US domestic box office revenue

Here we have discovered that Americans' enthusiasm for running 26.2 miles in the hot sun moves in almost perfect synchronisation with their willingness to sit in darkened rooms eating popcorn, which is rather like discovering that hat sales correlate with the number of people wearing hats, except the hat people are also inexplicably jogging. One might have assumed these two pursuits represented fundamentally opposed American impulses—the aspirational self versus the comfort-seeking self—but the data suggests they are, in fact, the same self, just at different times of day. The universe was apparently not interested in that particular irony.

Box office and marathon fields both collapsed in 2020 because both depend on cramming strangers into a shared space and hoping no one's contagious. Theatres went dark, marathons were cancelled en masse, and both numbers posted historic lows in the same twelve months. The correlation measures exactly how covid-compatible your business is — and neither of these was.

What we're looking at is not causation but rather the shadow of a third thing—the baseline health of the American economy and its peculiar habit of making everything simultaneously more accessible and more aspirational. When money flows, people run farther and watch bigger movies, which tells us something about human nature we probably already knew but find oddly comforting to see confirmed in graph form. We are creatures of correlation masquerading as creatures of reason, and somehow that's rather reassuring. The numbers just follow us home.