Can Online Reviews Predict the Box Office of a Star Wars Movie?

Gosh it has been awhile since I've posted something, but here I am.  Today I felt like doing correlation coefficients to determine if any particular website of online reviews can predict how well any Star Wars movie will do at the worldwide box office with adjusted grosses.  The data that I'll use comes from ultimatemovierankings.com, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes.  IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes are the biggest sources of movie reviews that I use and what practically everyone else uses.  Ultimate Movie Rankings is where I got the adjusted world wide grosses because IMDB seems to have bought out BoxofficeMojo where I used to look for movie grosses because now you have to sign up for IMDB Pro (and pay money!) to see those grosses.  Ultimate Movie Rankings isn't a very flashy website for this stuff but it is what we got now since this abomination happened. Any who, now let's get to the good stuff.  I'll just show you the data that I've gotten here on this link.

As you can see, I already did the correlation calculations when you look to the very right of the spreadsheet of data.  Each correlation calculation comes from using the data of the Worldwide Boxoffice Adjusted Grosses to each of the Star Wars movie scores from each piece of data that I've gotten from these websites.  If you need to be reminded of what the correlation numbers mean, I'll tell you right now!  If the correlation is at 0.00, that means that there is no correlation whatsoever between the two sets of data.  If the correlation is 1.00, that means that there is a perfect correlation.  The highest correlation that I got was 0.63 when I did a correlation test between the Worldwide Boxoffice Adjusted Grosses to the Rotten Tomatoes Critic Average Scores (out of 10).  Even though that is the highest, it still isn't that good.  I mean, if you got a 63 on a test, it is barely passing but not really good at all.  If we want to see if there is a good correlation, it needs to be between 0.90 and 1.  But none of these cases from these websites show this type of correlation.  What is funniest about this is that the audience user scores have the worst correlations, even though I hear a lot that fans want movie studios to make the movies how they want them to and then they'll perform better.  But of course, this is just a sample of 11 movies that I did.  To get an even more accurate correlation, we need hundreds or even thousands of movies.  Perhaps this is something to consider for any type of movie as well and not just Star Wars movies.

Since I did all of this research, I will give you some interesting data about these Star Wars movies.  For starters, the average Star Wars movie made $1.471 billion dollars worldwide by adjusted boxoffice inflated ticket prices.  When it comes to the Star Wars movies that are then "above average" when it comes to this are:

• The Phantom Menace
• A New Hope
• The Empire Strikes Back
• The Force Awakens.  

For the IMDB Scores (out of 10) is an average of 7.5.  The "above average" for this category (excluding Revenge of the Sith since it is 7.5 and not above it) are:

• Rogue One
• A New Hope
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Return of the Jedi
• The Force Awakens

For the Metacritic Score (out of 100) is an average of 68.1.  The "above average" for this category are:

• A New Hope
• The Empire Strikes Back
• The Force Awakens
• The Last Jedi.

For the RT Critic Score is an average of 77.82.  The "above average" for this category are:

• Revenge of the Sith
• Rogue One
• A New Hope
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Return of the Jedi
• The Force Awakens
• The Last Jedi.

For the RT Audience Score is an average of 75.64.  The "above average" for this category are:

• Rogue One
• A New Hope
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Return of the Jedi
• The Force Awakens
• The Rise of Skywalker

For the RT Critic Score Avg (out of 10) is an average of 7.39.  The "above average" for this category are:

• Rogue One
• A New Hope
• The Empire Strikes Back
• The Force Awakens
• The Last Jedi

For the RT Audience Score (out of 10) is an average of 7.71.  The "above average" for this category are:

• Rogue One
• A New Hope
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Return of the Jedi
• The Force Awakens
• The Rise of Skywalker

According to this, I will now rank all of the Star Wars movies.  Each movie mentioned in a category will get a point that determines how good they are in the "above average" Star Wars movies.

1. A New Hope - 7 points
2. The Empire Strikes Back - 7 points
3. The Force Awakens - 7 points
4. Rogue One - 5 points
5. Return of the Jedi - 4 points
6. The Last Jedi - 3 points
7. The Rise of Skywalker - 2 points
8. Revenge of the Sith - 1 point
9. The Phantom Menace - 1 point

This means that the only Star Wars movies that I guess that are "below average" are Solo: A Star Wars Story and Attack of the Clones.  Now seeing these rankings and seeing what is "below average", it just doesn't feel that right.  A lot of people use IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes to see how well movies are doing.  In the case of Star Wars, they seem to not measure them that well.  Even the best correlation that we had was 0.63 and that's not good still.  To me, I don't think Solo was a below average Star Wars movie and Phantom Menace is only slightly above average because of all the hype it had before everyone saw it literally which made it's box office massive.  So far, it is hard to predict how well any Star Wars movie will do.  The only for sure thing is that the first movie of each trilogy is going to be a box office record breaker.  

I like watching all of them and some more than others.  But of course I think that if you want to judge them overall as films, it makes me think that they are less great if you need books and comic books to explain plot points better.  The Rise of Skywalker would've been better to me if they had just mentioned that Palpatine was a clone in the movie instead of the novel to explain how he's back.  Of course I like lore and books giving us more in depth info about it, but stuff like this needs the movie itself to explain it or even mention it better.  Oh well!  I love Star Wars and I'll see any of them any time.  Except maybe Attack of the Clones.  Only sometimes.  But if it is your favorite movie, I'll just say: