After all that chat about The Canyons …
We do a lot of talking about movies, but actions speak louder than words. And sometimes, all of those tweets and comments just don't add up to box office success.
BuzzFeed took a look at the biggest and most talked about summer movies of 2013 to see how web fixation and ticket sales correlate. What we found was that the action movies of the summer (Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness, Fast & Furious 6, etc.) were the ones that dominated both the box office and conversation, with Despicable Me 2 being the exception.
On the other hand, some smaller independent movies that centered on or featured controversial subjects — such as Lovelace and The Canyons — generated tons of chatter (we can thank Lindsay Lohan and porn for both), but the box office sales didn't add up. The Ryan Gosling vehicle Only God Forgives also ranked high buzz-wise because, let's face it, he wins the internet.
Check out the full rankings in the graph below and read on to find out how BuzzFeed reached these conclusions.
John Gara / BuzzFeed
Methodology: BuzzFeed compiled its list of "buzziest" summer movies through data collected from its Partner Network, a collection of sites with a combined audience of 490 million people that carry BuzzFeed's tracking code and includes websites like The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, People, The Huffington Post, Daily Mail, College Humor, Cracked, The New Yorker, Time, The Atlantic, etc. The top 50 movies were determined by using title keyword search to determine relevant articles related to each movie and then aggregating the total amount of traffic generated by those articles. The list was culled from the top 100 grossing box office movies from May 1 to Aug. 31, 2013. We tracked traffic from social, search, link direct, and internal sources in order to build our list.
