By Eduardo Osorio
Microsoft is interested in creating a movie studio needs a better understanding of the industry. They need information to help them decide what type of movies they should invest in.
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The Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
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The Movie Database (TMDB)
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Box Office Mojo
Based on popularity, enthusiasm, and profitability. Microsoft should focus on producing these types of movies first.
- Action
- Adventure
- Comedy
- Fantasy We also recommend that Microsoft spends $100 million to $200 million on production budgets. Since the data shows that movies are most profitable in that range.
The data collect gave us information on popularity and profitability of movies with in the last ten years.
Profitability was measured by taking the sum of the domestic gross and foreign gross of each movie, Then subtracting the production budget.
If Microsoft is interested in creating a movie studio. They need to know who their top competitors are. As a new studio they might need to do collaborations with other more established studios in order to make a name for themselves.
| Studio | Total Production Budget | Profitability |
|---|---|---|
| BV | $5,161,200,000 | $18,447,901,369 |
| Fox | $2,087,000,000 | $8,754,500,000 |
| WB | $2,453,000,000 | $8,449,700,000 |
| Uni. | $1,084,000,000 | $8,305,501,019 |
| Sony | $1,440,000,000 | $5,425,600,000 |
Here is a graph showing the correlation between production budget and profitability.
The graph suggests that movies with higher production budgets are more profitable. However, according to the data, movies with a production budget between $100 million and $200 million are the most profitable.
Genre popularity has changed over the years. With the data provided, we graphed genre trends from the last ten years
According to these trends, the genres that are currently gaining popularity are the following:
- Action
- Adventure
- Animation
- Biography
- Comedy
- Fantasy
- Sport
- Thriller
- War
In order to slim down this list, we graphed the total profitability of these genres with in the last ten years.
With this graph were able to see which genres are the most profitable which are as follows:
- Adventure
- Action
- Comedy
- Sci-fi
- Drama
When producing a film the studio has to appeal to both domestic and foreign markets. If a studio makes a film aimed at one more then the other, Then there is a strong possibility that the fill will lose out on revenues.
This chart shows us how foreign Gross compares to domestic gross for the top the most profitable studios. In most cases foreign gross is substantially more then domestic.
Our recommendations to Microsoft is that they invest in action, adventure, comedy, and fantasy movies. Since these are the movies in the spotlight right now. They should spend no more then $200 million for their production budget in order to remain profitable. Finally, they need to appeal to foreign audiences. Perhaps by including actors, writers and directors from other nationalities.
As we conducted our investigation, we noticed that there were considerable amount of movies with very low production budgets that were still substantially profitable. With more time, it would have been interesting to map out the movies with Production budgets between $1 million and $ 50 million along with their respective genres. This would allow us to see which genres are more profitable at low budgets.
