Since you can see the film industry as a kind of mirror of society, we wanted to know on the occasion of the season which topics Christmas is typically embedded in films - and how that has changed over the years. To do this, we filtered all movie titles with the words Xmas, Christmas and Christmas from the IMDB database and used this data source to analyze all TV and cinema films since 1910.
The first exciting finding is that the genre of 'comedy' has grown ever stronger over the years and has secured a seemingly uncatchable first place in the last 10 years.
The reason why Christmas and comedy are ever closer together allows a wide range of interpretation. We don't want to speculate and leave the deliberations to everyone. In any case, we think that a little humor and a laugh are never out of place and therefore see it as a positive development đ
In any case, it is certain that the film industry in Hollywood is also data-driven: At the end of the day, the 'box office results control which films are produced for which genres.
Additional findings are derived from further analyses: From the end of the 1990s, Christmas films obviously became more important in industry and after TV productions overtook movie theaters due to the advent of television in the 1950s, movies have recently caught up with television productions. Would you like to analyse for yourself? Let's go!
Finally, we have compared the proportion of different genres and apart from the fact that 'comedy' consistently plays a dominant role here too, it can be stated that 'family' as a genre in Christmas films has taken on an ever less important role over time, while Christmas - admittedly rather unexpectedly - has taken on a subordinate but fixed place in the genres of 'adult' and 'horror' in recent decades. Click here for the interactive map with an annual list of the top rankings and top votes in the respective categories.
All data analyses, data visualizations and animation were carried out with Tableau software.
Inspirations: Ewe Zi Yi, Bo McCready and Tableau Cinema Tour
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