Data Story

Award Season Wheel

A mechanical watch face where months are gears and bars: prestige density and box-office momentum rotate through the calendar.

filmimdbtmdbawardsseasonalityrelease timing
Dataset scope
12
months
3,984
awards counted
$191M
max avg box office
A monthly aggregation: award winner density and average box-office momentum, read as a watch face.
Loading award season wheel
Hypothesis

Awards and prestige attention cluster seasonally (especially late-year releases), creating a recurring calendar bias.

Question: Do awards cluster by release month?

Method: Aggregate award-winner counts and average box office by release month.

Prediction: Late-year months show higher award density than the rest of the calendar.

Test: Compare month distributions, then test whether “award-heavy” months also show higher commercial momentum.

Narrative Arc
Act I

A watch opens: the year is a mechanism, not a timeline.

Act II

Bars grow as the dial winds — months reveal where awards accumulate and where money follows.

Act III

Seasonality becomes unavoidable: a recurring bias you can see as rotation.

Datasets
  • imdb.films
  • imdb.film_awards
  • tmdb.movies
  • award_season_wheel.json
Reading tip

Toggle Awards vs Box Office, then wind the crown: the calendar itself becomes the mechanism behind prestige.

The peak months are less “discovered” than engineered — a seasonal gravity well.

Next

Want another story? Head back to the film data stories index.

Back to indexarrow_forward