Madmind

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 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.

Well, after my last analysis of the gross revenues of 32 franchises and trilogies I wanted to write a completely different post again. But while I was redesigning my blog to be even more minimalistic my mind started to wander which finally resulted in this one nagging question: which franchise / trilogy made the most money with its (first) three movies?

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

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.

Hollywood is, after all, a business. Producers invest money in hope they can make money. In a perfect world, they make more than they invest. So, I am quite sure they analyze each and every movie regarding future projects and their chances of success.

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.