Many thanks to Information is Beautiful, who provided the dataset and inspiration! This visualization was made for their monthly challenge. The dataset can be found here: Hollywood data. Also don't miss their descriptions and examples (PDF) of the story types used in this visualization.

One note on the data-- by far the most profitable film in this dataset, Paranormal Activity (2009), is not included in this visualization. It had a production budget of only $15,000 and made $196.7 million worldwide, giving it an incredible profitability of 1311200%. This is so far from its nearest high-profit neighbor for 2009 (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, at 1419%) that it skews the visualization to make it look like no other movie was profitable that year. Therefore that... paranormal activity in the data (groan) was excluded.

Update! I made the longlist for this challenge (near the bottom of the page).