When Skyfall finally opened in the United States we ran a survey to find out what fans think about the new James Bond film. The survey ran from November 8th when it opened in IMAX in the US until November 15th, during which time we collected 451 responses.
Overview of the survey results
Note that survey respondents are mainly on the mailing list of The James Bond Dossier newsletter (if you’re not on it, why not? Click here to join) and therefore likely to self identify as part of the Bond community, rather than being more casual Bond fans or simply movie goers.
The questions were fairly straightforward and are shown below with the results of the first three questions and some comments regarding the responses:
1. How do you rate Skyfall as a James Bond film?
This was a multiple choice question with the following options:
- Brilliant, best ever!
- It’s good, but not the best
- A good entry in the Bond series
- Not in my top 10
- I hate it!
Retrospectively the five different options could have been phrased better, or a simple ranking system used instead.
Unsurprisingly, given the reception of the film, the majority of responses are positive, with 85% of respondents rating it as Brilliant, best ever! or It’s good, but not the best. I though that perhaps there would be more responses rating it as I hate it!, but this came from just 1% of respondants.
2. Have you seen Skyfall in IMAX or a regular screening?
This allowed both to be selected for anyone who had seen Skyfall in both.
I was also surprised at how many people have seen it on IMAX, with a large proporation having seen it on both regular and IMAX screens. There are, according to these stats, 40,194 screens in the US, of which 3,500 showed Skyfall, and 3,596 in the UK. From the IMAX website there appear to be just 18 IMAX screens in the UK and 409 in the US; either these stats are wrong or the number of respondents viewing Skyfall on IMAX is disproportionate.
3. How many times have you seen or intend seeing Skyfall on the big screen?
Another multiple choice question with the following options: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5-9, 10+.
Again unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents intend to see Skyfall on the big screen once or twice, with 28% saying they will go and watch it 3 or more times. That is still a hefty proportion who will be seeing it at least three times.
There were two further questions we asked too:
4. Is there anything in particular you LIKE about Skyfall? If so, what is it?
A free form question, this provided enough space for the survey to capture detailed comments on what was particularly liked in order to establish any particular patterns.
5. In there anything in particular you DISLIKE about Skyfall? If so, what is it?
As with the previous question, this allowed detailed comments on dislikes.
Because of the nature of the last two questions it makes more sense to take a closer look at what was particularly liked and disliked to see how it correlates with individual rating for Skyfall.
Watch this space for more stats soon!
