The NBCUniversal Analytics Challenge

Box-office forecasting is a challenging but an important task for movie distributors in their decision making process.  The global film industry shows healthy projections for the coming years, as the global box office revenue is forecast to increase from about 38 billion U.S. dollars in 2016 to nearly 50 billion U.S. dollars in 2020.  However, box office revenue is down 10% so far from 2016.  Leverage the data below to help determine the unexpected behavior of movies.

Your analysis should address one or more of the following questions:

·          Why do some small budget films end up being blockbuster hits? Conversely, why do some large budget films fail?

·          Do certain genres lend themselves to higher return? Horror, romantic comedies, science fiction?

·          Do remakes, tent-poles and sequels perform differently?

·          How does the time of year, weather and economic trends influence box office performance?

Data

Excel spreadsheet with movie information such as release date, actors, budget, box office revenue, ratings, etc.

Relevant websites:

·          Box Office Mojo –a box office reporting website that has budget data for movies.  The data is broken down in various ways, per movie, on the site.

·          IMDb –The Internet Movie Database has information related to movies and television shows such as, cast, budgets, plots, reviews etc.

NBCU DATA