Cinema Data Aggregator - Adam Solter, Winter 2010

Trend data in cinema box office results can tell us much about how tastes are changing, how ratings affect box office results, and how well movies do internationally. BoxOfficeMojo.com compiles this data in a simple format that would be easy enough to download by hand (there are only five pages), but much of the important data is buried in individual pages for each movie.

This project is designed to:

• Extract the basic data automatically
• Drill down into each sub-page to get additional information based on the link from the main page.
• Compile the information from multiple-release titles which must be handled differently from single-release titles.
• Output the data into a worksheet where ad hoc analysis can be done.
• Show summary data.

The process used in this project is applicable when trying to compile data that requires a click on each link to retrieve more detailed data from sub-pages. Just as important, it is designed to handle exceptions when clicking on the link has a different result that expected and a different process must be used to extract the data. The automation of this process can save countless hours of hand-picking the data, especially if this is a process that must be done often.

Files for this project can be found:

• Movie Machine.xlsm
• Project Writeup