The bar chart compares the number of viewers for six different movie genres in 1980, 2000 and 2020.
Overall, science fiction, comedy and thriller were consistently the most popular movie genres, while horror, action and romance attracted comparatively fewer viewers across the period. In addition, the viewer numbers of most genres fluctuated during the three years.
Science fiction, comedy and thriller were the most-watched genres. In 1990, thrillers were watched by around 30 million individuals in the USA. As for science fiction and comedy, they attracted around 17 million and 25 million viewers respectively. These numbers increased in the following 20 years by around 3 million each, except for thrillers, where the figure fell to almost 25 million during the time. Thrillers quickly caught up and reached a peak of approximately 32 million, making it the most watched genre in 2020. The other two failed to maintain their popularity and fell to their lowest levels over the period.
The viewership for horror, action and romantic movies remained consistent, with only minimal fluctuations during the 60-year period. Horror movies were the least preferred genre throughout the timeline, with 1990 marking its peak with a total of almost 4 million viewers, this value fell to around 3 million views in the following years. Romance also had a similar trend where it’s number of viewers decreased by almost 1 million in 2000 and 2020. On the other hand viewings of action movies increased by a similar amount in the period.