Welcome back to my final Dashboard Week blog. Day 5 brought an exciting dataset about Pixar movies! We received 6 Excel files, covering the films themselves, their genre(s), awards won, box office earnings, the crew behind the scenes, and the public’s response. With only 28 movies (as of now), the dataset wasn’t extensive, yet there were many options to explore.
Approach
I decided to focus on the public’s response to each movie, analysing ratings from various critic sites like Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and Metacrtiic. I was interested to see how these sites compared to one another regarding their reviews of Pixar films. Whilst the dataset was rather clean, I realised I needed to start in Alteryx to modify the data structure so that it would be in an appropriate format for analysis:
From here, I made quick work of creating a scatterplot of all Pixar movies colour-coded by the critic site. I spent the majority of my time after this supplementing this chart with additional information and interactivity to enhance user experience. I am still in the process of completing these final touches.
Insights
The three critic sources demonstrated different trends across the full range of movies. For starters, Rotten Tomatoes had the overall highest average rating, placing more movies than any other source above 90%. On the other hand, IMDb rates movies lower overall, with a highest rating of 8.4/10 (WALL-E and Coco) and lowest rating of 6.1/10 (Lightyear). As for Metacritic, their ratings are more distributed yet close to the average of IMDb, having a highest rating of 96 (Ratatouille) and lowest rating of 57 (Cars 2).
Red = Rotten Tomatoes, Yellow = IMDb (score multiplied by 10 for standardisation), Black = Metacritic
So why might this be the case? well, the number of reviews from each source that contribute to a movie’s overall score gives us an idea. For instance, IMDb has way more reviews than any other source. Moreover, anyone can rate on IMDb, meaning scores are easily influenced by fanbases and review bombing. It may be possible that the high number of reviews is helping mitigate strong positive and negative audience sentiments, contributing to the smaller range of scores. Meanwhile, Rotten Tomatoes uses an entirely different scoring system which affects how its rating should be interpreted. Unlike IMDb, scores from Rotten Tomatoes are essentially a percentage of positive reviews from critics. Even if a review stated “the movie was alright…”, this would be functionally equivalent to a review stating “this movie transcends modern animation”. Therefore, Rotten Tomatoes is better for quick “good or bad” judgements based on consensus approval.
Thank you so much for reading my last Dashboard Week blog! If you would like to check out what the critics had to say, click here to go to my dashboard. If you missed my last dashboard week blog, you can read that here.
