Malcolm Gladwell has written a very interesting piece for The New Yorker about his conversations with some people who are trying to develop/have developed a program that can predict a film’s box office potential.
An unusual bunch of film fans have analysed hundreds of movie scripts and are using an artificial neural network to figure out a formula and predict box office results, then offer suggestions to make a movie better. They have a fascinating look at the various versions of The Interpreter, a movie I liked but which didn’t set me alight.
I’ve had a thought for some time to sit down and try and analyse two movies that are very similar in plot, but had completely different receptions at the box office to try and see what made one a hit and the other a miss. This is obviously an extremely complex task that comes down to interpretation as much as anything, and there are a huge number of factors to consider, both in the what appears on screen and everything that led to that point.
The group seem to be headed, or at least figured-headed, by a lawyer with a passion for movies called Dick Copaken, and consists of several people only referred to by pseudonyms. Mr Pink and Mr Brown analyse the scripts and assign values, Mr Bootstraps developed the neural network and runs the computer side.
Copaken then approached another Hollywood studio. He was given nine unreleased movies to analyze. Mr. Pink, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Bootstraps worked only from the script—without reference to the stars or the director or the marketing budget or the producer. On three of the films—two of which were low-budget—the Epagogix estimates were way off. On the remaining six—including two of the studio’s biggest-budget productions—they correctly identified whether the film would make or lose money. On one film, the studio thought it had a picture that would make a good deal more than $100 million. Epagogix said $49 million. The movie made less than $40 million. On another, a big-budget picture, the team’s estimate came within $1.2 million of the final gross. On a number of films, they were surprisingly close. “They were basically within a few million,” a senior executive at the studio said. “It was shocking. It was kind of weird.” Had the studio used Epagogix on those nine scripts before filming started, it could have saved tens of millions of dollars. “I was impressed by a couple of things,” another executive at the same studio said. “I was impressed by the things they thought mattered to a movie. They weren’t the things that we typically give credit to. They cared about the venue, and whether it was a love story, and very specific things about the plot that they were convinced determined the outcome more than anything else. It felt very objective. And they could care less about whether the lead was Tom Cruise or Tom Jones.”
Fascinating stuff. What’s interesting is the article also mentions a company that is doing this for music releases.
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