Horror delivers the highest return on every dollar spent
Among the — movies in the dataset with a reported budget and revenue, — has the highest median yield of any genre at —x revenue per dollar budgeted — despite an average budget of only —, one of the smallest of the 19 genres. At the other end, — returns a median of just —x.
Median (revenue ÷ budget) by genre, genres with at least 30 financially-reported titles. Hover a bar for the genre's defining title.
Bigger budgets don't buy better returns
Adventure and Animation carry the largest average production budgets of any genre — — and — respectively — and generate enormous absolute box office. But per dollar spent, their median yields (—x and —x) both trail the top genre's —x.
Each bubble is a genre: position is average budget vs. average revenue, size is number of financially-reported titles.
The best-reviewed genres aren't the best-paying ones
Horror is TMDB voters' lowest-rated genre of the 19, averaging —/10 — yet it tops the yield leaderboard. — is rated highest at —/10, but doesn't come close to Horror's —x median return.
Average TMDB vote by genre, all 19 genres.
Output boomed for six decades, then pulled back
Release volume grew from — films in the 1950s to — in the 2010s — a —x increase — before falling to — in the 2020s so far.
Number of movies released per decade.
Back to back, that's — years of movies
Total combined runtime of all 72,775 films in this dataset: — hours.
Drama and Comedy dominate production, not the yield chart
Drama is the largest genre with — films (—%), Comedy follows with — (—%). Yet their median yields — —x and —x — both sit mid-pack.
Number of movies by genre, all 19 genres, sorted by volume.
Foreign-language films rate better but stay far less visible
Non-English-language films average a higher critic rating — — vs. — out of 10 — but score barely more than half the popularity, — vs. —. English is the original language for —% of the dataset.
Average TMDB vote by original language, top 10 languages by title count.
The cost of making a movie varies by an order of magnitude
Average production budgets range from — for — to — for — — a —x gap between the cheapest and most expensive genre to produce.
Average production budget by genre, sorted highest to lowest.
Runtime is a genre signature, not a coincidence
— runs shortest at — minutes on average, while — runs longest at — minutes — a —-minute spread across the 19 genres.
Average runtime (minutes) by genre, sorted longest to shortest.
About this data
- Source
- Full TMDB Movies Dataset (asaniczka, Kaggle), downloaded 2026-09-27. Poster art in the marquee above is served live from TMDB's public image CDN.
- What one row is
- One row is one movie with a "Released" status on TMDB, identified by its release date and its primary genre.
- Rows dropped and why
-
From ~1.5 million raw rows: kept only
status == "Released"; dropped rows with an unparseable release date or a release year outside 1950–2026; dropped rows with no listed genre (took the first listed genre as each movie'sprimary_genre); dropped rows with fewer than 10 TMDB votes. Result: 72,775 rows. Seescripts/clean_data.pyfor the exact code. - How rates and averages are computed
- Yield = revenue ÷ budget, computed only for movies with both budget > 0 and revenue > 0 reported (8,645 of 72,775 movies). Genre-level yield uses the median to avoid outliers dominating, and is only reported for genres with at least 30 financially-reported titles. All other averages are means over the full 72,775-row dataset unless stated otherwise.