IMDb Movie Ratings, and the Rise of the Summer Blockbuster

Written By Sean Ward

Movie poster for the first summer blockbuster “Jaws” from 1975….and the last time thousands of people felt completely safe on the beach.

The IMDb (otherwise known as the Internet Movie Database) was started way back before many people even knew what the internet was in 1990. It contains information for over 10,000 movies such as cast descriptions, production crews, plot summaries, ratings, and fan/critical reviews. It also contains both actual and adjusted for inflation budgets/revenues for all of these movies.

I was very curious as I started this project. I have always been fascinated with the intersection between movie blockbusters and critical darlings of the movie industry. Before I look at some of the burning questions I have, the next graphic is very important to keep in mind… 

Fig. 1: Number of movies for each year that are featured on the IMDb.  More recent years feature around a thousand movies a year, while in the 1960's and 1970's there are often only between 50 and 100 movies a year.

Since the IMDb was started in the 1990’s, it is very much skewed towards modern movies. All movies from the 1960’s to the 1980’s chosen are very selective and often are better rated since most mediocre movies from those time periods have been forgotten.

Movies in the 2010’s number a thousand a year so they often feature many forgettable movies and clunkers. This is why older movies tend to be better reviewed overall.

So the first question that I ask is a two-parter. “Does a higher budget always result in higher revenue and do certain years have higher budgets and/or revenues?”

Fig. 2 Revenues and budgets adjusted according to inflation as compared to each other.  There is no clear correlation between higher budgets and higher revenues.

I decided to use the adjusted budgets and revenues for this question. They are adjusted based on how much inflation has occurred between 1960 and 2015.

As seen by this chart….higher budget does NOT always guarantee higher revenue. Many low budget movies rake in huge revenues. Many high budget movies bomb at the box office.

Fig. 3: The actual revenue against budget for each year between 1960 and 2015.

This scatterplot shows that there were increases in movies with higher revenues in the late 1970’s, the mid-1990’s and the early 2000’s.

In the 1990’s, it became much more common for movies to lose money due to high budgets coupled with disappointing revenues.

Seems like studios were taking more chances. There was a higher reward for big hits from the 1990’s on, so they were willing to risk having more box office bombs.

Looking at the highest and lowest average “actual revenue” years is fascinating. It is not surprising to see the 4 most recent years on the highest list (2012-2015).

I believe that many of the other years stem from huge blockbusters that made a ton of revenue. 1973 featured “The Exorcist”, “The Sting” and “American Graffiti” (all over $100 million in revenue, highly unusual for the time).

1975 had “Jaws” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, while 1977 had “Star Wars”, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and “Saturday Night Fever.” 2009 had the massive blockbuster “Avatar”, along with popular installments of “Transformers” and “Harry Potter.

”

Looking at the lowest average “actual revenue,” all of the bottom 6 are pre-1973 (not surprising). What is surprising is sandwiched between the HUGE years of 1975 and 1977. 1976 was not a very profitable year for movies.

As the mammoth late 70’s blockbusters kept hitting box office gold, suddenly tons of money was flooding the movie market. Some of the worst actual revenue years were 1980, 1981, 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1988.

The second question that I asked is “How is vote average effected by variables such as release year, budget/revenue, and runtime of the movies?” Let’s start by looking at how voting average pans out by year.

Fig. 6:  The Top 20 highest "voting average" years in terms of viewer ratings on IMDb.

According to IMDb contributors…the “golden age” of cinema appears to be from 1968 until 1975. Critics continue to fawn over movies such as “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Once Upon a Time in the West”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “The Godfather I. and II.” and “Chinatown.”

It is interesting to note that the 1980’s don’t show up until 1982 (ranked #15) and the 1990’s/2000’s/ and 2010’s are not in the Top 20.

There are plenty of movies that are highly rated from the 1990’s on, but it is hard to keep an overall high average when there are often hundreds of movies with ratings that keep the average lower. 

Fig. 7: The Bottom 20 lowest “voting average” years in terms of viewer ratings on IMDb

It makes sense that most years since IMDb gained popularity online (mid-1990’s) would be featured on the lowest “voting average” years.

There are a few surprises scattered here and there…despite every other year between 1968-1975 being the very highest “voting average” years, for some reason 1969 is near the bottom.

The only other years before 1994 here are 1983 and 1988. 

Fig. 8: Looking at each voting average, and what the average runtime of each of those movies is.

It is absolutely no surprise that the movies that have a longer runtime tend to be higher rated than movies that run a shorter runtime.

Every vote average that has an average of over two hours has a rating between 7.2 and 8.3.

Vote averages that have a runtime of less than 97 minutes have an average rating between 2.2 and 4.5.

Through my research, I found out that “Jaws” literally invented the summer blockbuster. The next movie to really blow up in the summertime was “Star Wars” that came out in late May 1977.

Blockbusters started to appeal more to a younger audience. You couldn’t really bring your kids to see “The Godfather” and “The Exorcist.” But “Jaws”, “Star Wars” and the massive 1978 hit “Grease” were at least rated “PG” and safe to bring older children to.

Even Independence Day (the 4th of July weekend) became a target of movies vying to be the summer blockbuster. In 1981, 7 of the Top 8 grossing movies were put in the theaters either in June or July.

The biggest hits of the 1980’s and 1990’s often came out in the summer. This includes such luminaries as “E.T.”, “Indiana Jones”, “Star Wars", “Gremlins”, “Back to the Future”, “Top Gun”, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and “Batman.”

There was even a movie called “Independence Day” back in the 1990’s. Movies try to be quite a few different things, but a movie like that was trying to be “MASSIVE” more than anything else! And with the revenue of movies absolutely exploding, many movies have accomplished their “MASSIVE” intentions.

But there will always be small scale movies with low cost that will somehow break into blockbuster status. It takes more than a formula and a load of cash to bring people to the theater. It takes creating an “EXPERIENCE.”

Powerful experiences can be had both with movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars…and those that cost less than a million.

“The Blair Witch Project” from 1999 cost between $200,000-$500,000 and grossed $258 million. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” from 2002 cost $5 million to make, and grossed $368 million.

Even “Jaws” only cost $9 million to make…and made $476.5 million. It has also made people fear going to the beach to this day. Now, that is what I call an IMPACT.

Sean Ward
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