Get Daily Movie Sales

Jacob Kaplan

2019-11-30

The boxoffice() function scrapes information about daily box office results of movies. It scrapes the webpage https://www.the-numbers.com/ for this information. The data it returns are the following:

1. Movie name
   
2. The studio that produced that movie
   
3. The daily gross
   
4. Daily percent change in gross
   
5. Number of theaters it is playing in
   
6. Average gross per theater (result of 4 / result of 5)
7. Gross-to-date
   
8. How many days the movie has been playing
   
9. The date of the data

In essence, it shows how well each movie performed on a given day.

movies <- boxoffice::boxoffice(date = as.Date("2015-10-31"))
dim(movies)
#> [1] 46  9
movies[1:5, ]
#>                   movie   distributor   gross percent_change theaters
#> 1           The Martian  20th Century 4564809             31     3218
#> 2       Bridge of Spies   Walt Disney 3588796             45     2873
#> 3            Goosebumps Sony Pictures 3326075              9     3618
#> 4 The Last Witch Hunter     Lionsgate 2023321             36     3082
#> 5  Hotel Transylvania 2 Sony Pictures 1905762              7     2962
#>   per_theater total_gross days       date
#> 1        1419   179446657   30 2015-10-31
#> 2        1249    43200132   16 2015-10-31
#> 3         919    53277832   16 2015-10-31
#> 4         656    17377961    9 2015-10-31
#> 5         643   153858782   37 2015-10-31

There are two parameters for boxoffice(): dates and top_n.

dates are simply an input dates (in Date format) that you want to get information on. In accepts either a single date or a vector of dates. All results are ordered in descending order by how much that movie made on that day. For example, the top selling movie of the day is the first value while the worst selling movie is the last value.

top_n gives only the top N highest grossing movies for that day. If you want only the top 10 movies that day (ranked by daily movie revenue), you would set top_n to 10.