In the last couple of weeks, I have looked at a number of topics around movie budgets.

To complete this trilogy, I am turning to the connection between a movie’s budget and the amount of money it collects at the box office.  Specifically, I’ll be looking at the “Domestic” gross, i.e. all the money spent on movie tickets in US and Canadian cinemas.

I’ll be using my dataset of 5,713 feature films released domestically for which I could find a public budget figure.  See the Notes section for details and caveats of budget information. To measure the extent to which the budget and box office gross are correlated, I’ll be using the Pearson correlation coefficient.

A coefficient of minus one means they’re perfectly negatively …

Acting is a strange profession, with many contradictions.

• The job officially requires no qualifications but actors are expected to train to a high level in a wide variety of skills.
• Good actors convince audiences that they are the character (rather than an actor pretending) and yet top actors have loyal fanbases keen to see the specific actor who’s doing the pretending.
• It’s nominally a meritocratic industry but most successful actors are coincidentally thin and attractive with great hair.

As regular readers will know, I have recently built a dataset of all working actors in the UK using data these performers have published about themselves in their professional profiles. Today, I thought it would be interesting to look at how the pool of professional UK actors compares …