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Software Predicts Movie Success
scheming daemons writes "TechNewsWorld has an article about software that predicts whether a movie will be successful or not by factoring in its rating by censors (e.g. G, PG, R), strength of the cast, genre, competition from other films at the time of release, special effects, whether it is a sequel, and the number of theaters in which it will show."
A good script?
Trolling is a art,
It seems their has been a recent spurt of "smart" systems like this...
Maybe we're finally coming out of the "AI Winter" it seems like we've been in for a decade or so...
td
hard core geek-ware
int main() { /* error */
if ( this_is_mainstream() ) {
if ( good )
return 1;
else
printf("50 Million USD");
} else
printf("Sued out of existence before it's released");
return 0;
}
King Kong is flopping like a pancake...
I can do this with Excel and some previous statistics! How breaktrough it this? Of course, if it's a program that analyzes the script, that would be another matter, but it's not.
please excuse my apathy
buddah
It's not something that can be broken down into an equation, sorry, human element of chaos
The big recording labels had developed software to determine the quality of song. Apparently, they could determine if a song would be a megahit or a flop. Judging from what I've heard on the radio, it doesn't seem to work. Hopefully the movie industry will have better success.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Napoleon Dynamite? I find it hard to believe that this script would have predicted the success of this film.
Also, this actually kind of disgusts me since it seems IMHO that it relies on the same formulaic approach that's responsible for the poor offerings that Hollywood is currently producing.
rating by censors (e.g. G, PG, R), strength of the cast, genre, competition from other films at the time of release, special effects, whether it is a sequel, and the number of theaters in which it will show.
Hmmm...I wonder what it had to say about Waterworld...
New Snot Eunichs.
Suddenly I'm thinking of the measure of the greatness of poetry scene from Dead Poets Society. Right on. Yeah, I know, it's not about greatness, it's about box office success. I bet they left Gigli out of their tests.
must... stay... awake...
If this thing does any good predicting at all, I'm sure it's based on the number of screens that the movie shows on. Once you have that number, I'm sure your pick will usually be pretty close. This is because the theater companies pay public opinion eggheads big bucks to figure out how many screens to reserve for movies... based on the movie's expected audience draw. These theater people do the actual analysis. To piggyback on their results and then pretend you were the insightful one seems really ... unimpressive.
Many of the criteria used here are subjective, and based upon existing human estimation of the movie's success. For instance, when a movie opens in a large numbers of theatre's simultaneously, it usually means people have already predicted it will be successful. Also, movies are often chosen to 'Open' on a date that doesn't conflict with other movies, and is chosed to maximise revenue. It's a real stretch to call this software's process 'scientific'.
Network President: Greetings, gentlemen. You already know my execubots: Executive Alpha, programmed to like things it has seen before.
Executive Alpha: Hey hey hey.
Network President: Executive Beta, programmed to roll dice to determine the fall schedule.
Executive Beta: (rolls dice) More reality shows!
Network President: And Executive Gamma, programmed to underestimate Middle America.
Executive Gamma: It's funny, but is it going to get them off their tractors?
"...strength of the cast..."
Will it be based on looks or on acting ability? There would be some serious issues if they used acting abilities. There are some horid actors/actresses that sell boatloads because they look great, and then there are some...well...less visually pleasing folks, that are fantastic actors/actresses.
Yet another example of some machine learning bozo overtraining on a dataset to come up with a perfect predictro of historical data with little value for generalization. No doubt they have some dull understanding of cross validation which they mistakenly believe assures they have not over trained. Heh. In the end just as good as your linear numTit predictor.
And then when they are done they find that any future predictve power it has only is focused into a couple of clusters that any fool could have told you were sure bets. It has not value unless your goal is to recycle the same things over and over till there's just one tru formula that all money making movies must follow.
I suspect movie making is probably a lot like the stockmarket. While there's general themes that always have positive returns, the can't be a formula for big success because if there were then once it was known it would not work anymore. Originality and a cyclic nature of traditional themes is the flow but not predictable.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...with formulaic movies is more formulas?
By randomly declaring 1 out of 1000 movies "okay" and the rest "barftastic" accuracy is guaranteed.
Anybody want to buy my AI software which predicts the success rate of career comebacks among humpbacked prostitutes?
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
This sort of "equation" has it's basis in Quackery, and has been around for years; if I cared enough I think IIRC, that we even had the "equation of a Sitcom" posted and discussed here earlier on.
Howzabout we actually get an article that's worth discussing? This submission is pathetic.
Go ahead mods, do yer worst. I refuse to swallow this tripe.
A couple fans told me that my last journal entry was mint; give it a shot. Hope you like.
