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Arts · collecting
The Movie Issue
Franchise economics, streaming libraries, and when a star becomes expensive to protect.
MARGINS: Genre Mislabeling Hides the Winners
3,401 films tagged horror show median domestic gross of $25.5M, but Star Wars topped the list—revealing how loose genre tags obscure profit patterns. HORROR: Horror Ratings Rose as Catalog Volume Grew 50× in Seven Decades
32,540 horror films from 1950–2022 show median vote average climbed from 5.65 to 6.00 — modest quality gain amid explosive catalog growth. PIXAR: Pixar's Critic Scores Broke Only Twice—Cars 2 and Lightyear
Pixar's median Rotten Tomatoes score is 96%, but Cars 2 hit 40% and Lightyear stalled the streak—data from 24 rated theatrical features. FRANCHISE: Merchandise Owns the Ledger
140 franchises on the October 2026 Wikipedia ledger sum to $1.45T lifetime revenue. Merchandise is 55.8%; box office 18.3%; Pokémon leads at $130.7B. The US now out-earns Japan ($816B vs $394B), but Japan runs the higher merchandise share (71.4% vs 52.0%). Nine of 2025's ten biggest films were franchise entries. BLOCKBUSTERS: How Movies Become IMDb Famous
Title fields, ratings, and box-office references explain how films accumulate attention. Netflix's Top 10% of Titles Drew 68% of Viewing
Netflix's January–June 2026 engagement report lists 17,370 titles with at least 50,000 views worldwide (8,193 shows and 9,177 movies). The top 10% drew 67.9% of named hours; the top 20% drew 82.6%. NETFLIX: Squid Game Season 2 Logged 730 Million Hours on Netflix
Squid Game Season 2 logged 730 million hours viewed on Netflix — 292 times the 2.5 million-hour catalog median across 27,803 titles. CATALOG: Netflix's Movie-Heavy Catalog Hid Its Longest Titles in Interactives
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch hit 312 minutes; median duration rose from 41 to 98 minutes between 2008 and 2021 as the catalog skewed longer. EMMYS: SNL's 859 Records Beat Every Show
Saturday Night Live appears 859 times across 29,678 Emmy records from 1957–2021—three times the next-closest show. OSCARS: How Award Shows Build Prestige
How Oscars, Grammys, and Nobels manufacture legitimacy differently. Oscar prestige ties to market; Nobel prestige ties to institutional memory. SIMPSONS: Marcia Wallace, 175 Guest Appearances
Marcia Wallace logged 175 guest appearances across 30 Simpsons seasons—2.7× more than the second-place performer in the TidyTuesday dataset. TELEVISION: Prestige TV Scores Drifted Up—Slowly—From 1990 to 2018
Median season ratings climbed from 7.86 to 8.15 across 2,266 records—a raised floor, not a sudden elite leap.