Boy vs Girl Marvel Movies?
Purpose:
To
investigate what, if any, Marvel (MCU) movies males prefer more than females.
Source(s):
I used
the Wikipedia list of MCU films Wikipedia page.
I
scraped most IMDB ratings mid-2019, but manually added in the post-2019 movies last
week. When you have an IMDB account, there is a page that shows you gender
demographics and age demographics. IMDB gets these demographics from their IMDB
members who have registered with their gender and age.
Excel Data | Annotated R Code | Disney version | Pixar version
Highlights and Considerations:
• IMDb ratings are rated on a 10-point scale. The average IMDb rating (across the 26,000 most rated movies) is 6.92 with a standard deviation of 0.96. This means most average movie ratings (68%) across movies are within 1 point of each other. Therefore, while a decimal point difference between gender ratings might seem negligible on a 10-point scale, given that ratings across different movies are generally very similar to each other, even small differences in ratings for the same movie are interesting and significant.
• Across all IMDb movies, females tend
to rate movies more favorably than males (Δ = 0.14). I group mean-centered the
data (by gender) to see if women still liked Marvel movies more than men after
controlling for this small systematic bias.
• The popularity of the movies cannot
be determined by the graph, only the differences between male and female
ratings.
• Marvel movies are rated higher than
the average IMDB rating (Δ = 0.68) and are liked by both men and women.
However, females’ rate MCU movies more favorably than males (♂ = +0.58; ♀ = +0.77;
p < .001).
• The average MCU film rating is 7.6 (the average IMDB score amongst popular movies is 6.9). For comparison, Disney Animation Studios has an average IMDB rating of 7.4 and Pixar has a 7.7.
• The highest-rated Pixar movie is Spider-Man: No Way Home (μ = 8.9; this might be partially due to who has rated it this early) whereas The Incredible Hulk was the lowest-rated (μ = 6.6).
• I anticipate several people will have
difficulty believing this data because the results were the opposite of what I anticipated.
The results caused me to manually check to make my IMDB data scraped correctly,
and it seems these numbers are accurate. I leave the interpretation of the data
up to you. Why do men and women rate marvel movies differently? Is it something
about who rates movies on IMDb? Something about the movies themselves?
Formal
Statistics:
It is
impossible to give confidence intervals around a movie’s ratings because IMDb
only gives the overall average ratings for each movie by gender and thus there
is no variance to analyze (essentially n = 1). For the same reason, I
cannot say women and men rate any given movie differently, however, this is
very likely given the magnitude of differences between some movie ratings and
the large sample sizes. To confirm this, I would need access to the individual
ratings and not just summary statistics.
Because
I can look at male and female ratings across all the movies, it is possible to make
statements about MCU movies more generally (n = 26).
Using a
paired t-test, the mean difference between male and female scores (xdif
= 0.19) was not significant (t(25) = 15.44, p < .001). Power
was high (d = 1.68) and a post-hoc power estimate found a rounded 100%
chance to detect such a difference given the sample size (for whatever a
post-hoc power estimate is worth). These tests are included in the R code.
Graphics:
I made
the graphic in Excel and a few edits and tweaks in PowerPoint.
Alternative
Graphics:
These
are a bit ugly but might be interesting to some.
I just
re-ordered the movies from oldest to newest. I would have liked to include the
year in the original graph, but I think it might have made the graph a bit busy.
CenteredMale by Female Ratings
An x-by-y
graph of Male Ratings and Female ratings (labels can get a bit messy).
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