So this study aims to test the hypothesis that DC and Marvel movies are distinguishable.
We implemented web crawler to collected the reviews and movie information from Rottentomatoes, the most prevalent movie review platform. After prepossessing the texts, we applied multiple NLP methods, including term frequency analysis, classification models (Naive Bayes, SVM, and Random Forest), and topic models (Wordfish, LDA, and STM) to find the differences between DC and Marvel.
Literature Review
The difference in DC & Marvel Superhero Movies
Marvel and DC as two giants in the superhero-based movie industry, competitions and debates have never ended between them. There are some existing studies comparing their movies from different perspectives. \citet{2014} argued in his article that a major reason Marvel has beat DC at the box office is that Marvel took time and patience when producing every movie, while DC tended to rush things out. \citet{2014a} 's study focused on the storylines of Marvel and DC Movies, which he concluded Marvel has done a greater job in maintaining continuity and flexibility, by allowing different superheroes exist in different timelines and universes while still make sense when merging them together into one story and one world. DC, on the other hand, usually have their superheroes lived on separate lives and had separate adventures, and the lack of constancies and interconnections between stories also reduce the spreadability of their movies. Another interesting study focuses on the arachnid-based characters of Marvel and DC was done by \citet{Da_Silva_2014}. The results show that Marvel has more arachnid characters (84) than DC (40) does, and most of the arachnid characters in DC are villains, which according to the authors is corresponding to the “harmful” image of spiders, scorpions, and mites. However, there is no significant difference between the number of heroes and villains in Marvel arachnid characters, and this is because of Spider-Man’s success in Marvel.
Inspired by these studies, we are interested in exploring the difference between the Marvel movie and DC movie from a different perspective – audiences. We are curious about whether the differences in audiences' experiences correspond to the actual difference between them.