Fun Stats

You’re killin’ me, smalls

/ kpatterson5 / 2 Comments

Were the 90’s really the mecca for live action kids movies? And how much more profitable are animated movies these days?

kidsmovies_totals
 Note: The PG-13 rating did not exist until half-way through 1984.

kidsmovies_Boxoffice
Curious what caused those huge 2016 numbers? Finding Dory, Zootopia, and Moana.

I haven’t written a post in a while because I tried creating this database of all high school mascots and that got a bit too tedious, had to find too many manually.  Still working on it, hope to finish someday.

I was thinking back to what movies I really enjoyed in my childhood in the 90’s. The Sandlot, Mighty Ducks, Casper, The Big Green, Blank Check, Andre, A League of their Own, The Rookie, Now and Then, Matilda, Home Alone, Heavyweights, Toy Story, Camp Nowhere, Free Willy. The list goes on and on. Notice that they’re all live action, except for Toy Story? The 80’s and 90’s had a ton of good live-action kids movies. Nowadays, it seems like there are way more animated movies and a lot less Mighty Ducks. Were the mid-90’s really the mecca of live action kid movies? I set out to find out if this is really true.

At first, I started combing the internet manually, putting together lists of kids movies per decade. I also wrote SPARQL, the query language for wikipedia, to pull down movies with the genre “children’s film”. I looked at trailers and synopses to determine if a movie could be branded a kid’s movie if it wasn’t obvious to me. There were some tough dilemmas, like Now & Then is rated PG-13 but as an 11-year-old, I loved it and it featured kids around my age. Is that a kids movie? I think so, but the rating disagrees.  What about PG romantic comedies, like Sleepless in Seattle? In the end, this proved too cumbersome, especially considering there are way too many movies in the 1980s and 2000s that I was not familiar with, so I started all over. I resorted to simply copying down lists of movies from the site boxofficemojo. You can get lists per year and rating, so I took down all the G and PG-rated movies for each year, 1982-2017 (1982 was the earliest year using the aforementioned filters).  I then marked which ones were animated, which took a bit of time, but at least it was an unambiguous task, I thought, until I ran into movies like Space Jam, Hop, and the Muppet movies. I decided to label those live action.  Of course, I wouldn’t call all PG movies “kids movies”- there are definitely a lot from the 80s that looked like adult movies to me- but I figure this is good enough criteria to answer my research question without spending a million hours.

The first graph shows simply the number of movies rated G or PG per year, broken up by animated or live action.*  The second shows their box office numbers. As you can see, animated movies are becoming more common and raking in a ton of money for movie studios, while live-action G/PG movies are on the decline. There were 67 live action G/PG movies 1984 and it has slipped a lot since then, with only nine being released in all of 2013! One thing to consider is that the PG-13 rating did not exist until part way through 1984 and something that was G back then wouldn’t necessarily be G now.  The fact that you see a sharp drop off in PG movies after 1984 can attributed partly to this. There was a bit of a peak in the mid 90’s, during the height of my childhood (I was born in 1986), like I suspected.  I grew up on live-action movies and to this day, don’t care as much for animated movies, but I know that’s not true for everyone my age.

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USA Olympians on Instagram

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USA Olympians Ranked by Growth in followers during August
topgrowth

I’m a huge fan of the Olympics and hold a party every time to watch the Opening Ceremonies. I thought it would be fun to see which athletes at the 2016 Rio games had the most social media followers and which ones saw the most growth in followers during the Games. The list above is all the USA Olympians who saw their Instagram follower counts double after the Games were over (only those with at least 4000 followers were included). The list below is the top 20  with the most followers regardless of growth. Male basketball players feature prevalently, not to my surprise. But it was nice to see Serena and Alex Morgan up there in the top 5 along with Simone Biles at #7.

top20totals

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Average Age of Marriage

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I just turned 29 and that got me thinking about how I’m probably now older than the average age of marriage in the US for women (I turned out to be right- it’s 27). So I went googling around and came across this Wikipedia page listing the average age of marriage around the world in many countries. I was pretty surprised at how high the age is for countries like Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark. Men are nearly 36 for their first marriage in Sweden! That’s crazy to me. For women, it’s 33, which is beyond the age of easily being able to have children (many doctors consider pregnant women beyond 35 to have geriatric pregnancies or be in “advanced maternal age”). I have visions in my head of tons of young, single Swedes living up their 20s partying and doing whatever and not settling down.  On the flip side, none of the countries had a very low average. Iran, India and Indonesia were all about 22. China’s average age has been going up and they have to deal with a country full of a disproportionate amount of young men. I found this article about “leftover women”, so despite what you’d think, not all women are easily snatched up. As countries industrialize and women obtain college degrees and enter the workforce, the age has gone up. Are there consequences to this? According to this New York Times article, in general, women who delay marriage have higher incomes, but it’s the opposite for men.  Marrying later leads to stresses from fertility issues, unhealthy babies, and not getting the family that you wanted. Plus by the time you become parents, your parents are really getting up there in years and not as available to help.

I came across this interesting blog post that examines the myth about whether people really did get married very young in the old days.

Check out this map showing the average ages per country. There are lots of other nifty maps to check out as well, like where in the world you can find the most plastic surgeons (spoiler alert: it’s the United States, duh). Not so sure of the accuracy of these maps because when I clicked on World Religions, the map showed Christianity as the majority religion in North Korea, which I kind of doubt.