STAT Wars: The Force Awakens the Box Office

As an analytics firm, we love data visualization and the live stories you can tell with pictures, charts, graphs, and colors. This weekend, a movie came out that nerds of the old and new republic have been waiting for decades – Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The first movie, Star Wars: A New Hope, was released in May of 1977. Nerd deity, George Lucas, ingeniously created a futuristic world that went beyond the limits of our imagination and galaxy. Crazy enough, he started in the middle of the story! Which later spawned and frankly gave life to the “prequel” genre. No one could have anticipated that after selling Lucasfilm to Disney, the legacy would live on in a new set of films.

This series has seen many decades of history. It started long ago, in a galaxy far, far away at a time before the internet and technological revolution. It’s charmed generations and continues to engage adults and children alike.

How did the newest film do at the box office though? We know that times have changed, including inflation since the first Star Wars came out. Budgets have exponentially grown and technology and the global market has changed the game in terms of marketing, making it easier than before to build hype around a movie. Thus, each newer movie has had an edge over its predecessor.

But we thought it might be interesting to compare each movie’s box office success using Tableau Software. Did the force really awaken the box office? See our viz below and toggle the dropdown at the top to see the Domestic Box Office (opening weekend), Domestic Box Office Overall, as well as the Production Budget.

• You can see that on opening weekend, Ep. VII (Force Awakens) murdered all it’s predecessors!
• Budget for Ep VII had by far the largest production budget, but looks like they covered it on just opening weekend!
• Domestic Box Office overall is incomplete, but I think we can agree Ep VII is off to a great start!