Interesting Stats Behind Brand Biopics

Films and TV series about brands and products have gained immense popularity in recent times. Which of them are most successful? Let’s take a look at the numbers.

Read this article to know:

• What are brand biopics and why analyse them?
• Data scope of the analysis
• Evolution of brand biopics
• Acceptance & recognition
  • Recognition among professionals in the Industry
  • Popularity and acceptance by the general audience
• Financial insights
• Overall performance
• Final thoughts

What Are Brand Biopics and Why Analyse Them?

Last year, a clear trend emerged in filmmaking: a plethora of films and TV series based on true stories about brands, products, and their creators. In this regard, Darren Mooney, a journalist and renowned pop culture critic, coined the term 'brandopics':

The product biopic, a genre of film that takes the cinematic language traditionally reserved for important historical figures or true events and applies them to the origin of a consumer product. Call it a “commodopic” or a “brandopic.”

If you are interested in business and entrepreneurship, or specific companies or industries, watching a brand biopic is an excellent way to blend a entertainment with utility. They provide historical insights into how a brand or product was built, including the challenges, strategies, and decisions that led to its success or failure. This can be both educational and inspirational: it can stimulate creative thinking and provide new perspectives on addressing challenges in various professional fields.

For these reasons, I've compiled the most comprehensive list of films and TV series with stories about famous brands over the last 25 years, all based on or inspired by true events.

My financial and data analysis background spurred further research, especially with publicly available data on budgets, revenues, ratings, and awards at hand. Consequently, I set two main objectives of the analysis:

1. Determine brand biopics, that are more successful than others.
2. Identify brand biopics that are worth watching.

Data Scope of the Analysis

Data Sources

The main data source for this analysis is IMDb, the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. IMDb, or Internet Movie Database, is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and fan and critical reviews.

Metrics

Success can mean many things. In filmmaking, success can be defined by three key factors:

1. Recognition among professionals in the industry,
2. Popularity and acceptance by the general audience,
3. Financial performance.

These aspects can be objectively estimated using the following metrics:

• Recognition among professionals in the industry:
  • Total award nominations
  • Award wins
  • Oscar wins
• Popularity and acceptance by the general audience:
  • IMDb rating
• Financial performance:
  • Gross revenue, or box office earnings
  • Budget, or production cost
  • Gross profit
  • Profitability

Data Exclusions

Publicly available data on production costs and box office performances is scarce for TV series and some movies, especially those released primarily on streaming platforms, where traditional box office figures are absent and budget information is often kept confidential.

Therefore, the financial and overall performance analysis will focus on the following 16 films, comprising half of the list:

Evolution of Brand Biopics

The evolution of brand biopics reflects a growing interest in the stories behind iconic brands and the visionaries who created them.

The genesis of brand biopics can be traced back to the depiction of pioneering entrepreneurs and companies in cinema and television. Often focusing on dramatising the lives of inventors, innovators, and business leaders, these stories laid the foundation for what would evolve into a dedicated genre.

The rise in popularity of brand biopics coincides with the late 20th and early 21st centuries, marked by films such as Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) and The Social Network (2010). The success of these films underscored audience interest in the drama of business and innovation.

In particular, many critics attribute the success of The Social Network as a turning point that sparked the genre's growth in the film industry. Indeed, since 2010, there has been a notable increase in the number of films and series produced, highlighting a fascination with the personal stories behind multinational corporations, revolutionary products, and their creators.

As the genre matured, brand biopics began to explore a wider array of industries and personalities. The focus expanded from technology moguls to figures in fashion, entertainment, and consumer goods.

The advent of streaming platforms further influenced the evolution of brand biopics. Services like Netflix and Amazon Prime have not only provided a new medium for these stories but have also broadened the scope of narratives, embracing lesser-known yet equally compelling stories. Consequently, the years 2022 and 2023 were rich in the number of stories brought to the screen.

Today, brand biopics continue to evolve, with an increasing emphasis on authenticity, diverse perspectives, and complex storytelling.

Acceptance & Recognition

There are several metrics related to the acceptance and recognition of films and series, including IMDb ratings, award wins, and total nominations. To understand whether these metrics have a linear relationship with each other, I used the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient.

