Marvel vs. DC

Since the first Iron Man film came out in 2008, Marvel and DC have been engaging in something of an arms race. Between 2008 and 2020, total of 32 films were launched by the two studios collectively. This amounts to over 2 films a year. Arguably, we reached peak superhero films in 2017, when five comic book IP films were released one after another.

However, not all the films have been equally successful. There are different ways to measure a film’s success. Here, I will use rating scores I’ve pulled from IMDB database. With a little bit of perseverance, you can convert their datasets into a SQL-friendly database. Using the weighted average of all individual user ratings, Marvel and DC scored 7.54 and 6.69, respectively.

In addition to the overall score, Marvel films attracted a larger number of votes. On average, a Marvel film had 694K user votes in this period, which is over 60% higher than the DC equivalent.

The highest-rated DC film in this period was Zack Snyder’s Justice League with a 8.1 score, which makes it one of the only 5 films that had a score of 8.0 or higher. From Marvel camp, with the exception of the surprise hit nobody saw coming, Guardians of the Galaxy (8.0), all the other films that achieved this feat were the “orthodox” Avengers titles; Marvel’s The Avengers (8.0), Avengers: Infinity War (8.4), and Avengers: Endgame (8.4).

If you’d like to find out how I’ve converted the IMDB dataset into a SQL-ready format, you can watch the following instructional video.

Sources:

IMDB dataset — https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/