Monday, November 21, 2011

By the Numbers: Victini and Zekrom’s Theatrical Distribution

For those who weren’t aware, one of the 14th Pokémon movies, Pokémon the Movie: White-Victini and Zekrom, is being given a limited theatrical distribution on December 3rd and 4th. You can read a list of the currently announced locations here.

For those of you who love statistics, I thought I’d break down the numbers and give you some interesting facts (accurate as of 11/19/2011):

-347 locations are currently listed, covering 39 states.
-The largest state without any theatres on the list is Utah, with 2.7 million people.
-The smallest state with a location on the list is Wyoming (which is also the smallest state in the country).
-The state with the highest number of listings relative to its population is Hawaii, which has one location for about every 194,000 people. If the entire country were covered at this rate, there would be over 1500 screens showing the movie.
-Out of all states with one or more venues, the one with the highest population-to-theatre ratio is Wisconsin (primarily by virtue of being the largest state with only one announced location). If the entire country were covered at this rate (approximately 5.7 million to one), there would be a mere 54 screens.

For you nitpickers out there, here are several problems with the current list:

-One entry for Colorado (Highlands Ranch) is mixed in with the locations for California.
-There are two vertical dividing lines between “MI” (Michigan) and “MN” (Minnesota) in the header. However, the only states that start with an “M” not currently listed are Maine (“ME”) and Montana (“MT”), neither falling between the two alphabetically.
-Although Minnesota comes before Missouri alphabetically, the one location in Minnesota is listed after Missouri’s locations.
-Despite having a location listed, Wisconsin does not appear in the list of states at the top of the page.

Sources:

List of theatres
List of state populations (itself derived from 2010 census data)