Writing sample one - Superhero movie statistics

Excerpt from Yien Yip's Information Graphic, Superheroes Movie Statistics

I was incredibly curious on the amount and impact of superhero movies that came out this year. From Iron Man, the infamous Dark Knight to Hancock, I was wondering, what was the impact of comic books on movies and was Hollywood going comic book crazy. The info graphic is based on data collected on super hero movies from 1978 until December 2008. The data was collected off two sites, www.imbd.com, www.the-numbers.com and www.boxofficemojo.com. The criteria for the movie was simple, under imdb’s data sorting macro, the movie criteria was based off movies, based off comic books, which had superheroes.

IMDB sorted 68 movies from the first Christopher Reeves’ Superman in 1978 all the way to Frank Miller’s directorial debut, the Spirit in December 2008.

Besides looking at the quantity of movies made in each year, I also looked at what drives the movie industry, money, sex, comic company origins, sequels made etc. I looked at movie budgets, domestic revenue, world wide revenue, the number of movies with male leads, female leads and an ensemble cast, and which comic book company the superhero had originated from. Some of the fun facts I found were:

• A total of 68 movies were made

• 36 were made from 2000 to 2008

• Nearly 78% or 53 movies had a male lead

• The total revenue made by the movies were $14 billion, and dark knight was responsible for $1 billion

• 24 sequels and retroactive continuities worth $7 billion were made

• DC and marvel are responsible for 65% of movies made

• Only 10% of movies didn’t turn a profit world-wide

I guess one of the more jarring facts is the significant increase of movies from 1978, one made to 36 made from 2000 to 2008. Some of the reasons that have been speculated why this increase happened could be the a depressed American society due to a lagging economy, the Iraq war that started in 2002, the increased capacity of movie and computer technology and overall the increase of all genres of movies produced where 294 were made in 1978 to 1979 to 5999 made in 2000 to 2008.

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