Popular Movies in Cinema Today — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

Instructions

Student presentations must have a faculty sponsor.

Abstracts must include a title and a description of the research, scholarship, or creative work. The description should be 150-225 words in length and constructed in a format or style appropriate for the presenter’s discipline.

The following points should be addressed within the selected format or style for the abstract:

A clear statement of the problem or question you pursued, or the scholarly goal or creative theme achieved in your work.
A brief comment about the significance or uniqueness of the work.
A clear description of the methods used to achieve the purpose or goals for the work.
A statement of the conclusions, results, outcomes, or recommendations, or if the work is still in progress, the results you expect to report at the event.

Presenter photographs should be head and shoulder shots comparable to passport photos.

Additional Information

More information is available at carthage.edu/celebration-scholars/. The following are members of the Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Committee who are eager to listen to ideas and answer questions:

Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

Popular Movies in Cinema Today

Name: Christopher Peavy
Major: Business Management
Hometown: Eagle, WI
Faculty Sponsor:
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Course project
Funding: N/A

Abstract

This project explored which movie genres dominated recent US box office sales and which had the highest return on investment in terms of total film cost and total revenues. Data was collected on ten films per year in each of seven genres for a three year period. While no single genre dominated all three years, Action films dominated two of the three. Action films also had the highest revenue relative to costs over the three year period.

The procedure to complete this project:

For this statistics project, I wanted to find out which genre of movies dominated the US box office for the current times. To achieve a good analysis I made sure to collect data from three recent consecutive years (2009, 2010, and 2011). Next, I needed large samples of data (10 movies per year per genre). In determining the issue of the most popular genre, I also needed to know which genres to take my information from (I could not simply use a genre that had little to no data per year and expect to measure it against the others with a standard. So my genres turned out to be: Action/Adventure, Drama, Romance, Comedy, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Family, Horror. Finally, I wanted this data to be somewhat random, that is, I did not think it would be correct to just take 5 movies of a genre in the month of January and find the rest in the remainder of the year. I determined a good method to stick by was to find 2 movies per month per genre and then pick 1 out of almost each month to get a good spread-out sample of 10 movies that represented the particular genre at that point in time. Once all of the data was retrieved, put into graphs, and examined, I decided to find out how the dominant genre’s US box office sales measured up to its estimated budget. I plotted this activity on the far right-hand side of this project (far right hand side of the poster? I don’t understand) and computed the regression and talked about the significance. (last sentence could use some rephrasing.)

Poster file