Christmas Movies and Music Data: The Biggest Hits and Flops
Nothing says Christmas like honey-roasted ham, holiday movies and those tunes we either love or hate.
Here at Yellowfin we also love data at any time of the year, so we couldn’t resist exploring some of the holiday data we’ve seen being floated around.
Let’s start with the movies
Over the years, we’ve seen some big movies become synonymous with Christmas, plus some other films that didn’t really create the impact that was envisioned.
In 2009, Disney’s studio backed the release of A Christmas Carol with a mammoth marketing campaign as they experienced the pressure to deliver a big hit at the time.
Its overall budget ended up being a massive $200,000,000!
Was it worth it?
With a worldwide total lifetime grosses of $325,286,646, it certainly did pay off. The film is not, however, the highest grossing Christmas film.
After all, who can possibly beat the much-loved Home Alone with a revenue of $476,684,675?
There are also several films that just didn’t quite make the same impact.
The biggest Christmas film flops that experienced millions in losses are Black Nativity with $10,481,811, The Nutcracker at $16,880,006, Santa Clause: The Movie experiencing $26,282,709 in losses, Surviving Christmas with $30,206,376 and The Nutcracker: The Untold Story suffering a loss of $73,821,041. Perhaps one Nutcracker film would have been enough?
This year, the most talked about Christmas film has been Netflix’s A Christmas Prince. The company was able to uncover that 53 users watched the movie every day for a period of 18 days. Was it the feel-good storyline or their inability to pass up a good princess movie?
What about those tunes we love… or hate?
Many of us of us would have been forced to listen to the Christmas tunes when working at the local supermarket or department store, or while we attempted to finish off our Christmas shopping.
This experience has often been described as mind-numbing, with some research going as far to say listening to Christmas music can be bad for your mental health. There is still a large proportion of people who can’t resist a little Mariah Carey or Michael Bublé every year. In fact, Spotify has recently shared its global data on the most popular Christmas music.
The results are in and has been reported in a recent Business Insider article, ‘The top 5 most popular Christmas songs, according to Spotify’ and as you expect Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé are at the top of the list with their signature songs ‘All I want for Christmas’ and ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas’, with Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande joining them this year with their hits ‘Mistletoe’ and ‘Santa tell me.’
Ever wondered what contributes to an increase in streaming this type of music? According to The Economist, research suggests and is demonstrated in ‘the music industry should be dreaming of a white Christmas’, that in the countries that experience the wettest weather and have the fewest daylight hours. Temperature and snowfall also play a part. In fact:
“A fall in a state’s average daily temperature of 10 degrees Celsius is associated with a 0.1 percentage-point rise in Christmas song-streaming. The biggest bump is reserved for snowfall, which causes a two-percentage-point increase in streaming.”
As we put our pedals on and work towards closing things off for what’s been a massive and exciting year for Yellowfin, we couldn’t resist digging into some Christmas data to get into the holiday spirit.
Happy holidays everyone!
Contributors:
Kanella Aliferis – Marketing Coordinator (APAC)
Tim McIntosh – Consultant