Sources & Method

This standalone page embeds 2,496 real film records from Movie Dataset 2001-2025.xlsx. Every dot represents a named film. Values are nominal, and the data works offline; poster art and trailer links need a connection.

Which films are included?

• For 2001–2024, 100 films per year are ranked by North American gross within an IMDb-popular extract. This is a sample, not an exhaustive top-100 theatrical chart.
• For 2025, 96 entries from The Numbers’ released-in-year domestic chart were matched after catalog and episodic items were excluded. Selection by gross favors successful theatrical films and affects box-office relationships.
• Gross figures are lifetime totals in their source snapshots, not year-of-release receipts. Release dates come from the source records and may not be North American opening dates.

What is measured?

• 2,318 films have production budgets; 2,406 have opening-weekend grosses; 1,979 have both Rotten Tomatoes scores. Scores, dates and worldwide grosses reflect the different source snapshots recorded in the workbook.
• Marketing budget, total budget, studio/distributor, parent company and film universe have no populated data. No values are estimated to fill those gaps. “Lead production company” is the first production company listed, not a verified distributor.
• The color key prioritizes Animation, Sci-Fi and Horror tags, then uses the first broad genre in the source list. All genre tags are visible on the card. Oscar counts come from a title/year match to the Academy Awards extract; zero means no nomination was matched.

Data adjustments

• Streaming-first releases — KPop Demon Hunters and Glass Onion (Netflix), Soul (Disney+) and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run (Paramount+ and Netflix) premiered mainly on streaming, so their box office covers only a limited cinema run. They are drawn as rings and left out of box-office trend lines, r values and outliers.
• Streaming outside North America — Uncut Gems, Isn’t It Romantic, Shaft (2019), News of the World and Love and Monsters played North American cinemas but premiered on Netflix elsewhere, so international box office is left blank rather than shown as $0.
• Mixed-source grosses — where domestic and worldwide grosses come from different sources (mostly 2025 films), international gross (worldwide minus domestic) is not reliable and is left blank.

Directors and cast

• Search a director or actor to see how their films performed, or pick two to compare them and see the films they made together. Cast means the first five billed names in the source data. Co-directed films count for each director.
• The sample holds only each year’s top-grossing films, so flops and small releases are mostly missing. Hit rates and medians therefore look better than a full career would. A hit here means worldwide gross of at least 2.5× the production budget, a common rough break-even rule once marketing and cinema shares are counted.

How to read the charts

• Domestic means the North American theatrical market, not US-only. Worldwide is recorded worldwide theatrical gross. Box office is ticket revenue, not studio profit. Gross ÷ production budget is a ratio, not return on investment.
• Pearson’s r and the least-squares trend use films with both selected values recorded. Dollar measures and positive counts use logarithms. Outlier “expected” values describe the fitted trend for the visible sample, not a forecast.
• Current audience scores and later awards cannot explain earlier box-office results. The years and historical events shown are context, not causal evidence.

Data sources

• Film list, budgets, grosses and IMDb ratings, 2001–2024 — Top 500–600 movies of each year, 1960–2024, compiled from IMDb by raedaddala on Kaggle (the “IMDb popular film extract”).
• 2025 films and grosses — The Numbers, domestic box office for films released in 2025 (Nash Information Services).
• Supplementary budgets and release details — TMDB movies, daily updates by alanvourch on Kaggle, drawn from The Movie Database (TMDB). This guide uses TMDB data but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
• Rotten Tomatoes scores, 2001–2020 — Rotten Tomatoes movies and critic reviews dataset by stefanoleone992 on Kaggle.
• Rotten Tomatoes scores, 2021–2024 — Dataset for Rotten Tomatoes movies, 1970–2024, shared on Reddit’s r/datasets.
• Academy Award nominations and wins — The Oscar Award dataset by unanimad on Kaggle, from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ awards records.
• Film pages — each film card links to its source record and to its IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes pages.
• Poster art and trailers — each film’s IMDb ID is matched on Wikidata to its English Wikipedia article, whose lead image is shown as the poster (credited on each card; posters remain the property of their studios and are shown for identification). Trailer links use the YouTube video ID Wikidata records as the film’s trailer, or a YouTube search when none is recorded. These are looked up when a card opens.
• Timeline context bands — Great Recession dates from the NBER U.S. business-cycle chronology; the COVID-19 pandemic as declared by the World Health Organization; the 2023 Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
• Compiled workbook — Movie Dataset 2001-2025.xlsx, assembled for this guide from the sources above (research snapshot September 2026).

See each film’s source links for provenance and data gaps. Titles, ratings and figures remain the property of their respective sources.