Data Science Mod 1 Project
Prompt: Microsoft sees all the big companies creating original video content, and they want to get in on the fun. They have decided to create a new movie studio, but the problem is they don’t know anything about creating movies. They have hired you to help them better understand the movie industry. Your team is charged with doing data analysis and creating a presentation that explores what type of films are currently doing the best at the box office. You must then translate those findings into actionable insights that the CEO can use when deciding what type of films they should be creating.
Methodology: The following analysis was drawn from 8 different Excel files, which contained different datasets regarding films’ budgets, gross profits, popularity and more. The sources for these datasets include IMDB, The Movie Database and Box Office Mojo. For this analysis, visualizations and calculations were executed using multiple Python libraries. These include Pandas, NumPy, and MatPlotLib.
For this analysis, I utilized the CSV files provided in order to explore three questions. 1) What are the most popular films? 2) What are the most lucrative films? And finally 3) What are the most expensive films?
When analyzing the most popular films (The Movie Data Base), they all fell into three major categories: Super Hero movies, Well-Known Series (LOTR, Star Wars, etc.), and Children’s movies. The top 5 most popular films consisted of “Avengers: Infinity Wars”, “John Wick”, “Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse”, “The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies” & “The Avengers”.
Among the most lucrative films (Box Office Mojo), 100% of them also fell into the three categories found among the most popular movies. Though this may seem unsurprising, it is important to clearly show that there is a pattern between how popular a film is and how much money it brings in.
Finally, I explored the most expensive films and found that, yet again, these movies fell into the same three categories. The top six films with the highest production budgets are: “Avatar”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”, “Dark Phoenix”, “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Star Wars Ep. VII: The Last Jedi”.
Unfortunately, because Microsoft does not own the intellectual property for any major film series or super hero, it will be very difficult for them to create a movie that competes with the most popular ones. In addition, it is extremely expensive to create a top movie that can be reliably successful. Finally, despite Microsoft having the sufficient capital to make competitive films, there is a significant opportunity cost to moving in a new direction
It is my recommend that Microsoft does not get involved in creating new movie content, nor streaming because it is too expensive and risky to take the chance. Rather, Microsoft should continue spending capital on trying to improve their other services that are already dominant, such as GitHub, Windows, Teams, etc.
