By: Lauren Taylor, Abbie Burrus & Yalda Uhls 

Children are spending a significant portion of their time consuming media— which is a good thing for those who make content; a potential concern for parents whose kids consume it; and an exciting opportunity for imparting social and emotional learning and the skills necessary for development and life success.

Parents value this. In fact, research by Common Sense Media (CSM) has shown that education around character strengths is the most important factor they consider when selecting shows and movies for their kids to watch. And guess what? This kind of content can make money, too.

Several years ago, CSM began an initiative to help parents, educators and children choose entertainment that models the skills and strengths necessary for positive youth development. Through extensive research, the team identified a list of 11 key character strengths and life skills that can be taught to young audiences through media. These include communication, compassion, courage, curiosity, empathy, gratitude, humility, integrity, perseverance, self-control and teamwork.

This list was then used to develop a first-of-its-kind tagging system that helps parents and children easily identify content promoting these core strengths and skills. In our sample of films, the most frequent ones tagged were perseverance (tagged 795 times), courage (tagged 732 times) and teamwork (tagged 614 times).

We then conducted focus groups and surveys to evaluate the system’s effectiveness, and found that both parents and children responded more positively to content with those tags. But the question is, will they pay for it?

At the box office

At the Center for Scholars & Storytellers (CSS), we work with content creators and researchers to harness the power of entertainment media to help the next generation thrive and grow. We wanted to see if there was a business case for making films that promote positive character strengths and life skills. So we partnered with CSM, which provided us with a dataset sourced from its reviews of 2,767 films that showed each one’s tagged strengths and skills, plus star ratings and recommended ages.

The films selected for this sample were released in theaters post-2010 and given at least a three-star rating from CSM. In analyzing the data, we discovered some prominent takeaways.

Money talks

Movies that promote character strengths and life skills perform better at the box office, both domestically and internationally. Average worldwide ticket sales (sourced from boxofficemojo.com) for films tagged with strengths was more than US$87 million, compared to just US$36.5 million for other films.

It’s important to note that this relationship held true regardless of the film’s star rating. For example, 2022’s Minions: Rise of Gru (four stars, no tags) made US$937.2 million worldwide, while 2013’s Despicable Me 2 (four stars, two tags) made US$970.7 million. On the superhero front, Marvel’s 2018 film Deadpool 2 (four stars, no tags) made US$785.8 million worldwide, while 2019’s Captain Marvel (four stars, three tags) made US$1.13 billion. DC superhero movies followed a similar pattern—2013’s Man of Steel (three stars, no tags) made US$667.9 worldwide, and 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (three stars, one tag) made US$872.4.

Although ticket sales figures were not adjusted for inflation, these examples show that even films in the same “universe” seem to make less money when positive attributes are not anticipated or seen in reviews by parents.

Tomato power

The positive relationship between a film’s success and its Common Sense star ratings and character strengths continued into the Rotten Tomatoes evaluations. For example, Minions: Rise of Gru (2022) has a 70% Tomatometer rating, while Despicable Me 2 (2013) is at 75%.

Teens: Not-so-titan

Films for teens were tagged with fewer strengths overall, compared to movies for younger kids. Specifically, teen pics were less likely to be tagged for curiosity, gratitude, humility and teamwork, and had an average of just 0.8 tags—nearly half of the average posted by films for other kid age groups.

In fact, films for teens were more likely to not contain any character strengths or skills. And more importantly, they were also less likely to be tagged for skills necessary for healthy social relationships, such as gratitude, humility and teamwork.

There’s a clear gap in the market right now for values-driven entertainment for teens, who are at a critical and difficult stage of their lives. They are encountering key developmental milestones of relationship development and identity formation at a time when mental health crises are at an all-time high. We feel teens would benefit from seeing more role models in their entertainment that exhibit strengths and skills for social-emotional development.

Big winners

The top-grossing films listed with strengths were often family-targeted ones with a focus on friendship, adventure and superheroes, such as 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, The Kid Who Would Be King (2019) and Incredibles 2 (2018).

Takeaway: Values matter!

Let’s face it—most feature filmmakers don’t do it as a hobby. These projects need to be financially viable and, ideally, profitable. We hope this quantitative analysis proves that not only does content high in values make money, it makes more money than other content.

We encourage kids content creators to work with experts to develop stories that promote positive strengths and life skills in clear and educational ways. Your audience will benefit, and so will you!

Yalda Uhls is the founder of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA; Lauren Taylor is a fellow at CSS; and Abbie Burrus is a CSS intern.