Freddy Vs Jason Vs Michael

Tonight I thought that we would debate the long running "Which is the best slasher franchise?" It's a Horror Battle Royal between "A Nightmare on Elm Street", "Friday 13th" and the "Halloween" franchises.

Now the answer is obviously "Nightmare on Elm Street" but that's just my opinion. Instead I thought that I would take a more empirical (if what a little simplified) look at the highs and lows of the genre. It may be appropriate at this point to let on that my day job is as a finance data analyst, previously it had been a retail analyst so I will use a few simple industry standard techniques to see which franchise and movie is the king of the slashers. For this little mock up. Any results and conclusions are based on the data for fun. Please know that there's great movies in all 3 franchises and I could have used alternative analysis methods to look at the success of the movies (however, the raw data is very much real).

I will be analysing by three main dimensions:

Budget ($)

Gross Profit ($)

Ranking (/10)*

*I will be using IMDB as a data source as it's reasonably impartial.

The aim here is a very simplistic way to establish the below:

What’s the highest Ranking?

Well, as you can see below I’ve plotted the ratings for each movie on the charts below. In terms of rating the original in each series is considered the best. Each franchise seems to deteriorate in quality over time. “Halloween 3: Season of the Witch” and “Halloween: Resurrection” received just 3.9 rankings on IMDB. Although the original Halloween movie tops the rankings chart at 7.9. Overall though there’s very little to choose from in terms of IMDB rating. The average rating chart shows a spread of just 0.58 between the franchises.

 What’s the most profitable?

Interesting here how the 3 franchises made their profits. Friday 13th went low budget but high on quantity. Nightmare on Elm Street was generally declining in profit until reinvented as “Freddy Vs Jason” and the remake. Halloween generally increases profitability after movie 6 “The Curse of Michael Myers”. Looking at the franchised as a whole the data suggests that Friday 13th is the overall most profitable, then Nightmare on Elm Street, followed by Halloween.

 

 What’s the most expensive to make?

The budgets of each franchise are a story in themselves. Nightmare on Elm Street took a simple strategy of building on past success, incrementally increasing the spending. This seems to have worked well and the cash cow keeps giving. Friday 13th took the thrift option of the lowest budgets of the 3 franchises. Only for “Freddy Vs Jason” and the 2009 remake do we see the budgets rise to compete with the other modern movies. These last 2 movies also returned some of the highest gross profits of any of the franchises showing that the budget increase was a good step to take financially. Halloween made an interesting decision after movie 6 “The Curse of Michael Myers” the budgets leapt from $5m to $17, for “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later”. Overall the budgets were the highest for the Elm Street franchise (mostly due to the £35m remake).

 

So, which series is best?

In terms of High Budgets and Overall Ratings “Nightmare on Elm Street” is our winner.

I will give a special award to the original Halloween that converted a budget of $320,000 in to a $46.7m profit for a single movie. In turn leading to a franchise of 10 movies plus another in the filming stage right now.

I will also tip my hat to the “Friday 13th” franchise. 12 movies so far and all made at a cheap budget but capable of getting cinema goers through the doors.

Hopefully you enjoyed this little look in to “Freddy VS Jason Vs Michael”.

Happy hauntings, Jiblet.