Explore the Data for Recent Movies

In this video, you will navigate the movie data spreadsheet and prepare to visualize the data to identify patterns.

If you have not already opened the movie data spreadsheet that your group member shared with you, open it now.

This spreadsheet gives you lots of information about recently released movies.

In each row is information about one movie.

In the columns are: the release date, title, a URL for a Wikipedia article about the movie, the genre, subgenre, and directors, the top five cast members, the movie budget, or how much it cost to make the movie, and the box office revenue, or how much people spent to see the movie in theaters.

To start, get a better sense of what is in the spreadsheet.

Sort the data by genre, director, or actors to compare movies.

Or sort the sheet by title to find your favorite films.

There is a lot of data in this sheet! Looking at the data can tell you some things, like which movie made the most money, or which movie cost the most to make.

But if you want to understand a pattern or trend, like which genres make the most money, then you'll need to do a deeper analysis.

To help identify patterns and get new insights, visualize the data using charts and graphs.

Charts and graphs help you see the distribution of data and the relationships between numbers.

In this case, they also help you test your hypotheses about successful movies.

A histogram, for example, depicts the frequency of numbers in a data set.

In this activity, you will use a histogram to depict typical movie budgets and box office revenues.

Being able to see the data can help you determine: What is a reasonable movie budget?

Ten million dollars?

A 100 million dollars?

How are movie budgets distributed?

Do most cost between one and 20 million dollars?

Or do they cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce?

A scatter plot shows the relationships between data on x- and y-axes.

Scatter plots show how one variable relates to another.

In this case, you can use a scatter plot to show the relationship between movie budget and box office returns.

Does spending more to produce a movie lead to bigger box office revenues?

For this activity, each person in your group will produce one of these graphs.

Discuss with your group and decide who will be responsible for each graph.

Then, have each group member watch the corresponding video linked on this page.

For example, if you are in charge of creating the Budget versus Box Office Revenue scatter plot, you should only watch the video for that topic.

When you have finished creating your graph, check in on your group members and help them finish.

When you have all finished creating your graphs, move on to the next page to continue the activity.

Now, it's your turn: Decide who will explore and visualize: movie budgets, box office revenue, and the relationship between budget and box office revenue.

Watch the video, linked on this page, that corresponds with the graph you are responsible for creating.

When you finish, check in with your group members.

Then, when all your group members are done, move on to the next video to explore more relationships between the data.