This http://www.the-numbers.com/keywords/ website contains lot of statistics related to movies and one important piece of juicy data is that they have categorized the movie listings by keywords. Using this list we try to analyze the popularity of sports in movies.
1. How has the featuring of sports as backdrop or prominent theme increased over the years?
We simply count the number of movies and show it against the year.
The categories that we selected are as below
[“Basketball”,”Football”,”Gambling”,”Hockey”,”Lacrosse”,”Miscellaneous Sports”]
Now we can check the box office impact of sports in the movies
That is a big spike in 1999 so let us see what sport categories contributed to all these numbers
Interestingly, Lacrosse was featured for the first time in movies and the year was 1999 and movie “American Pie”
Miscellaneous Sports Movies
Let us take a big picture view of sports impact on movies [excluding gambling]
Click here for the interactive visualization
List of movies featuring Basketball
Movies featuring Football
Movies featuring Hockey