Box Office Crawler

Executive Summary

For my project, I decided to create something extremely practical and immediately useful in my own work and school. In Business Intelligence, my team and I wanted to research the answers to many important questions about the movie industry, such as what makes a movie successful. So, I created a VBA script to meet our huge need of grabbing thousands of pieces of data as well as converting them to usable forms and cleaning them in preparation for analysis. However, it has since evolved into a powerful data scraping and analyzing tool for anyone who wishes to use it. My VBA project works in conjunction with Box Office Mojo, the largest and most complete movie database in the world (owned by IMDB). Anybody who wishes to grab useful information on a movie or any number of movies, and then analyze the success of those movies based on many different factors, are welcome to use my workbook, and even embellish upon what I have created. The script I wrote to scrape data, easily executed through a custom button in the ribbon (“Get Movie Info”), uses the hyperlinks connected to any movie title copied from BoxOfficeMojo.com in the Title column of the “Movies A-Z” worksheet to grab the producing studio, total box office gross, opening date, rating, genre, director (if listed/known), total known days in theaters, day of the week opened, budget (if listed/known), and runtime of the movie, all in two seconds or less (per movie). It also converts all gross and budget figures to 2014 dollars, so that movies from all years may be compared side-by-side, and it extracts the specific year and month of the movie release, for purposes of analyzing. Once all records and related data have been retrieved, the user may click “Create Result Charts” and the workbook will generate multiple charts to compare movies based on earnings.

Excel File
PDF Report