Highest Grossing Movie Franchises

The Highest Grossing Movie Franchises infographic from Buzzfeed makes good use of a stacked bar chart to put the various movie series into perspective. Design by John Gara.

Listed below are the most successful action/adventure movie franchises of all time. Each box represents an individual movie within that franchise, its width reflective of its contribution to the franchise’s box office success. We used worldwide box office totals from The-Numbers. com and adjusted them for inflation. All movies within each franchise are displayed chronologically from left to right.

Great design that really does a fantastic job of comparing the franchises.  I’m especially impressed that they took the time to adjust the data for inflation, a step that designers normally forget.  The color coding within each franchise is also easily explained with colored text under the stacked bars.  No need for a chart legend!

The franchises are sorted in descending order as shown by the bars, but the extra graphic design to the right of each bar is visually misleading.  To some, this will look like an extension of the data, but it’s just artistic, with the images spaced out so they don’t overlap.

The footer should have included both a copyright statement, and the URL link back to the original landing page so readers can find the original full-size version.

Found on GeekTyrant

Comments

[Charles S]

Great infographic. You mention copyright. Where was the information sourced?

[Randy]

In the infographic description they claim that they "...used worldwide box office totals from The-Numbers.com and adjusted them for inflation."

[Marcelo]

Hello! My name's Marcelo, I'm from Brazil and I have to say that this infographic is preatty cool! Awesome!

[Toby]

Really nice use of depth on this one with the heavy layering - quite eye-catching.

[Davi T.]

So Twilight sold almost 2x more than The Godfather... Oh, humanity...

[X]

There's a reason most designers 'forget' to adjust these films for inflation. It's because it's really not accurate to simply do that and not take into account all the dozens of other variables when comparing grosses from widely different time periods. There is no way to make it all work in such a way that doesn't unfairly penalize competing films. Which is why the simply unadjusted numbers are what are used most of the time. Simply adjusting for inflation doesn't give an accurate portrayal of what a film actually made. Not even close.