Percentage of top grossing US films by decade that depict killing

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/08/percentage-of-top-grossing-us-films-by.html

by calvinf • 16 years ago

47 42 16 years ago

blog.jgc.org

sabj• 16 years ago

What will happen after 100%?

Tichy2• 16 years ago

Erasure of social media presences?

code_duck3• 16 years ago

What does that mean? Scoble massacred in 3D?

mrkurt• 16 years ago

Big budgets mean big ticket sales. They also mean action. Thus, killing.

protomyth3• 16 years ago

Let's look at the top 10 (I will use US sales): Avatar (2009) - Yep, Titanic (1997)- Yep, The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep, Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep, Spider-Man (2002) - Yep, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep

So 9 for 10

pyre• 16 years ago

I count 8:

  Avatar (2009) - Yep
  Titanic (1997) - Yep
  The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep
  Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep
  Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope
  E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope
  Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep
  Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep
  Spider-Man (2002) - Yep
  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep

diiq• 16 years ago

As martijn points out in the comments, no conclusions can be drawn without data about the pool of all movies.

If it makes you feel better about the world, actual murders per capita is not significantly higher now than it was in the 1960's; I guess we've all figured out that life lessons don't come from blockbuster movies --- just fun explosions.

anamax5• 16 years ago

> actual murders per capita is not significantly higher now than it was in the 1960's

As of 2010, US murder rates are significantly higher than they were in 1960. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

Violent crime increased significantly in the 60s, 70s and 80s, peaking about 1990. Since then they've dropped somewhat, but we're still at somewhere around 1975 levels.

CapitalistCartr• 16 years ago

The actual article you linked to says, "Overall, the crime rate in the U.S. was the same in 2004 as in 1969, with the homicide rate being roughly the same as in 1966." As the subject is the homicide rate, that seems the most relevant datum.

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

What is there to conclude, other than that people are more tolerant of killing being portrayed in films? After 1980, there's an inverse correlation between the frequency of murder or violent crime in the US and depiction of killing in film - the former goes down while the latter continues to increase. (http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm)

callmeed• 16 years ago

It would be interesting to see if a similar curve exists for movies depicting sex (not necessarily nudity).

pchristensen• 16 years ago

Wow, I got it totally wrong. When I read this in my RSS, I read "firms" instead of films and I was wondering what all these businesses were doing portraying killing.

Then when I read the title correctly on HN, I remembered the graph going downward and thought it was weird that films were showing less killing. I clicked through and was surprised to see that the x-axis was descending chronological order.

So now that I finally get the graph, let me throw out a WAG: with the end of the military draft, the almost complete departure of workers from agriculture, and increasing safety in society, violence of any form and especially death is not a real part of most peoples' lives. It is therefore fair game for fantasy and storytelling because there is little negative emotional experience attached to it, but there is a high degree of novelty.

thetrumanshow• 16 years ago

I was expecting the graph to descend chronologically myself. It seemed to me that every other movie that I remember from 80s and early 90s were slasher films (Krueger, 13th, Critters, Steven King movies). Now, its romantic comedies left and right.

... or maybe I just got married.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Certain parts of our society have been rushing headlong toward the ideal infantilization / dis-empowerment of the individual, toward utter dependency on the police and the state for protection from violence, poverty, etc. As a personal connection to self-reliance, self-defense, weapons, firearms, and indeed violence becomes increasingly taboo it also becomes increasingly potent (see also: the draw and power of sex in puritanical society), and thus that much greater of a draw for entertainment.

drawkbox• 16 years ago

Yeh same here. Typically graph x-axis are time, totally threw me off.

So seeing that in reverse I was like "Well because we have more family and less Rated R movies nowadays that are blockbusters". Even rated R movies are not the same as the top grossing one is 'Passion of the Christ'.

Not sure what is worse graphs with time in the wrong direction or that more family movies are being made now with killing in them.

gojomo• 16 years ago

Can similar percentages be calculated for cursing, sex, blasphemy, atomic-mutated monsters? (At least one of those probably peaked in the late 50s.)

zokier• 16 years ago

Could some correlation be with average age of movie-goers?

cellularmitosis• 16 years ago

my brain wants very badly for the data to flow chronologically from left to right, rather than its current arrangement.

pvg• 16 years ago

It's a silly and misleading graph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

Alternatively watch something like Howard Hughes's Hell's Angels (1930)

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

It is lots of fun reading through the pre-Code movie synopses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Face_(film)

Sex and violence are not some kind of radical new idea. The shape of the OP's graph is almost certainly caused by the censors of the mid-20th century.

shrikant• 16 years ago

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might enjoy my travel book for people interested in science and technology: The Geek Atlas

Is that a boilerplate footer for every blog post? Because I didn't really see the connection between gore in movies and the book :)

twp• 16 years ago

The lesson taught in almost every movie is that your problems are only permanently solved by the death of your action antagonist. Even kids' movies have this lesson, e.g. A Bug's Life where the bad-guy grasshopper is eaten by a bird. There are few movies where the action antagonist does not die, and these invariably involve morally ambiguous lead characters (e.g. The Dark Knight).

It's shame that more conciliatory outcomes are not considered. And you wonder about youth violence, but if this is the message taught by every film what do you expect?

P.S. counter examples please!

hernan7• 16 years ago

Heck, even The Flintstones had to kill the bad guy.

machrider• 16 years ago

> And you wonder about youth violence, but if this is the message taught by every film what do you expect?

The facts don't bear this out, despite how often it's repeated. Real world violence is not proportional to violence in movies (or video games for that matter).

tmsh• 16 years ago

I think this gets at the distance between US culture, as it were, and the realities of violence. War is not the only source of violence. But it is a big one, which affects the entire culture pretty significantly.

So the 70s correspond to Vietnam. And the 40s correspond to WWII. Today, we also have wars. But we are somehow increasingly disconnected from the realities of what that means.

Anyway, it's a nice chart. But if you ever watch old movies right after WWII (in the 40s, early 50s), you can almost feel the trepidation around anything but those undervalued, safe moral environments. In some ways, it's a more mature audience / understanding -- it's more focused. But because a lot of the country has seen real horrors, it seems like now they crave some kind of careful normalcy (which doesn't have much violence). Perhaps the 70s also had that incentive. A lot of social change and some violence in the late 60s might've prompted it. Or, alternatively, people actually might've believed in non-violence for a while, and that might've stimulated other subjects.

I don't know. But obviously, according to the chart, it's a self-perpetuating phenomenon. So this can be explained by saying that US culture (perhaps increasingly in the form of high grossing films), left to its own status quo momentum, gradually disconnects us from the realities of violence.

MC27• 16 years ago

I tend to think modern US blockbusters, are heavily influenced by special effects rather than characters, which usually means killing lots of stuff.

afterburner• 16 years ago

So more lenient movie moral codes wrt censorship and larger budgets for action, combined with a growing expertise in stunts and fight choreography, and a growing movie industry eager to entice audiences into theatres with blockbuster escapist theatre, result in a greater percentage?

There, I drew my own conclusion. Provided the data is true.

mhb• 16 years ago

How did the author know which depict killing?

code_duck3• 16 years ago

So, killing animals that can't "speak" doesn't count? That's odd, I'd pay good money to see people slaughtering those obnoxious anthropomorphic CG animals Hollywood is so in love with.

Percentage of top grossing US films by decade that depict killing

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