With 32 observations for x and y, this is considered sufficient for more reliable statistical analyses, as the general rule is to have at least 30 observations.

The most interesting outcomes from the correlation matrix include:

• The IMDb rating does not show a strong correlation with metrics describing professional recognition. This supports the primary aim of the IMDb rating system: to offer a fair and accurate reflection of general audience opinions while minimising potential biases, including those from professionals.
• The award win rate (calculated as award wins divided by total nominations) does not strongly correlate with other metrics. Thus, having a 50% win rate from either 2 nominations and 1 win or 200 nominations and 100 wins does not impact other metrics. This indicates that a higher number of nominations does not necessarily improve the win rate.
• A strong positive correlation (94%) exists between award wins and total nominations, suggesting that films with more nominations tend to win more awards.

Recognition Among Professionals in the Industry

Award nominations and award wins can be considered as the recognition of the film by professional jury. I ranked all brand biopics by their total nominations for professional awards, and then grouped them into five groups:

1. Highly Recognised (more than 80 total award nominations)
2. Significantly Recognised (25 - 51)
3. Moderately Recognised (11 - 24)
4. Minimally Recognised (1 - 10)
5. Not Nominated.

The key statistics from the award wins and nominations are as follows:

• 6 films (or 19% of the total) were highly recognised, collectively receiving 911 nominations and winning 286 of them.
• The most highly recognised film is The Social Network.
• Only two movies from the list received Oscars:
  • The Social Network won 3 Oscars
  • Le Mans '66 (Ford v Ferrari) won 2 Oscars
• The highest award win rate (around 50%) is shared by 6 brand biopics:
  • The Social Network
  • Flamin’ Hot
  • Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
  • WeCrashed
  • Lamborghini
  • Dumb Money
• 50% of all brand biopics were minimally recognised or not nominated at all.

It’s also interesting to explore how recognition by professional juries has evolved over the years. The best approach is to use the average award nominations and wins per film. Since the number of brand biopics varies from year to year, analysing awards per film offers the fairest way to identify trends.

Based on the data, the perception of brand biopics by professional juries seems to have significantly declined. For instance, while a brand biopic in 2010 might have garnered 360 award nominations, by 2024, this number has plummeted to just 20 nominations, marking an 18-fold decrease.

Popularity and Acceptance by the General Audience

The best way to estimate recognition among general audience is to use IMDb rating, which is calculated based on user votes.

• IMDb voters are individuals who have registered accounts on the IMDb website. Any registered user can vote on a film or TV show by giving it a rating between 1 and 10.
• The system gives more weight to votes from regular IMDb voters, meaning that the ratings are not a simple arithmetic mean of all the votes. The exact formula IMDb uses for this weighting is proprietary and not publicly disclosed to prevent manipulation of ratings.
• Regular IMDb voters, while not officially defined by IMDb, can be understood as users who consistently and frequently participate in the rating process. The assumption is that their consistent participation may reflect a more reliable and informed evaluation of titles.

I often rely on IMDb ratings to determine whether a film or TV series is worth watching. In my experience, this approach usually proves effective.

Here is a list of 32 brand biopics ranked by their IMDb ratings:

My personal strategy, which has always served me well, is as follows: any movie rated above 6.0 on IMDb qualifies as a good movie. Based on this criterion:

• Films like Walt Before Mickey, House of Versace, Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay, Lamborghini might not be worth watching if you're looking to save time.
• The top 5 brand biopics include: Le Mans '66 (Ford v Ferrari), Harley and the Davidsons, The Billion Dollar Code, The Social Network, **and Moneyball.

Again, it’s also interesting to explore how recognition by general audience has evolved over the years.

In general, based on the moving average, comparing to professional jury, general audience didn’t notice any decrease in quality of the movies. Indeed, in last two years brandopics had slightly worse ratings, but this is not critical.

Three brandopics have surpassed The Social Network success: Le Mans '66 (Ford v Ferrari), Harley and the Davidsons, and The Billion Dollar Code.

Financial Insights

Financial performance is also an important part of a film's overall success. Unreasonably high production costs and/or overestimated revenue predictions are key reasons for financial failure, and a film cannot be considered as successful.

