reach the break-even point. Out of them Final Fantasy is the big and massive loser. The other ones are not that catastrophic but they’re not in any good shape either. Silent Hill: Investment 50 Million, return 47 Million. Wing Commander: Investment 30 Million, return 12 Million. And so on. What catches my eye is the fact that many movies almost reach their investments at the box office but never really break it.

Perhaps this is what drives the producers at Universal nuts: although they might love the concept of Bioshock and the game itself, the chance of making a box office failure is high, especially when you talk about an assumed investment of 160 Million Dollar. Even the best video game adaptation didn’t reach that amount. Moreover, chances are rather high that Bioshock won’t break-even; or worse, won’t earn as much as it cost.

Oh, and there is one last problem: although many of us know first person shooter like Half Life 2, Bioshock or Far Cry it’s not that this genre is very big. As far as I remember from a small paper I wrote this genre in fact only plays a marginal role in the video game industry compared to Sports or Role-Playing for example.

So, what would you do regarding those numbers? Would you take the risk fully on with a 160 Million Dollar investment? Or would you try cutting corners wherever possible? Or would you even give the project a good kick in its ass and throw it into a dark alley?

Of course, I couldn’t let this one be unanswered.

Slowly but surely I am getting old from writing this one sentence again and again, but…well, I am (again) surprised by the results. Just when I thought I’d be right this time, the results smashed my hopes again with a dose of reality.

While I believed that LORD OF THE RINGS might take the first place this time, it in reality “only” made it to a fourth place. SPIDERMAN is the ruler of them all, grossing almost 100 million Dollar more than any other film “trilogy”:

At least my guessing on the other two possibilities were somehow right because I wasn’t surprised at all by the next two entries in the list: PIRATES and SHREK both managed to climb to the top three, divided by an almost non-existent margin of 6 million dollar. In a way we could say they all (including LORD OF THE RINGS) managed a good second place.

It’s also interesting to notice that the next three movies after LotR not only earned significantly lower amounts of money (around -260 million dollar each) but share the almost exact gross revenue. These results create two “steps” of some sort in the upper ranking while the rest of the list drops in a more linear way from X-MEM to EVIL DEAD.

Speaking of the devil (lame pun intended) I find it kinda sweet to see this unbelievably small trilogy on this list. It shows that revenues are not necessarily the only thing to create some kind of fame in the movie world.

What do you think ?

We all know them: STAR WARS, TERMINATOR and GODFATHER, to name just a few. But did you ever wonder how well or badly they fared at the box office? Well, search no further because after a statistical look at the most successful genres of 2008, this post will take a graphical look at 32 franchises and trilogies to give the answer.

Below you find two charts which visually show US gross revenues of the first three movies of some well-known franchises and every movie of some well-known trilogies. Of course there are still some missing ones, like SAW, but I promise to deliver them, when I have another list of 16.

Nevertheless. thanks to the visual simplicity of such graphs and bars, there are many surprising things that come to the surface.

(Click images for larger view)

For example, there is the result of the STAR WARS franchise not doing as well as I would have thought. The more I think about it the more I am surprised. The franchise is basically the geekdom of heavens yet the second movie earned less money than the first. Was the second movie to serious or the first one not good enough? I don’t know. But the jump from second to third movie is very interesting, because the second installment is seen by many as the best one of the first three.

Another jump to the bottom is visible for INDIANA JONES, even more so than STAR WARS. From a quality perspective this doesn’t come to a surprise to me because the second movie was by far the worst adventure for the whip wielder.

On the bright side, the TERMINATOR franchise can be proud of itself since the increase of gross earnings from the first to the second movie is truly mesmerizing and no other big franchise (except for RAMBO coming close) ever managed to do that. On the other hand, this series also suffers from what I call the “Franchise Peak” where the second movie of the trio is always the best selling incarnation. Besides TERMINATOR you can spot this peak amongst others for RAMBO, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, NAKED GUN and SHREK.

Out of all of the 32 franchises and trilogies six of them managed the seemingly impossible to earn more money with each sequel. X-MEN, AUSTIN POWERS, BOURNE and LORD OF THE RINGS could be called the Big Four, while EVIL DEAD and MAD MAX would then be the Small Two.

But again, not everything is nice and wonderful in the world of sequels. While there are six winners, there are also 9 looser. In other words out of all 32 analyzed series 28 percent of them made successively less money. Some of them were lucky as SPIDERMAN, where the money flow didn’t drop that drastically. Yet, there are also those which fared horribly during their whole lifetime. BEVERLY HILLS COP is one of them, as is POLERGEIST. And the then there is FREE WILLY which fall is second to none: no other trilogy or franchise managed to earn 26 times (!) less money at the end compared to its beginning.

So, as you can see, there are some nice tidbits that came to the surface and some of the were truly surprising. Did you spot anything you never thought of?

