Graph: Movie title length vs box office success

Movie about 13 years agoby

I have to type various titles as part of my job at GeekTyrant. Some titles are long, some are short, some have hyphens and some have semicolons. I just returned from Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and am eagerly awaiting Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Captain America: The First Avenger. The full titles of Borat and Dr. Strangelove are extremely long titles, but have been successes. On the flipside, movies like Hop and Rio have had great success at the box office. Have you ever wondered if a movie's length has any correlation to it's success at the box office?

Mark Lee from OverthinkingIt.com decided to find an answer to that question and created some handy-dandy charts to help explain his findings. Lee took the 150 highest grossing films of the last ten years and plotted them according to the number of letters in their title.

As you can see from the graph above, the answer is not really. Movie title length has very little correlation to box office success. Equal amounts of long titled films and short titled films experience box office gold. titles as long titles that experienced success. In the next graph, Lee plotted the same movies based on how many letters are in each to show what the most common movie title lengths are.

In the final graph, Lee checked to see if the length of a movie’s title has anything to do with its quality by plotting them with the IMDB rating. As you can see below, there is no real correlation.

Here is how Lee summed up his findings:

Now, I know we’re all hoping for some sort of mind-blowing statistical discovery in movie title lengths, but after running through multiple regressions/data slices, I failed to find anything of note. No significant correlations could be found between movie title length and a variety of variables: box office take, MPAA rating, IMDB rating all turned up laughably poor results.

I think even though film titles seem to get longer, people naturally change the length when referring to it verbally an especially on the various types of social media. What are your thoughts on his findings?