Stats at the Movies

The article is talking about a movies Rotten Tomato rating and how it compares to its actual gross sales. Brendan Bettinger is saying how some times the Rotten Tomato rating is spot on with the movies domestic box office sales, like the Transformers movie had a rating of 35% and had sales of $350 million where Warrior had a rating of 83% and it's sales were just over $13 million. But there where several other factors to consider and that's just what he did, Bettinger figured out the top five contributing factors to a movies gross sales and included those in a formula with the Rotten tomato rating to get the movies gross sales. In conclusion Bettinger says that positive reviews equal financial success. Say someone likes a movie, then they will go and tell people about it and those people will have a higher chance of going to see that movie and vis versa with a bad movie.

My thoughts on this article is that overall it had some pretty interesting things to say about how to relate certain things to a movie's gross sales, most people wouldn't even put a thought into it. And Bettinger shows that not one thing contributes to the results, that there are many factors involved and he took the time to figure those factors out and put them into a formula and his formula is almost spot on the movie's gross sales, I know I would never have the patience to do that, but find it cool that he put an everyday thing such as going to the movies, into statistics.

In the article it has several things relating to what we are currently learning in AP Stats class right now. Things such as, Bettinger made a scatter plot of a movies rating versus their gross sales, with those points he drew in a line of best fit which shows that there was a strong positive correlation, but what is the correlation. Bettinger found out the slope which was .68 to also prove that there is a strong positive correlation between the two but it wasn't a perfect correlation so there are obviously other factors involved in the movies gross sales.

This article is also involving stats that we have yet to learn such as figuring out what the other factors are and including them with all the other factors. We have just so far learned how to deal with one factor and how much that one factor relates.

The movie Moneyball came out in 2011 and based on the formula; GROSS= -80+0.6xRT+0.5xBUDGET+0.025xTHEATERS+50xSEQUEL+20xPG13. Moneyball's RT rating was 95%, budget was $50 million, theaters was unknown so we went with the number Bettinger used which was 3450, this movie isn't a sequel and the movie is PG13. The predicted gross sales is $27 million but I'm pretty sure I put the numbers in wrong, I was confused on what to put for PG13 and theaters so I'm pretty sure my results are wrong, that actual gross sales were over $110 million. A movie that's coming out in three months is Les Misérables but it doesn't have a rating so we can't really predict the gross sales, we are missing too much information to do so.