Wrap Up

In this activity, your group created three graphs to visualize the movie budget and revenue data.

This spreadsheet has a lot of data -- so much that it can be hard to make sense of it at a glance.

When you visualize the data, you can see patterns that you couldn't before.

For example, the histograms demonstrate the distribution of movie budgets and revenues.

The budget histogram shows that there are very few "high budget" films.

The majority of films have fairly low budgets.

If you select a movie idea with a very high budget, justify why you think it's worth it to spend more on this movie.

Similarly, you see that most film revenues fall on the lower end of the scale.

There are very few films that make over 250 million dollars.

Movie producers are even more interested in the relationship between a movie's budget and its revenue.

If it costs one million dollars to make a movie, and it makes ten million dollars, that's much better for a producer than a movie with a ten million dollar budget that only makes eleven million dollars.

The scatter plot shows every movie as a point.

Y-axis shows how much the movie made at the box office.

The x-axis shows how much it cost to make the movie.

From this you can see a relationship or pattern.

Generally, the more money a movie studio spends to make a movie, the more money the movie makes.

This might be because they spend more money on famous actors or directors, who have a lot of fans.

Or maybe they use more special effects, which attract moviegoers.

But the relationship isn't perfect.

There are movies with really high budgets that didn't make much money.

And there are movies with really low budgets that made a lot of money.

As a movie producer, your job is to select the best, or most profitable, movie.

Visualizing data about past movies can help you analyze their success, but the data alone cannot pick the best movie.

In the next activity, you'll use formulas to continue to analyze data from past movies.

You'll look at the relationship between budget and revenue to find out how profitable each movie is.

Then, you'll look at individual characteristics for each movie, like the genre, actors, and directors, to find out which characteristics lead to profitable movies.