It is a truth universally acknowledged that Americans who watch films in darkened rooms while eating popcorn that costs more than a small car are also, apparently, exactly the sort of people who board trains. The correlation is so tight—0.942, if you're keeping score, which someone certainly is—that one wonders if there exists some cosmic accountant in Des Moines carefully synchronising Hollywood's revenue with Amtrak's passenger counts. One does not wonder this for long.
Two industries that live on gathering strangers in enclosed spaces. Covid emptied Amtrak's carriages and multiplexes at essentially the same moment in 2020, and both recovered slowly as travel and cinema-going remained the last habits to return. The correlation isn't causal in either direction — it's the sound of the same respiratory pandemic closing two doors.
What this reveals is something rather lovely about the human mind: we are correlation-detection machines who have trained ourselves to see patterns so consistently that we've built an entire website around the ones that mean absolutely nothing. We spotted a mathematical ghost and followed it home. Perhaps that's what Amtrak passengers and cinema-goers have most in common after all—a willingness to board something without being entirely sure where it's going.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “US domestic box office revenue” vs “Amtrak ridership” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
