Mane attraction: cats beat dogs at the box office but is the data fishy? – The Guardian

On a day as dark and sad as this, we as a society have two options: we can seriously explore the reasons that led to Labours worst election defeat since the 1930s, or we can cheat and numb ourselves with a procession of empty distractions.

What Im trying to say is this: films about cats are more popular than films about dogs.

A survey by personalised gift company Petlandia has studied every movie that features either a cat or a dog since 1970. Its found that films starring cats have generated $7,841,924,828 in revenue compared with the measly $6,556,609,118 generated by films starring dogs.

I know what youre thinking. Those two figures are relatively close, which suggests that there isnt really one runaway winner here, you say, and as such this is an opportunistic and poorly conceived survey to infinitesimally raise awareness about something as banal as a personalised pet gift service.

To that I say: I dont need your lip, especially not today. I dont mind that, of the top 10 cat movies listed, seven of them dont even feature the sort of domesticated cat you might have expected. The leading films are not really cat movies. The top five are the two Lion King films and three instalments of Madagascar, proving just how imprecise of the surveys was. But who cares? Maybe we like being lied to. Thats the only possible explanation for what happened last night, isnt it? Maybe we deserve this.

The survey also listed the genres people enjoy when it comes to films about cats or dogs. Animation is the favourite, which is bad news for horror fans, though, because horror is only the seventh most popular genre. The message probably the most important message youll hear all week is clear: cartoons about cats and/or dogs are much more popular than horror movies about cats and/or dogs.

I stayed up to watch it, you know. I watched the whole thing, right from the exit polls all the way up until Dennis Skinner lost his seat. What the hell are we supposed to do now? Were we too complacent? Did we have it coming?

Oh, and I meant to say, we finally have definitive evidence that brown animals are the best at generating box-office revenue. Thanks to Petlandia, we now know that brown animals have made $3,038,333,404 at the box office, which is a whole billion dollars more than their second-place rivals gold-coloured animals.

What an exciting discovery! What a time to be alive! And what an inspiring message to aspiring film-makers: if you want to be popular, you should make a cartoon about a brown cat. Thats what we should be concentrating on now, cartoons about brown cats. Not anything else. Never anything else. Never anything else again.

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Mane attraction: cats beat dogs at the box office but is the data fishy? - The Guardian

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero