The Numbers Turns 20: Database Census Report
October 19, 2017
The Numbers celebrates is 20th anniversary this week and as we previously stated, the site has grown a lot over those 20 years. How big has it grown? Let’s look at some of the stats.
There are a total of 29,993 movies in our database, although by the time you read this, we will have likely crossed the 30,000 mark, as several films are added each day. If we used a conservative estimate of 100 minutes per movie, it would take over five years and eight months to watch every movie in our database, if you watch them continuously. Treat this task as a full time job and it would take nearly 25 years. There are almost 800 franchises containing just over 2,200 films with the MCU comprising just over 1% of the total films, although it feels like more. There are also plenty of keywords we use to categorize movies. There are 1,730 of them, ranging from the incredibly common ones like Dysfunctional Family, to the more esoteric ones, like Character’s Journey Shown on Map. That’s a personal favorite of mine.
The number of people in our database is even more impressive, as there are nearly 140,000 people. This is more people than live in Cedar Rapids. (Great movie.) These people have been very busy, with 340,000 combined acting and technical roles in those aforementioned 30,000 movies. It was an interesting year for actors, as it looks like Samuel L. Jackson will come in first place on the highest grossing stars, ending Jennifer Lawrence’s four-year winning streak.
A more in-depth look at star power comes from our Bankability Index. While the highest grossing stars list rewards actors who are in several midlevel or bigger hits over a three-year period, the Bankability Index looks at the average movie an actor, or producer, or composer worked on and calculates what their value is to the average production. This explains why eight of the top ten people in this list make less than two films a year. Kevin Feige is the first person on this list making more than 2 films a year. Matt Damon is the highest on the list with an average of more than 3 films per year and he placed 30th.
In order to build a Bankability Index, we need a lot of financial information. Our financial databases are some of the largest on our site with 466,000 combined daily and weekend chart entries. That’s just for the domestic numbers. If you add in the international numbers, that climbs to 648,000 entries. It’s at the home market where things get really unwieldy. There are a combined 1.83 million entries in the DVD and Blu-ray sales charts. The only database that’s larger is the Bankability Index at 4.96 million entries.
The site has collected a nearly unfathomable amount of data over the past 20 years and we are committed to keep the site growing in the future.
Filed under: Analysis, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Matt Damon, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Feige