Summer Movies: Does Quality Make a Difference at the Box Office?

I took the top twenty grossing films of the past summer, which combined brought in more than $3.2 billion during a period of recession, and compared them to their Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes scores to see if there was a connection between their rating of quality (the Metacritic or RT score) and how much money they generated. In other words, as the film's quality increased, did the box office also increase? Or was it the other way around? Was it important for people to see a good movie--or would they be content with mindless summer fare?

The results say that there was a weak and insignificant relationship between a movie's critical acclaim and how much it makes at the box office (r=.35 for you stat nerds). Movies like Transformers 2, which got a score of 19 on Rotten Tomatoes, for example, earned huge box office ($399 million, to be exact). Good movies like Star Trek and Up made some box office jack, but there were enough Wolverines and G.I. Joes on the list to make it almost a wash. People apparently did not necessarily want to see bad movies, but the movie's quality (at least as judged by critics) was not a factor in whether they decided to go see it or not.

By the way, the Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes scores correlate very highly (r=.94), so it doesn't really matter which scores you use. Metacritic's average score for the top summer movies was 57, while Rotten Tomatoes gave them a 56 on average. Rotten Tomatoes tends to give more extreme scores, giving well-reviewed films higher numbers and lower-rated movies worse ratings. In the end, they all average out about the same, but the rich get richer and the poor get poorer on RT. For example, Star Trek earned a Metacritic score of 83, while RT gave it a 95. On the other end, The Ugly Truth got a 28 on Metacritic and a 15 on RT.

The bottom line for our question of whether quality makes a difference, is no, it does not. Good movies are not necessarily rewarded with bigger audiences and more money. We might complain about the loud, noisy, mindless movies of the summer, but it looks like we get what we want.