Avengers: Infinity War is just days away — with early reviews sprinkling out already and Rotten Tomatoes set to announce it as ‘Certified Fresh’ later on Tuesday — the movie is certain to take to the top of the list for most all Marvel fans.
Videos by ComicBook.com
As such, the research done by CableTV.com going into the biggest event of 2018 will soon be obsolete. Until that time, it is worth digging into.
The website used Google Trends to identify which movies were the most searched in each state over the last five years. While this methodology likely gave some unfair advantage to more recent films, it doesn’t explain away all of the results.
Curiously, Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk — perhaps among the worst of the Phase 1 films — claimed the top spot in several states despite coming out eight- and 10-years ago, respectively.
Moreover, the detailed search for Iron Man 2 bettered a generic search for Iron Man.
Some may say that the recency bias may lean in the favor of Hulk as he was a main attraction of Thor: Ragnarok and had a re-birth in the comics over the last year but that bias did not carry over to Black Panther, which just dominated the box office to the tune a $1B+ run, only pushing that search to the top of four states.
The Incredible Hulk, somehow or another, has a massive strong hold in both the Bible Belt and the Rust Belt. It claimed the top spot in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
Utah was the state either most divided, or most recently interested in superhero movies as it had a statistically improbable tie among 14 (!!) of the Marvel movies with Ant-Man, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Avengers, Thor, and Thor: The Dark World having a numerically narrow difference in relevance.
Naturally all of this is going to change as soon as Infinity War takes hold. The movie has been a decade in the making and is expected to raise the bar for box office takes with a massive opening and lengthy run.
For more on the CableTV.com research you can check out the full report by their staff writer, Rachel Oaks by clicking here.