The Best Movie of 2012 In America (Or At Least The Most Enjoyed)

Recently, economist Dave Berri, in talking about the Oscars, pointed out that if we looked simply at revenue, the ‘best’ movie of 2012 was ‘Marvel’s The Avengers’. Essentially, he argued that, if we measured the worth of movies in terms of the utility they provide to customers, then ‘Marvel’s The Avengers’, as the movie in 2012 with the highest revenue, delivered more utility to people than any other film. (It’s not certain whether or not Dave Berri thinks that the movie which delivers the most utility is the ‘best’, but it does seem to be strongly suggested.)

But did ‘The Avengers’ really deliver the most utility? The reason I say this, which is a reason that also occurred to commenters on Berri’s site, is that measuring utility simply by revenue means that a dollar spent on one movie delivers exactly the same utility to the viewer as a dollar spent on any other movie. This is implausible – people certainly have different levels of enjoyment in relation to different movies.

One way to adjust for this is to use a measure of ‘user enjoyment’. In this case, I used the ‘user ratings’ from IMDB.com – given that each movie (at least the highest-grossing ones) has a large sample of users rating it, I reckon this is as good an indication as any of the average level of enjoyment that viewers got from that film. I then multiplied this rating by the $US box office revenue for each of the top 25 highest-grossing movies in the US that were released in 2012.  

Actually, I adjusted the user rating somewhat by multiplying it to the power of three. For example, if ‘Argo’ has a user rating of 8.0, and the latest ‘Twilight’ movie has a user rating of 5.7, then this means that each person, on average, got 2.8 times more enjoyment from watching ‘Argo’ then from watching ‘Twilight’ (whereas it would only be 1.4 times if I left the user rating as is). The result of this is that ‘Argo’ ends up with a higher total utility rating then ‘Twilight’ even with half the box-office take, which seems about ‘right’ to me (though it’s an arguable point).

As it turns out, this doesn’t make too much difference at the very top of the list. ‘The Avengers’ and ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ are clearly #’s 1 and 2, and you would have to put a very high weight on the user rating to get ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ to the top. ‘The Hobbit’, ‘The Hunger Games’, ‘Skyfall’, and ‘Django Unchained’ round out the top six, which in thinking about the movies released in 2012 that have had the largest impact, seems about ‘right’ to me as well.

	Total Gross US	User Rating	Utility Rating
Marvel's The Avengers	611,075,000	8.3	34,940,474,103
The Dark Knight Rises	458,507,400	8.6	29,163,638,281
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey	297,768,300	8.2	16,417,991,203
The Hunger Games	404,672,800	7.2	15,104,331,325
Skyfall	300,764,200	7.9	14,828,848,040
Django Unchained	158,523,600	8.6	10,082,988,692
The Amazing Spider-Man	268,093,100	7.2	10,006,521,339
Wreck-It Ralph	185,296,900	7.9	9,135,859,828
Brave	238,588,600	7.2	8,905,271,777
Lincoln	178,077,600	7.7	8,129,830,096
Ted	223,878,000	7.1	8,012,839,886
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted	212,127,600	7.0	7,275,976,680
Les Miserables	145,968,600	7.9	7,196,821,258
Argo	131,276,700	8.0	6,721,367,040
MIB 3	175,493,300	6.9	5,765,112,849
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2	289,032,000	5.7	5,352,670,318
Dr Seuss' The Lorax	214,030,500	6.3	5,351,768,443
21 Jump Street	137,651,800	7.2	5,137,825,905
Hotel Transylvania	146,654,900	7.0	5,030,263,070
Prometheus	123,984,900	7.2	4,627,711,596
Ice Age: Continental Drift	164,964,100	6.6	4,742,651,889
Safe House	126,930,700	6.8	3,991,107,386
The Vow	125,599,100	6.7	3,777,556,211
Snow White and the Huntsman	152,877,700	6.2	3,643,503,649
Taken 2	138,290,700	6.2	3,295,854,595

I think we can safely say then that ‘The Avengers’ did deliver more total utility/enjoyment than any other 2012 movie to cinema-goers in the US (and probably worldwide). I’m not going to go so far as to say that definitively makes it the ‘best’ movie, but as far as creating total happiness goes it looks to have had no peer.