To Me, Nothingness is an AI Report.
I have my doubts this will work. Like, statistically speaking, John Ratzenberger, the guy that played Cliff on Cheers is very bankable actor, he'd been in Empire Strikes Back and a couple Superman films, and all six Pixar films, so his films have grossed billions of dollars. I guess a computer might pick him to play the villian in the next Batman film, but in real life there isn't a magic formula.
This is what happens when the bean counters try to quantify the creative process. You can add up all the ingredients for a hit movie and still have a major bomb on your hands.
It's like saying you can dump fois gras, Chateau Latour, beluga caviar and a savoy truffle into a blender and end up with the world's most wonderful milkshake. In the end it's a recipe for mediocrity, at best. More often, all you get is expensive puke.
If one could predict success by adding up the elements that go into movie making, then "Catwoman" should have been the megahit of 2004.
Normally in my country stories like this spread so that I read them on Slashdot first, then I read them in a local IT news service a few hours later and the next day they may be in mainstream news.
This one I heard on the radio yesterday driving home from work!
rating by censors (e.g. G, PG, R) strength of the cast genre competition from other films at the time of release special effects whether it is a sequel and the number of theaters in which it will show." It's ridiculous to expect software to predict entertainment. From the above, success can only be even remotely predicted by "the number of theaters in which it will show". And possibly the "strength of the cast". Mainly I think the trailers shoved down our throat with only the best parts of the movie could help success. I highly doubt this software would have predicted the success of The Blair Witch Project. Zero special effects, zero strength of the cast, zero budget.
success = IMDB.com_USER_RATING
With 9 revenue categories, correctly predicting the category 37% of the time (RTFA), is, ehem, unimpressive - a dartboard would guess correctly 11% of the time.
So we have a predictor that makes 0.63/0.88 ~= 70% as many mistakes as a dartboard. If you give it one category of "wiggle", it makes 0.25/0.66 ~= 40% as many mistakes as a dartboard.
People are making a lot of hay out of this. It tells you that small movies (opening on fewer screens) are very seldom blockbusters, and that heavily promoted movies almost always make at least ten million or so. How is this unexpected? I bet I could get similar predictive power using a SINGLE variable - the promotion budget for each of the films. If it could tell us something actually interesting (or useful to hollywood types) - like "why are some big budget movies successful while others are not?" - that might be worth something.
Also, the journalist is a nitwit - "North American ticket sales currently total $7.6 million."
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Hollywood uses similar metrics for most of their features.
This explains more than anything else why the quality of the majority of movies dropped so fast in the last few years.
None of those parameters can measure (digitally) the quality of the story, quality of acting (note: not popularity of the cast, Pam Anderson is also popular) and quality of the movie anyway.
Hearing from buddies or critic reviews, that a movie is poorly done mix up of popular actors, effects and soft porn with dumb as stics scenario stolen from a bunch of action flicks from the past, is the fastest way to give up an average moviegoer from seeing it.
Does it take into account a quality of script (or lack of)?
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
- Creating a formula based on your theories and finding that the data you run data through it is well explained by your (weighted) equation.
- Taking a bunch of numbers and having the computer find the best equation that explains the data.
One of those two methods is bad mathIf it took this Information Systems Professor 7 years of work to create his model, I seriosuly doubt that he picked Method #2 and I also doubt that you could have done this in an hour with Excel.Oh, and since this article has shitty information, if you check out google news, you'll discover they're using a nerual network to crunch their numbers.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This is unbelievable! Awesome-o has thought up 1193 different film ideas. 906 of which star Adam Sandler!
I am scientifically inaccurate.
I guess it doesen't matter if the movie is "good" anymore...
First of all, if I was only 37% successful at my tasks at work, I would be out the door in a heartbeat. One category off could mean the difference between success or failure.
Where this gets stupid are the advertising, word of mouth, and "fanatic" factors.
First, if a studio thinks a film is going to tank, they won't advertise it and won't push it to as many screens. As a result, less people even know the film exists and even if they do, it is harder to find. I can think of several movies that were awesome films that were just not advertised. I never saw a commercial for Usual Suspects, but saw it after a friend said it was the best movie they had ever seen. If the studio predicts failure, it could be a self-fulfilling prophesy, but I think the age of quick DVD release and peer recommendations is changing this.
That brings me to the second factor - word of mouth. How do you put word of mouth into a formula? Maybe I am in a very small minority, but my interest in a movie goes up significantly if a trusted friend (key point, others I do the exact opposite of what they say) says it is am AWESOME movie. They rank many movies as good, but very few as awesome. So what is the Awesome determinator? A movie can creep out of nowhere and just keep growing on the word of mouth factor. I admit that this is not a common event, but one that would seem nearly impossible to predict.
