I just finished analyzing data scraped from Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes, and it was an eye opening experience. To begin, I wanted to determine the impact Rotten Tomatoes’ critic’s score had on the total box office gross of a movie. I became interested in the affect of critic reviews in general and Rotten Tomatoes in particular after “Batman Vs Superman” received a poor rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So how much more could that movie had made if it had scored higher with the critics?

After preforming a linear regression on the data it became apparent that total gross on the opening day is a better indicator of total box office gross than Rotten Tomatoes score. That doesn’t mean that Rotten Tomatoes Scores is not an indicator. It can be; it’s just very small compared to the total opening gross for a movie.

Of course if you want your movie to make $1 billion every little detail matters, so paying attention to movie quality as determined by Rotten Tomatoes and other ratings aggregators could help eek out that additional $20 million that puts you over the edge.