In the last few years, there has been lots of talk about the decline of comedy. For example, Gary Thompson, a columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: Don’t Laugh: Movie comedies are disappearing. If you look at the two comedy genres in the previous chart (Relationship Comedy and Crude Humor & Satire), you can see why people are talking about this trend. Both genres have declined over 30% in total box office.

However, the strategic value of the 2x2 matrix is clear when you review Crude Humor & Satire. The chart shows that this genre has declined in total box office by about 35% during the last decade. However, during that same time, median box office actually grew by about 35%. This data shows that the revenue for titles in this genre was actually growing while the total revenue was shrinking. Several things could account for this trend, but it certainly indicates that there’s still big audience interest in Crude Humor & Satire titles – with a great opportunity to release a successful title.

One of the best things about building genres using an analytical foundation instead of an editorial one is that you can break them down into minigenres or nanogenres. Let’s focus on the genre “Horror, the undead, and monster classics.” If we stopped our strategic analysis using the chart above, all we would know is that this genre is in the lower-left quadrant, where both the total box and median box are declining.

However, if we break the Horror genre down into its four primary minigenres, a very different picture emerges.