Madmind

It might come to a surprise for the one or the other but I sometimes watch European movies. Admitted, anything else would be stranger than fiction because I am living in Europe.

Today was such a day I went local again. I watched a French movie about some high school kids. It’s called The French Kissers, and well, the titles fits the movie really well. In a way it was the depiction of the more than awkward phase of puberty in full bloom – accompanied by much slurping and smacking. In other words: More than once it was embarrassing not only for the characters but also for the audience.

Some days ago James added a comment to my review of Pixar’s Up. Well, normally I wouldn’t reply to a comment via a post but by a comment myself but I think that James raised an interesting point about which I never really wrote about: movies and realism. Basically James called my criticism of Up uncalled-for because Up is not meant for realism (or written realistic) but more about the feelings of the main characters.

Okay. I get his point but he also totally misses my point because…

Since when did I ever care about realism in a movie?

Although there’s tons of news – as always – I simply can’t think of anything remotely interesting for me to blog about. Perhaps it’s this constant flood of news in my RSS reader that causes this lack of interest. Some of the news are indeed interesting but – let’s face it – most of them don’t get published in newspapers for a reason.

There are hundreds papers out there that try to find scientific reasons for why we watch movies. Some reasons they come up with are to be entertained or to flee the harsh reality of life.

Bullshit!

Here’s a list of ten reasons we really watch movies in our movie theater of choice:

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.