Visualization: movie box office data

The New York Times site has an intriguing interactive visualization of box office data for Hollywood films from 1986 to 2007. The height shows the weekly box office revenue and the area of the shape and color represents the film's total gross in the US. One thing it shows is that Oscar nominees built popularity over time while Blockbusters are quick hits. For more insight into the visualization, check out Nathan's post about it at the Flowing Data blog. Link to NYT, Link to Flowing Data (Thanks, Mike Love!)

• [FineTuning]

  This reminds me of LastGraph, a cool visualization tool for your Last.fm listening habits. It looks very similar.
  It can be found at http://lastgraph.aeracode.org/

  You may want to see a screenshot of the result here:
  http://finetuning.free.fr/wp-content/lastgraph.jpg

• [Rob Cockerham]

  Man, that is awesome. I love that they used the area above and below the horizontal. That is brilliant.

• [ElTimbalino]

  What is most revealing is the segment for ‘Juno.’ Most of the other segments spike quickly and then trail away at varying speeds to nothing.

  Juno spiked very slowly and then found a steady trail and still remains the most significant band at the end of the graph.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets up again in the next holiday season.

  I wonder if the amount of money spent marketing a movie could be overlaid in a meaningful way.

• [Doug Nelson]

  They should track ticket sales, not BO dollars

• [Takuan]

  you need a real time graphic that shows commenting/reading traffic on each thread