(Thanks to Dan Meth and his Trilogy Meter which inspired me to this)

While I could do the same and simply copy and paste all grosses of 2008 in this blog, I take a more profound way:

In this post I analyze the most successful genres of 2008, based on the Top 100 of BoxOfficeMojo (as of January 12th) and the genre classifications used there.

To do this I implemented a three part statistical analysis. Firstly I take a look at the overall grosses of each genre to see how much money went to Hollywood. Secondly I average those grosses by the number of movies. Then I take a look at the cost-income ratio. Finally I add all those results together in one final chart.

So, enough of theory, let’s start.

Total Genre Box Offices 2008

As you can see, it is no wonder we are plagued with bad comedies all time because in terms of total grosses, this genre tops the others with its amazing 1.7 billion Dollars easily.

The next two genres are the usual suspects: Comic Book and 3D Animation. Both earned almost the same amount of money. Comic Book reached $983 Million hence being only $6 Million higher than 3D Animation.

The next Genres can be described as the middle group, ranging from Drama ($614 Million) to Fantasy ($520 Million). Of course, INDIANA JONES was the biggest movie in the Genre of Period Adventures. Without it the genre would have reached $242 Million, and not $560 Million.

The last group of Genres starts with the Action Comedy, which garnered $328 Million. Interestingly GET SMART and not TROPIC THUNDER is the most successful contender in this genre

Perhaps some Horror fans scream in anguish, yet SAW V was the highest grossing Horror Movie, the Genre in total earned $247 Million, which results in a 10^th place.

And as a total surprise (at least to me), the success of MAMMA MIA and HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3 helped the Musical Genre to its pseudo-revival and an adequate 11^th place.

The same goes for romance. Its overall success is the result of the massive success of TWILIGHT, which was the most difficult movie to add to a specific genre.

While for Adventure fans of all kinds 2008 was a good year, the pure Adventure Genre (not Period Adventure) garnered only 214 Million Dollar with JORUNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH ($101 Million) at its top.

Romantic Comedies and Action Horror (interesting genre) had no good year with three and two releases respectively hence only earning a rather small amount of money.

Science Fiction was the total looser in 2008. On the other hand, only one movie in the Top 100 can be truly added to this one, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.

The information we gained here already is quite interesting, yet it sadly doesn’t tell you everything because the total number of movies in each genre isn’t accounted for. So, let us take another look at the grosses, this time averaged by the number of movies:

Average Genre Box Offices 2008

Although Comedies made the most money you can see that Comic Book Adaptions (thanks to DARK KNIGHT) made by far the highest average gross ($327 Million) while Comedies with its high numbers of movies only made $58 Million in average.

Period Adventure Genre has a high average gross but as we remember, INDIANA JONES is mostly the reason for this result. Again, without this movie, the genre only would have made an average of $80 Million.

Surprisingly, 3D Animation is not listed in the Top 3. If you love this genre and hate this result, send your thanks to CLONE WARS and SPACE CHIMPS.

Although Horror Movies are not the last movies in terms of total grosses they made in fact the lowest average amount of money (~$35 Million). Those numbers show that Horror Movies were a niche market in 2008.

As with the first chart, this one again has a problem: although it gives a very good statistical insight there is no indication of the true success of a genre. Take the Comic Book Movies. They made tons of money. But it would mean nothing if the production costs were high as the sky. Therefore, the next chart shows ratio of production budgets – without marketing costs – and grosses (200% = grosses double the amount of costs). From a producer point of view, this chart should be the most important one:

Genre Cost-Gross-Ratios in 2008

My first reaction to the results? I so hope nobody important in Hollywood reads this blog. Seriously, in terms of ratios nothing beats the Musical Genre. The two movies listed as Musicals made in average more than five times the money they cost.

Overall, the year 2008 was quite good for Hollywood since most genres (or better: their movies) made roundabout two times money they cost.

Comic Book Movies like DARK KNIGHT might be successful, but in 2008 they also were pricey.

The “ratio losers” of 2008 are the last four Genres in the chart. All of them made less money than they cost. Although Fantasy only looses by 1 percent, but it looses. Surprisingly, Period Adventure is one of the looser because of the disastrous performance of AUSTRIALIA.

Another surprise is again the Horror Genre: Although it is the smallest in terms of average grosses, the production costs were so low that even with the low grosses they made quite respectable ratios.

Now, while all three charts have valuable information they also create a new problem. Of course, all of them are valid and give a great statistical insight. So, in other words, regarding which statistical way you like more, you have three different genres to choose. And that is the exact problem.

So, to resolve this last problem I decided to aggregate all three results into one final chart by counting points from 16 to 1 for their respective positions in each chart (first place = 16 points, second place = 15 points and so on).  This way we can see which genre was the overall most successful in terms of total gross, average gross and gross-cost ratio.

And without further delay, I hereby present you the final rank of the most successful genres in 2008:

Did you spot any big surprises?