Ghostbusters Afterlife named most popular franchise film, according to Twitter
Ghostbusters Afterlife – due to hit UK screens on 18th November – has seen the best reception among Twitter fans than any other franchise film to date, a new study reveals.
Film Franchise Crossovers looks to name which blockbuster franchises – including Marvel, Star Wars and DC – are best-suited to an onscreen collaboration, based on their profitability, popularity and format, as well as which instalments of each franchise are fans’ favourites.
The study included a Twitter Sentiment Analysis, which pulls together all Tweets referencing a franchise film across the last decade, and assigns a positivity/negativity score to each.
Ghostbusters Afterlife has seen the highest influx of positive Tweets over that period than any other franchise film, including Avengers Endgame and The Fellowship of the Ring.
This is interesting given that the same analysis at franchise level found that Ghostbusters proved the second-least popular series of those analysed, and was beaten by the likes of X-Men, Jurassic Park and James Bond. Fast and Furious came out as the least popular.
These findings seem to suggest that fans are positive that the new Ghostbusters flick will prove to be the film that they’ve been waiting for – particularly given the critical reception of the female-led iteration that hit screens back in 2016.
When it comes to previous Ghostbusters flicks, the study shows fans much prefer the original 1984 Ghostbusters to the second 1987 instalment, Ghostbusters II.
Franchises analysed in the study
1 – DC Universe
2 – Star Wars
3 – X-Men
4 – Ghostbusters
5 – Star Trek
6 – James Bond
7 – Marvel Cinematic Universe
8 – Lord of the Rings
9 – Jurassic Park
10 – Fast & Furious
Other franchise flicks that proved popular with Twitter fans were found to be X-Men, Shazam!, The Avengers, Man of Steel and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Blockbuster movies that didn’t stand up to scrutiny on social media included Hobbs & Shaw, The Empire Strikes Back, A View to Kill and X:Men: The Last Stand.
As well as looking at which individual franchise films prove the most popular online, the study also paired together the big-budget series that would be best-suited to a crossover.
Based on individual popularity, profitability and format data collected for the 116 films within the 10 franchises featured, the study found that the most compatible crossovers were X-Men x Marvel, James Bond x Fast & Furious, and Ghostbusters x Star Wars.
Data analysed included global search volume, Twitter sentiment ranking, Rotten tomatoes score, IMDb score, budget, global box office earnings, total years spanned, current film count, average film certification and average film runtime, to gauge franchise compatibility.
It’s no surprise that X-Men and Avengers are well-suited to an onscreen collaboration given the similarity of the franchises and fact they’ve both been acquired by Disney – but the Ghostbusters x Star Wars compatibility is an interesting result.
This stems from the fact that films within both franchises share a similar average runtime, IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes scores, Twitter rating, global search volume and box office returns.
The study also found that if these two franchises were to collaborate, both studios Lucasfilm/Disney and Columbia Pictures Ghost Corps, could see a shared potential earning of a massive $365 million (£267.9 million), based on the previous earnings of films owned by both series.
Other key findings from the analysis include the characters that are best-suited to a potential onscreen interaction, the highest-rated franchise films, and the highest-earning franchises.