When a movie is released by Hollywood it is watched Domestically and
Internationally. But not all movies are released everywhere, and movies
are received with varying levels of acclaim. Use this page to find out
where movies are popular. See how strong Hollywood's dominance
is of foreign movie houses.
Instructions Above
- Click on the pencil in the upper right corner to focus on specific
times/genres and modify how the main map is colored.
- Hover your mouse over the barchart just under Africa to see a brief
summary, click on a bar to focus on that country's information. Better
yet, just click on a country directly to focus in on its details on the
bottom part of this page.
Instructions Below
- The Lower Left part of the page shows you all of a county's
Hollywood and Non-Hollywood movies arranged by their box office
earnings. Look there to compare how different movies faired. Hover your
mouse over the graphics to see movie details.
- See what kinds of movies are popular in the country on the Lower
Right section of the page. The six most popular genres along
with the movies in the genre and the total monetary breakdown is shown.
Designed for Chrome/Safari
As I developed this application I had several questions that I wanted
to be able to answer myself. Here are a few below...
- What does Hollywood vs Non-Hollywood mean? I've taken an initial dataset from the Information Is Beautiful January, 2012 Challenge. It consisted of five
years of Hollywood titles, with box office information, genre, story, etc. I augmented this set with International box office information from boxofficemojo.com. These movies that weren't on the original set are probably of International origin, although this isn't garuanteed. I've fixed several glaring mistakes, but several movies of definite
Hollywood origin (particularly very unsuccessful in the box office) appear as Non-Hollywood. Non-Hollywood movies have no known genre - they are labelled 'Unknown'
- Why are there all of these gray countries? The only
comprehensive online source of foreign box office numbers that I
could find were at boxofficemojo.com. But they
didn't have all countries. Most notably the majority of Africa,
and the Middle East. I looked thru a number of countries and found
some common themes:
- War?: Angola and Chad are examples I found. Chad had one theatre that been closed in 1984. It reopened in 2011 but doesn't have an online presence.
- One Theatre: Several countres in Africa appear to only have on theatre. Examples I found: Botswana, Kazakhstan, Gabon.
- Illegal: In Saudi Arabia. I've read that people travel to Bahrain to watch movies.
- Which countries watch fewer Hollywood movies than non-Hollywood? By selecting the pencil in the upper right corner you can select 'Hollywood - Others' option. Countries that spend more money on non-Hollywood movies are colored green. India I expected - Bollywood, anyone!? But Japan?!
- What is the top grossing non-Hollywood movie? Click on the pencil and color by 'Movie Revenue'. Next to the US it appears that Japan, UK, France, and Germany spend the most on movies. Perusing the top box office movies for those countries I found Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis at $193 million in France.
- What Hollywood movies do well abroad? ie, what aspect of American culture do other countries want to watch?Just randomly clicking around the Action and Comedy movies are Hollywoods most popular genres (in terms of number of movies people watch).
- What foreign country likes Romances?I clicked on the pencie, and chose the 'Romance' genre and colored by the # Movies. I have always had a secret hope that Japan would be most keen on them. But no: UK, Germany, etc.
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