Finally, the fanatic factor. Remember where fan comes from. There are certain writers, directors, actors, soundtrack performers, etc. that carry a certain draw all on their own. Josh Weadon could write a movie about a girl who has poo flinging superpowers and tens of thousands of fans would go see it based on his name, but almost all would be inside a tight demographic. 37% sounds about right in this area.
As a final addition, there is the stupidity of Hollywood factor. They make movies based on what movie-goers like. There are less movie-goers each year because there is less for movie-goers to like. Why pay $25 for tickets, coke, and popcorn to take the wife to see a movie when I can go the big screen TV, NetFlix, and Newman's Own Microwave Popcorn route? My wife would probably add the "you can't pause the theater movie to go pee" factor, too.
Hollywood responds with stupid formulas like this that lets them focus on certain formula films fed to certain demographics and expect a simple equation where you fill in 40 variables and get instant profit. Political and religious discussions aside, the Passion totally breaks the mold. I went with 10 people to see that movie in the opening week and 6 of those people had not been to a theater in years.
The box is getting smaller each year and each year Hollywood continues to segment the box into what it thinks is the most profitable section, throw their efforts there, and alienate another years worth of eyeballs out of the box.
My hope is for alternative delivery and an uprooting of the current studio/distribution model. When the fanatics have a mechanism for funding a film or tv series that goes to internet and/or dvd delivery, the whole world changes. There are multiple ways to do this, too. Fans could pre-pay for a season of tv in order to get the dvds as they are made instead of in a boxed set (with no rental/netflix option until the boxed set was out). A film company could put up a bond that they would sell to the fans for a share of the profits.
If you really think JMS is so awesome, how many $50 bonds would you buy? If he sold 100,000 bonds with a 20% of profit share, made the movie for the $5 million, and netted only $30 million on theater, pay-per-view, and dvd, you would still get $60 back for each $50 investment.
1. make a db of meta info for already released movies
2. make a software that conforms to the already existing stats and "guesses" the income. If it doesn't guess it, tweak until it "guesses" it.
3. pitch it to Holywood execs by demonstrating it "works" by entering the same movie info you have already tweaked it for
4. profit
Of course the fact that it has (well, relatively poor IMO - 37% success? 75% "sort of success"?) success with the db of 800 movies is a result of it been tuned to work for those stats, and there's totally no guarantee it'll work for future releases.
Especially that it can't and won't factor in the most important factor: does the movie suck after all or not.
Movie success is without a doubt a non-linear/chaotic system. Very small perturbations can cause large end effects, like did the lead actor get busted with dope or is the actress the new "it girl" etc etc...
What formula would have predicted the success of "Blair Witch Project", or the original "Nightmare on Elm"?? Nope, just another example of "spreadsheetitus"...
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
I know the parallel isn't perfect, but upon reading this, did anyone think of the South Park episode of Awesome-O?
The software is ALREADY in use in Hollywood and our sources say that in just one week it has come up with over one thousand movie ideas, eight hundred of which feature Adam Sandler:
...golden retriever, or something."
...boxer, or something."
We were able to obtain details about few of the features, which are targeted to be released summer 2006:
Puppy Love
Plot description: "Adam Sandler is like, in love with some girl, but then it turns out that the girl is actually a
Punch-Drunk Millionaire
Plot description: "Adam Sandler... inherits like, a billion dollars, but first, he has to, like, become a
Untitled Project
Plot description: "Adam Sandler is trapped on an island and falls in love with a coconut."
This isn't perfect because how would Passion of the Christ or Mystic River fit into this algorythm. There were no special effects, both were rated R, and one was in a language that hasn't been spoken for 2000 years. This is the problem with Hollywood today, they think there is a formula to good movies, good movies are good because they have a good plot, not high payed actors or special effects out the waazoo.
Okay, so I can understand that the editors don't actually read the front page.. That, with all of the submissions they review, they don't have the memory capacity to remember that this is a dupe..
But not having a script based ability to detect dupes? What kind of geeks are you?
I am sure this is already in use by companies. They just need some finetuning and then we will be presented with the ultimate move.
It will probably made by all studios combined as the outcome can only be one true movie. After that no more movies will be made.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The main result is that the method (neural net) works a little better than other methods on the same data (Table 4 of paper). It scores 75% in a test; conventional regression scores 71%. As they say in the statistical literature, "big woop"; the fancy new thing is marginally better than the simple old thing.
