"The Irishman" vs "Knives Out": What Immigration Movie is Your City Watching?
Date: February 7, 2020
The 92nd Academy Awards are just around the corner. And while change has been slow to come in diversifying Oscar nominations, we wanted to take a moment and recognize how immigrant themes are increasingly prominent in mainstream movies. In this data interactive, we take a look at eight from the past five years, including three nominated for an Oscar this year (“The Irishman,” “Ford v Ferrari,” and “Knives Out”) to show where immigrant stories are resonating in America today.
We used Google Trends data of YouTube movie trailer searches to compare a film’s popularity across the United States. Google Trends scores range from 0 to 100 with high scores representing higher levels of interest. To explore the data, click on a movie below to reveal a heat map. Hover or click on a region to reveal the name of the metro area and their Google Trend score. For more details, read our methodology below.
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We used Google Trends data of YouTube movie trailer searches gathered on February 2, 2020. The results capture one year’s worth of data, beginning at four months before a film’s wide release (the average time a trailer is released.) For newer films, we captured one year’s worth of data between February 3, 2019 - February 2, 2020.
Google Trends scores range from 0 to 100, and scores are scaled based on time and location. A region with a high score indicates that the proportion of searches for the movie trailer within the region are higher compared to other regions across the country. In Google Trends, we used Nielsen’s Designated Market Areas for geographic locations to compare metropolitan regions across the country. The Pudding's post on Oscar movie popularity was the inspiration for this data interactive.