As I’ve frequently said, statistics is an area which is poorly understood by most people, and as a result, it’s an area which is commonly used to mislead people. The thing is, when you’re working with statistics, it’s easy to find a way of presenting some value computed from the data that will appear to support a predetermined conclusion – regardless of whether the data as a whole supports that conclusion. Politicians and political writers are some of the worst offenders at this.
\nCase in point: over at [powerline][powerline], they’re reporting:
\n>UPI reports that Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, hasn’t done so well
\n>after a promising start:
\n>
\n>> Former U.S. vice-President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”
\n>>has seen its ticket sales plummet after a promising start.
\n>>
\n>>After Gore’s global warming documentary garnered the highest average per play
\n>>ever for a film documentary during its limited Memorial Day weekend opening,
\n>>recent theater takes for the film have been less than stellar, Daily Variety
\n>>reports.
\n>>
\n>> The film dropped from its record $70,333 per play to $12,334 during its
\n>>third week and its numbers have continued to fall as the film opens in smaller
\n>>cities and suburbs across the country.
\n>
\n>It’s no shock, I suppose, that most people aren’t interested in seeing
\n>propaganda films about the weather. But the topic is an interesting and
\n>important one which we wrote about quite a few years ago, and will try to
\n>return to as time permits.
\nSo: they’re quoting a particular figure: *dollars per screen-showing*, as a measure of how the movie is doing. The thing is, that’s a pretty darn weird statistic. Why would they use dollars\/screen-showing, instead of total revenue?
\nBecause it’s the one statistic that lets them support the conclusion that they wanted to draw. What are the real facts? Official box office statistics for gross per weekend (rounded to the nearest thousand):
\n* May 26: $281,000 (in 4 theaters)
\n* June 2: $1,356,000 (in 77 theaters)
\n* June 9: $1,505,000 (in 122 theaters)
\n* June 16: $1,912,000 (in 404 theaters)
\n* June 23: $2,016,000 (in 514 theaters)
\nEach weekend, it has made more money than the previous weekend. (Those are per weekend numbers, not cumulative. The cumulative gross for the movie is $9,630,000.)
\nBut the per showing gross has gone down. Why? Because when it was first released, it was being shown in a small number of showings in a small number of theaters. When it was premiered in 4 theaters, they sold out standing room only – so the gross per showing was very high. Now, four weeks later, it’s showing in over 500 theaters, and the individual showings aren’t selling out anymore. But *more people* are seeing it – every weekend, the number of people seeing it has increased!
\nThe Powerline article (and the UPI article which it cites) are playing games with numbers to skew the results. They *want* to say that Al Gore’s movie is tanking in the theaters, so they pick a bizzare statistic to support that, even though it’s highly misleading. In fact, it’s one of the best performing documentaries *ever*. It’s currently the number seven grossing documentary of all time, and it’s about $600,000 off from becoming number 5.
\nWhat was the per-theater (note, not per showing, but per theater) gross for the last Star Wars movie four weeks into its showing? $4,500\/theater (at 3,322 theaters), according to [Box Office Mojo][bom]. So, if we want to use reasoning a lot like powerline, we can argue that Al Gore’s movie is doing *as well as Star Wars* an a dollars\/theater-weekend basis.
\nBut that would be stupid, wouldn’t it.
\n[bom]: http:\/\/www.boxofficemojo.com\/movies\/?page=weekend&id=starwars3.htm
\n[powerline]: http:\/\/powerlineblog.com\/archives\/014530.php<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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