I happened to be stumbling around the web when I chanced upon an incredibly cool web site where you can view a graphical representation of the movie box office charts. The visualization is based on what is called steam graphs and it is a really cool way to see how a movie fares from week to week.
It’s actually kind of hard to describe the graphs. Basically, each movie shows as a colored bar that you can track from week to week and the colors change from week to week so you can see which films have good legs and which ones fall fast. It also gives you the actual total amount grossed for each film for each week.
You can view the charts for 2005-2008 and the current year is updated on a weekly basis. There’s also visualizations for the years 1998 and 1988. I thought it was pretty interesting to look at 1988. I can remember seeing a lot of those movies, but I didn’t remember some of the details.
For instance, I didn’t know that Die Hard opened at #3 with $7.1M behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Coming To America and never actually made it to number 1 on the charts. I also didn’t remember that year as being the year that Schwarzenegger’s Red Heat and Twins both came out or that Friday the 13th Part VII, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, They Live, and Child’s Play all opened at number one during the year.
Fun stuff. Check it out right here.
Ah… 1988 - that was a good year… except, of course, for Twins.