Whoa:

{% blockquote The Information is Beautiful Awards http://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/2012/01/challenge-of-the-stars/ %} The Oscars are looming. So we thought it might be great to produce some amazing, hand-curated data on Hollywood films.

Our ultra-comprehensive dataset lifts the lid on opening weekends, worldwide gross, budgets, storylines, review scores – everything – for every Hollywood film released in the last five years.

…

Our challenge to you is, as ever, VISUALIZE. {% endblockquote %}

The fine geeks at Information is Beautiful have culled data on every film released since 2007 from The Numbers, Box Office Mojo, Wikipedia and IMDb. They’ve placed it all nice and neat into a Google Docs spreadsheet. Entrants have until February 6th to take the data and either create a static graphical representation of it or build a webapp.

If my 2011 Box Office in Review didn’t tip you off, I love playing with data. When I was parsing out the numbers myself, I created a spreadsheet on my own and it took forever. This dataset is nice to have even if you don’t want to make a neat infographic out of it. But you do; obviously you do.

They extended the contest deadline to widen the pool of entrants:

{% blockquote %} We’ve had loads of great entries already. And some amazingly creative ideas are popping up.

Like, Jermone Cukier‘s explorations of the dollar value of individual features of a plot. He cross-referenced keywords for each movie on IMDb with box office return. The result? A price tag for each plot element.

Having an explosion in your film could earn you $150m, he finds. A love triangle $37m. And a psychopath – just $32m. {% endblockquote %}

I cannot begin to explain how excited I am to see what people come up with. I may have to enter myself.