In January 2012, The Information is Beautiful Awards launched a data visualization challenge for Hollywood films from 2007–2011, providing an “ultra-comprehensive dataset that lifts the lid on opening weekends, worldwide gross, budgets, storylines, review scores – everything – for every Hollywood film released in the last five years.” This is our (Çilek Ağacı’s) submission which was shortlisted along with eleven others.

For each element (movie or genre), we visualize two values – the budget and the worldwide gross revenue – with two concentric circles, where the area of the lighter shade circle represents the revenue. In the cases of the main graph (single movies) and the inset graph (averages for genres), these circles are plotted on an x-axis representing sustainability and a y-axis representing profitability. We calculate the sustainability of movies by dividing gross revenue by the opening-weekend revenue, and profitability by dividing gross revenue by the budget. These axes are logarithmically scaled in order to accommodate the wide range of values.