Wolfram|Alpha announced on September 17th that it has added movie box office data to its data engine. You can check it out at http://www.wolframalpha.com/.

Whenever I hear about a new data set on WA I always check to see if you can access it randomly. And in this case you can: the query random movie got me the result New Wave Hookers (I am not kidding) with basic information as well as a brief cast listing. A few random searches later I found Cabaret, and this is where the box office data started coming in.

Cabaret, according to WA, was released in 1972. There was a brief mention of total box office receipts but clicking on “More History” brought me to … nothing. Total receipts was all the information this movie had. I went to look at something more recent, and picked Dead Again, which was released in 1991. For that movie, WA had statistics about its highest rank at the box office, highest receipts for the weekend, highest number of screens it played on at one time, and highest average receipts per screen for a single weekend. There were also graphs that showed the performance of the movie over time. It looks like most of the recent movies have a good amount of data, though one that I looked at (the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie that came out a few years ago) had no box office data at all.

If you want to do some comparisons, you can search for several movies at once and get the box office data presented in a table. See the screenshot for a comparison of super hero movie sequels, pitting Iron Man 2 against X2 and the Fantastic Four sequel.

I discovered to my delight that you can also use movie release dates as a time unit, making the query minutes since iron man release date — well, let’s not get nuts and say useful, but how about viable. Just so you know, at this writing it’s been 21024 hours since the release of Iron Man. You can also calculate time between movies, as in minutes between iron man release date and iron man 2 release date.