Fanfiction Volume vs. Box Office Receipts
This post was inspired by this semi-recent tweet:
It got me thinking. What is the relationship between box office success and long term “fandom” popularity. Is Avatar an outlier? What films are outliers in the other direction?
So I pulled up some of the top most written about film fandoms on AO3, manually joined that with domestic ticket revenue data provided by boxofficemojo and plotted it.
Fitting a line to this data yields an R-squared of 0.64 which is a reasonable fit for such noisy data.
The first thing I noted looking at the graph is the one huge downward outlier. This turns out to be Repo! The Genetic Opera a cult film which had a very limited theatrical release. This works out to a fic written for every $360 in box office. The other major downward outliers are Newsies and Labyrinth both of which had poor theatrical performance but later became cult classics.
The three heaviest hitters of the dataset are the obvious Marvel Cinematic Universe, Harry Potter and the DC Cinematic Universe (in that order). When a fic referred to an entire movie series I summed all films in the series together to compute the box office total.
One surprising element is that Avatar doesn’t appear as an outlier in this plot. One huge blockbuster just doesn’t compete with the cinematic universes’ box office performance. It sits in a cluster along with the MIB series and the Kung Fu Panda series.
Avatar isn’t even the worst performing film in the dataset I collected. Avatar has $4.3 million in box office returns for every fic but the 300 series and Finding Nemo both have above $5 million. That said I’m only looking at domestic box office. If you factor in international ticket sales where Avatar did especially well (70% of its sales were international) then Avatar leaps ahead by several million per fic.
So generally speaking higher box office returns translates into fics but there’s definitely other factors here. In particular age of the fandom matters. Titanic (another of James Cameron’s films) does particularly poorly with $2.5 million per fic and I speculate that its due to the film’s age. Meanwhile a film like the 1989 Little Mermaid has $380 thousand per fic (though inflation adjustments might slightly level the playing field here).
I would be interested in seeing a more complete analysis of this data with year of release included (though dealing with that with cinematic universes isn’t obvious). You could also plot fic volume over time after the work’s release to see how many fics are written long after a work is out there.
