Imagine a world where Hollywood producers could predict, with scientific precision, the box office revenue a movie will generate just by reading the screenplay. A new forecasting model devised by a trio of marketing professors from Wharton and NYU promises to deliver something like that. Among their findings: action movies with multidimensional conflicts are the most surefire investments, and horror films the riskiest. In a paper describing their model, they write that “a higher movie budget tend[s] to increase the movie’s box office, but at a diminishing rate. Thus, throwing money at a script does not always generate a blockbuster movie.” Here’s looking at you, Waterworld. [%comments]
Box-Office Science
TAGS: movies, statistics
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Sounds dubious. In my opinion the best (and most successful) movies are those who do something radical different, satisfy the need for something new and then change the taste of the audience.
Also I’m not really convinced by the results. They only used scripts for released movies, so the data was biased. And the successful genres are the easiest; family movies and comedy. These movies have lower budgets and a straight pattern, so it’s easier to filter bad ones and harder to make mistakes in the production phase.
Totally impossible and also about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Considering the words in a screenplay are, maybe, a third of the experience (and the most transient in the process) while hearing it and actually seeing it (OMG, what!?) make up the bulk, this proposal it utter nonsense. If this metric was at all relevant it wouldn’t matter who was in a film, who directed it, who edited, scored or art directed – IMHO said film would be unwatchable thereby invalidating the whole point. A lot of great movies would be scrapped in favor of a lot of useless ones (we’d lose the 2001s in favor of Titanics) because there’s simply a lot more to a film than a screenplay. Hell, some great films never really had a screenplay (La Jetee).
Already heard about a pretty precise formula to predict box office revenue 2 years ago in my media management course at the University of Hamburg. It mainly checked for variables like star power, marketing budget, genre, target group, etc…
If you want to know more about that, you should contact your colleague Michel Clement at the University of Hamburg.
I am doing a project quite similar to this. I am creating an econometrics model that attempts to predict the number of Hires of a DVD at the local rental store. I have data from the business, and I am using quite a few similar variables. Will be good to reference some of this in mine I think
Waterworld did OK and while no cinematic classic is not a bad film. It was killed by bad industry buzz before it was even released.