Distribution of colors in movie posters between 1914 and 2012

I am awe-struck with what people with a passion manage to get done "in a couple weeks" just for fun.<p>I can't imagine that I could have <i>hired</i> someone to do the same analysis, research, programming, scripting, graphics creation, and web site layout for anything less than tens of thousands of dollars. (Or is my intuition wrong about that?)

I immediately starting scanning the colors to see if this blog post from a couple of years ago was vindicated about all movies being teal and orange:<p><a href="http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html" rel="nofollow">http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...</a><p>It is.

In the associated blog post he says:<p><pre><code> Methodology: I downloaded ~ 35k thumbnailed-size images (yay wget -- “The Social Network” inspired me to not use curl) </code></pre> Could some who's seen the film enlighten me on why wget is better than curl?<p>Thanks.

While beautiful, only a seriously limited amount of movies was analysed for this and the selection seems weird. The year 2000 for example only has 48 movies in this. I am not sure you can interpret anything from it.

I'd be interested seeing someone (not fit enough in this topics to do it myself) applying color psychology and mapping it to the years / events / industry.<p>Could explain the shift from warmer colors to more technical ones (just speculating)

Interesting to watch the color gamut open up as color printing technologies improve over time. Blue/Cyan is the hardest pigment to work with, and you can see the blue-range grow over time as the technology to support it improves.

The eventual settling on teal and orange is interesting. I'm curious what the feedback loop was that told the marketing department "this is what will make more money". It seems such a subtle thing, and I would think red (as an alarming color) or green (as the color we see best) would end up figuring more prominently.

It would be interesting to combine this information with boxofficemojo and adjust the distribution of colors based on box office revenue assuming that box office revenue correlates to mindshare, you would have a closer map to what people 'thought' a movie poster would look like in that year.

More red/yellow before, more blue/violet in recent history. Cool data set, but the question is "so what?".

I wonder what happened in 1921. It was out of control!

Related: <a href="http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/</a><p>Shows an entire movie in a single image.

Wasn't this here before? It's still cool though :)

Interesting that there are no black columns ie no colors which consistently wouldn't be used. Green is represented very little though

Fascinating viewing. Wonder what changed us from being all sunshine and light to being all doom and gloom. I blame the Dark Knight.

Ha, you can see the teal trend getting stronger in the 2000s. I wonder why the colorfulness of 1919-1921 was so quickly reverted?

I'm curious about the distribution of ink costs (by color) during the same timespan - just how close that correlation is.

If they were scanned in recently, doesn't this just prove that print materials do indeed yellow over time?

But why a stacked barplot? This way you can easily see the dynamics in reds but the apparent amount of blue is quite deceiving. IMO a better idea is fixed hue grid and modulated saturation for the counts.

Looks like Star Wars posters messed up 1977!?<p><a href="http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1977" rel="nofollow">http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1977</a>

I wonder how much this adjusts for natural fading in prints.

I find the near constant use of red interesting. Given all we've been told of red and marketing (think cereal boxes), I figured it would grown.

OK, so who's going to do the correlation with en vogue colors from the same years (fashion, paint, cars, etc.)?

but hey, isn't there any color corruption during scanning/digitalisation of those posters?

Cool! Color combinations form sinusoid throughout the history.

What happened in 1977?

Wait, so they all fall on the visible spectrum?

I don't see The Matrix. I wonder if it was left out because it's on outlier (too green/yellow).