I was listening to the Skill shot pincast today and they brought up a theory that bad movies make for better games. I too have had this thought (as I love BSD, Shadow, Congo, Demolition Man, etc), and have heard others mention it as well. I figured this was a pervasive enough of an idea that it was worth examining empirically.

I pulled as many games I could think of that were based on movie franchises, and looked up their Rotten Tomatoes score as well as their Pinside rating. Obviously game quality and movie quality are subjective, but this seemed like a straightforward way of doing it. Next, I made a simple scatter plot with a best-fit line.

As can be seen on the scatter plot, contrary to the popular belief, there is actually a positive relationship between game rating and movie rating. I should note that this relationship was not quite statistically reliable (p = .075). So, at best we can say there is no relationship between movie quality and game quality.

Anyways, thought you'd all enjoy this one. Happy to slice and dice the data in other ways based on your suggestions. Also let me know if I missed a game. I pulled this thing together pretty quickly.

moviegame_(resized).png

So I just realized that several games were not showing up. I regenerated the plot with some new parameters...

moviegames_(resized).png

did not know that! I will add later. thanks.

Well, some of these games were not based off a single movie, but a series of movies. When this happened, I took the mean of all movies covered. Stern IJ actually has elements from all 4 movies in it, so it was the mean RT score of those 4 movies.