Unfortunately, as previously stated, publicly available data on production costs and box office performances exist for only 16 out of the 32 brand biopics. Nonetheless, this still presents a good opportunity to uncover some interesting insights.

• 1 films (or 70% of the total) are profitable.
• Le Mans '66 (Ford v Ferrari) and The Social Network lead the financial performance of the list with worldwide gross sales of around $225 million USD each. Notably, The Social Network has a profitability 25 percentage points higher, thanks to a budget that is half as large.
• The highest profitability is seen in The Social Network (82%), followed by Jobs (72%) and Saving Mr. Banks (70%).
• The most financially unsuccessful brand biopic on the list is Ferrari. Its poor financial performance (68 million USD of loss) can be attributed to production challenges, budgetary constraints, and complications surrounding the U.S. distribution rights after a bidding war.
• Movies such as The Founder, Dumb Money, and BlackBerry also faced financial underperformance.
• Air achieved zero profitability, mainly because its box office earnings fell short of expectations relative to its production cost. Originally produced as an Amazon Prime Original, Air was later decided to be released theatrically following positive test screenings. This decision, unfortunately, seems to have backfired, contributing to its box-office flop status. However, it's also noted that the film will not incur losses for the makers due to its release on Amazon Prime.

Some entertainment critics state that after The Social Network, “which arguably ushered in this trendy subgenre for our modern era”, most brand biopics are a waste of both talent and time. In the years since, many have tried to replicate The Social Network’s success, but few have come close. Let's examine this claim from a financial perspective by analysing the gross profit of these movies over the years.

Indeed, there has been a negative trend in gross profit, with all movies in 2023, except for Gran Turismo, being unprofitable.

Overall Performance of Brand Biopics

It’s also valuable to correlate financial performance with professional judgement to get overall performance. A straightforward metric that reflects professional recognition is the total number of award nominations, including wins. This allows an at-a-glance comparison of financial performance and critical acclaim, serving as a useful tool for evaluating the success of these brand biopics.

In the bubble chart, each bubble represents a specific brand biopic, with its size indicating gross revenue worldwide. The axes denote profit and the number of awards won. Based on this mapping:

• The Social Network is the most successful brandopic among all.
• The brand biopics that are also considered successful based on all three aspects include:
  • Le Mans '66 (Ford v Ferrari)
  • Moneyball
  • House of Gucci
  • Saving Mr. Banks
• Joy, Coco Before Chanel, and Yves Saint Laurent can also be considered successful, despite more modest financials.
• Steve Jobs received recognition but is not as successful as the brand biopics mentioned earlier.
• Ferrari, Air, and BlackBerry are partially successful, as they received recognition from professionals and the general audience but have financial underperformance.
• Gran Turismo and Jobs achieved good box office success and profitability, yet they weren't significantly recognized by professional critics, receiving only a few nominations without any award wins.
• Dumb Money and The Founder can be considered the least successful movies based on all aspects.

Interestingly, the two movies about Steve Jobs had vastly different outcomes: Steve Jobs (2015) had a much larger budget, higher ratings (7.2 vs. 6.0), 143 nominations, and 28 awards won, while Jobs (2013) was six times more profitable but received almost no recognition, with just 2 nominations. The modest returns of Steve Jobs, which was well-crafted, might be attributed to the audience's lower interest in revisiting the same story within a short period.

Final Thoughts

The exploration of brand biopics through various statistical lenses reveals a nuanced landscape of success and recognition. These insights underscore the complex interplay between creative storytelling, audience appeal, and financial viability in the film industry.

Based on the statistics, the most successful brand biopic is unquestionably The Social Network. Le Mans '66 (Ford v Ferrari), Moneyball, House of Gucci, and Saving Mr. Banks also rank as successful, but with more moderate figures. Dumb Money and The Founder, while less successful overall, still enjoy significant acceptance and popularity among the general audience.

Half of the brand biopics were not fully evaluated due to the absence of financial data. However, based on available data (popularity and recognition), notable and successful brand biopics include The Billion Dollar Code and Harley and the Davidsons. Conversely, Walt Before Mickey, House of Versace, Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay, and Lamborghini rank as the least successful.

As human beings, our time is precious. Life is too short to waste on bad movies. I hope this brief statistical analysis of brand biopics has guided you in choosing worthwhile films to enjoy.