Nice visualization, but I think the New York Times' version is easier to follow visually because of the fewer colors.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022...

I'm gonna have to disagree with you here... This is beautiful, and much richer than the NYTimes version because it depicts not only total sales, but box office position. Tufte would be proud...

Is the movie industry growing that much over time - or is it just inflation?

Only thing this visualization is missing is the ability to highlight a given movie's trajectory by name.

I wish that was the only thing it was missing! If I did this in, say, Flash or SVG from the start, I think I could make many more things visible on mouseover. The PNG tools are the closest at hand, though.

I also wish it was easy to search for a particular movie. I wanted to show a friend the interesting path of Little Miss Sunshine, but it took me a while and some mousing to find it again.

It's pretty decent for aimless browsing around for interesting patterns, though.

It'd of course be possible if he was using flash or something, but it's just a PNG and an image map. I agree wholeheartedly with your comment though.

Very cool. Interesting is seeing just how few movies sit on the top of the box office charts for more than their launch weekend.

what a nice visualization