Brandwatch Bulletin #62: The Internet’s Favorite Movies

How many have you seen?

Welcome to the end of the week. Today’s subject is movies as we work attempt to find out which movie the online world loves the most.

Let’s get to it.

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An online trip to the theater

After finding out the internet’s favorite composer a couple of weeks ago, we’re doing the same with a new topic: movies.

The film industry has been hit hard by the pandemic, with productions halted and cinemas closed. So we thought this would be a good time to take a look at movies, and get people excited about returning to theaters.

First, we needed to create a list of movies to analyze. We’ll be clear now that this is just for fun, so we haven’t looked at every movie ever made.

Instead we took the top 20 movies on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb to get a list of 40 films. We then plugged them into our AI-powered Search tool, and collected data going back to July 2020.

The beauty of using Brandwatch Search is its clever use of entities for queries. This means, for example, that our AI technology will only collect mentions of the film Dunkirk, and will skip other meanings of the word.

Now to the data.

Let’s see which of these films generated the most discussion online to begin.

Black Panther sits way out in front, although Wonder Woman has a very strong showing too. Why is this? For one, it helps that they’re relatively recent movies and so fresh in people’s minds. They’re also both part of franchises that can keep the conversation going.

Black Panther has another reason for being top. In August 2020, the film’s lead actor Chadwick Boseman sadly passed away. Unsurprisingly this contributed significantly to the conversation, with 84k mentions referencing the actor and Black Panther. In comparison, Wonder Woman’s lead actor, Gal Gadot, was mentioned only 10k times.

Of course getting the most mentions doesn’t make your movie the best by any means. To try to figure out which of the movies is the internet’s favorite, we turn to sentiment analysis.

For this, we simply removed the neutral mentions, and subtracted the negative mention percentage value from the positive mention one. In other words, it’s a similar approach to working out a politician’s net approval.

Here are the movies that topped the list on this metric.

We end up with a very exciting mix of the old and new, with films spanning a range of genres. The oldest film on the list is the noir classic The Third Man which was released in 1949, while the newest is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Interestingly, the latter includes a parody noir character, creating a vague link between the two films.

It seems like animated films are particularly popular online, with two taking the top spots, and Coco, a 2017 Pixar film, coming first with a net sentiment of 48%.

We also looked at the movies which generated the most emotional responses. To do this, we ranked the films by the proportion of their mentions that were categorized by a certain emotion and excluded any mention that couldn’t be categorized by emotion. This meant we found the films associated most with joy and sadness etc.

Joy: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (54%)
Sadness: Inside Out (67%)
Anger: Get Out (32%)
Fear: Get Out (18%)
Disgust: The Shape of Water (25%)
Surprise: Wonder Woman (31%)

We will admit that this is a very rough and ready analysis, as some films can generate lots of conversation that isn’t necessarily about the quality of the film itself. Having said that, we reckon this is a solid list, and an excellent tool for when you can’t figure out what to watch but happen to have Brandwatch tools to hand.

Have a great movie night!

What should we cover next?

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Thanks for reading

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team

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