Highest Grossing Movies Since 2001

What studio made your favorite movie? How about your top five? Don't feel bad if you cannot remember, the truth is that hardly anyone can. However, there is a complicated and cutthroat business behind every film and it often dictates the type of movies the industry produces. This viz details the Top 100 movies each year since 2001 (so, 1000 total). Click around and explore- there are some patterns that may surprise you.

As you can see in the first visualization, the major studios have leapfrogged eachother every year for the past decade. The impetus to cut costs and increase revenue are enormous. Oddly, studios are skipping cheaper, smaller productions in favor of enormous, billion dollar franchises like Avatar. This trend can be seen in the second visualization- as the decade has gone on there have been more and more $100M movies, at significantly higher average grosses.

Mark labels: Although you can tooltip over any item that you are interested in on this viz, having mark labels on likely points of interest makes the analytical process much easier.