The Age of Super (White) Men
After decades of primarily white and male superheroes on the big screen, the overwhelming commercial successes of Wonder Woman in 2017 and Black Panther in 2018 were notable for more than their gross earnings. Just how white and male is the history of superhero films?
Data source: imdb.com
Tools:
- D3.js
- Tableau
- Google Sheets
Project Description
As a superhero movie fan, it's hard to not notice that almost all of the headlining heroes are white and male. I wanted to visualize the lack of diversity in these films and also highlight the recent successes of Wonder Woman and Black Panther, notable for their stars and directors. I started by compiling data in a spreadsheet for all DC and Marvel live-action movies using imdb.com as my source. Once I got a sense of the data, I created a few sketches on how I might present information.
I initially created the visualization as a course project in Tableau. Although the dot plots were simple to create, the complete piece required wrestling with Tableau's limited page layout and design abilities. See the Tableau implementation.
Finally, I recreated the piece using D3.js. I took advantage of capabilities such as defining a gradient to create two-color dots and embedding Adobe Typekit fonts.
