It looks like a mathematician's decided to spend his time going through all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to gather and analyze data on Marvel's comic book movies.
According to a report by ABC News, a mathematician decided to spend Christmas binge-watching comic book movies so that he could create some statistical analysis of what he's seen from Marvel. The University of Adelaide's Professor Matthew Roughan spent his Christmas going through Marvel movies, and so he and his team decided to try and analyze the effectivity of the cast size and how it reflects on the success and popularity of the film.
Calculating the effective cast size in Marvel's 21 movies, Professor Roughan decided to analyze just how profitable a Marvel movie is based on whether the film features an origin story, a sequel, or a team-up.
It turns out that ensemble superhero movies are the most profitable in Marvel's roster of offerings.
"The most obvious thing you see is a correlation between the size of the cast, the effective number of characters in the movie, and the profitability," Professor Roughan said.
This doesn't necessarily mean the more characters the more profitable a Marvel movie though. Films like Avengers: Infinity War might have been a major success, but it wasn't that profitable because its cast size required a bigger budget for the film.
According to the results of Roughan's study, sequels and team-up movies do generally better than origin movies – though Black Panther and Captain Marvel were exceptions to the trend.
Marvel is set to begin Phase 4 of the MCU when Black Widow premieres on May 1, 2020.
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