January 9th, 2023, Clifton Mark
What were the biggest movies of 2022? YouGov eavesdropped on the internet to find out. And it turns out that most of the movies that people cared about in 2022 were released before the year even began.
The data comes from YouGov Signal, a social listening tool that tracks the performance of TV programs, movies and brands. Appetite Score is a value from 0-100 which measures the ddemand for a given movie by combining web searches and Wikipedia lookups. How does a movie from 2017 (Spider-Man: Homecoming) rank on a 2022 list? This simply means that even years out from its release, the web was still abuzz with interest for the film. This often happens when movies are released on a streaming platform or when a sequel generates interest in past installments. Here are the movies with the top Appetite Scores averaged over the course of 2022:
The list is topped by the Disney blockbuster Encanto , a film about a Colombian family living in a magic house. Its soundtrack, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, featured the viral hit “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” Superhero movies dominate the list with two Spider-Man movies (two-and-a-half if you count the Venom movie) as well as sequels from Thor, Venom, Ghostbusters and the Kingsmen series. James Bond sequel No Time to Die is not technically a comic-book movie but can perhaps be considered adjacent to the genre. In fact, House of Gucci and The Last Duel, both Ridley Scott true crime pictures, are the only entries that are decisively outside of the superhero genre.
While Appetite Score is a good metric of demand, Signal also monitors the online conversation about movies through comments and mentions on the major social platforms. While the movies in our Appetite ranking were the most searched, they were not necessarily the most talked about or the most liked by those who saw them. Signal can measure the sentiment of the online conversation about a topic. While all these movies generated a lot of conversation, they scored between 46% (Last Duel and House of Gucci) and 64% (No Time to Die) positive sentiment based on social media conversation.
Top movie Encanto generated 55% positive sentiment compared to 19% negative sentiment and 26% neutral. Those involved in online discussion of this film are 66% female and mostly between the ages of 30-44.
The King’s Man was the film which attracted most negative sentiment in our top ten. Almost a third (32%) of online chatter about the film was negative. That’s twice as much as, for example, Spider-Man: No Way Home and perhaps that’s because the film polarised opinion more than any other in our ranking – only 15% of sentiment was neutral, compared to more than a third for a movie like Venom.
YouGov Signal also tracks affinities of audiences with other media, brands and persons. For example, the audience for Encanto has above-average affinities with the Netflix show The Squid Game, actor Zendaya and the video game Minecraft. These means that fans of Encanto are more likely to engage with these other entities.
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Photo by Myke Simon on Unsplash