I have some ideas at beginning of the semester. When we brainstorm about the final project, I want to do something that can connect the economy and humanities, because I am an economy major student. After I understand more about digital humanities, I think who not do a project that can demonstrate how economic trends affect the movie industry. The first idea is crazy because I want to see if the economic trend has an effect on movie post. Here is the idea, I assume all else equal because the whole society is in a downturn economy like 2009. The movie poster maker may use darker colors subconsciously. And in a good year, the movie post maker may use bright colors. In order to get the data, I screenshot the action movie post that movie released in 2007, 2009 and 2011 in north America. If you want to check the website that I used, please click here.

This is a simple view to my screenshot. The next step is using the Imageplot to analyze the picture. And plug data to the Excel and some simple function. I got the graph.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It really shocked me because I thought this could not happen. So I try to find a peer-reviewed article that can prove my theory. So I want to keep going and leave this graph as a ‘not peer-reviewed fun fact’.

The next theory I want to test if the downturn economy trend will affect the box office. So I found a website called The Numbers, if you want to check the website, please click here. And I upload my Excel sheet at Google sheet, please click here to see.

After all the work, I found out the average box office was not affected by great recession.

The box office even get a boost at 2009. I didn’t expect this result, so I try to find a research article to prove this theory. And I found it at JSTOR. The article‘s writer give evidence that shows only personal disposable income have little affect people demanding cinema. So what is the situation of personal disposable income at 2009?

We can see at beginning of 2009, the personal disposable income was not decreased a lot, combine the result form the article, the movie industry was not striked makes sense. Porbably because people have more time to consume, because of the unemployment rate increased. So it is possible that people will have more chance to go to cinema.