As for the practical side of things, the main predictive variable is the number of screens on which the film was initially shown. The next-highest predictive variables are a variable representing the use of technical effects and a variable represengint the actors' reputation. Well, none of these indicates that this tool (or others discussed in the paper) is of any real use to the industry. The suggested use of the tool is to predict movie success. But the main predictive variables all represent things the industry already knew, when the film was being made and promoted. It's like asking a patient if they have a cold, and then charging them to tell them they have a cold.
Does it consider the Chewbacca Factor when rating Starwars sequels?
-David
It's called the Awesome-O 4000:
Um, Ok, how bout this, Adam Sandler, is like in love with some girl, but then it turns out, that the girl is actually a golden retriever, or something.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
"Chair: What do you suggest we do about the problem?
Officer: Throw mony at it..."
Most of the factors it uses depend on a human already deciding that a movie's going to be a success. You don't get a star studded cast unless you think it's going to be a hit. You don't spend lavishly on special effects unless you think it's going to be a hit. And distribution size is determined by its commercial potential. When that's already decided, there's not much point to having a computer algorithm say the same thing.
what about lord of the rings? the cast was known but certainly not in the public focus. the genre was fantasy, one that doesn't always do so well. there was other strong competition at the time of the first movie's release. i'll admit it did have good special effects. the first was not a sequal. and it did show in many theatres. all things considered, i wonder how the software would have rated this blockbuster. it's really impossible to do for great films because there are so many details behind what makes a movie successful.
I notice that TFA does not state whether the film being a sequel is a positive or negative factor on its chances of success. Given that most of us could probably count the number of decent sequels which we have seen without running out of fingers, I hope they have got it the right way round.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
One can overtrain a large neural network to fit perfectly to the existing data. That's why for a serious work it is necessary to use validation data, but for a scam a fake perfect fit is better.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
If this were 1990, the title would read "neural network predicts movie success" and the discussion would be about the impending success of strong AI.
Reading TFA, it's impossible to know whether this study has any value without seing a proper article, as submited to a reputable stats journal.
First of all this sounds like simple statistical classification with pretty obvious variables. However making classification work is not always trivial.
Methodology is the key here. The sample of 800 movies is rather small, and the details on the chosen explanatory variables is sketchy. With enough variables, even meaningless ones, one can explain anything on a training sample. However with proper classification techniques, using for example jacknife/resubstitution/cross-validation one can find out if the classification model has any actual predictive values.
As someone said "anybody can predict the past", and someone else "prediction is rather difficult, especially about the future".
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Censoring a movie would be an accurate description if the MPAA actually edited the movie. They rate the movie which allows consumers to make an educated decision about seeing the movie.
In a comedy with Carol Kane, numerous others, gun fights with helicopters and a camel. Oh, and it's partly a musical with an epic storyline involving the fate of the world. No similar movies at the time...
Yep. Ishtar wins. Blockbuster successful.
Of course, Star Wars should've flopped by the same arguments.
Neural nets are often badly misapplied, but they can hardly be called "quackery". In fact, this is precisely the sort of thing that neural nets are supposed to do: take numerous factors and try to categorize the input based on those factors.
We have an entire industry devoted to figuring out which movies will be most successful, how best to advertise them, how many theaters to release a given movie in, etc. Arguably, this entire industry is less talented at picking winners than a small shell script. If you want to look for quackery, hare-brained theories, etc., you would do well to start by looking there.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
This is really only useful for 16 year old boys, the only movies that will make it through are going to be Independence Day clones. I for one have always relied on my simple method of trial and error. Although for me it may cost me 8 bucks, the movie industry loses millions. This is a good thing, pavlovian negative reinforcement. Also, bad movies are made better because you know that some goofy idiot is losing his friends money.
Unfortunately since hollywood is a constant the program repeatedly spits out "This will bomb" .
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Unless this factors storylines, soundtracks, and whether the actors have ever been in a successful movie of that genre (e.g. Gene Wilder in a military action thriller), this is worthless. Furthermore, if movie executives reply on this rather than gut instinct, the quality of movies will likely fall even more. Sleeper hits for instance would never be produced any more. Movies that don't reach the height of their popularity until years after being in the theaters would never be produced. Movies that generate more revenue from merchandise than ticket sales would never be produced. Movies that have greater appeal because the actors are relatively unknown. I bet Star Wars would never have been produced if this software were used as a guide.
I'm all for automation and simulation through software, but this just gives greedy, lazy executives a reason to kill quality movie making, what little there is left.
I ask you, which came first, the jerk computer program that could predict the best movies for jerks or the jerk that figured out howto make movies for jerks? Either way, theres a lot of jerks out there making movies, watching movies, and writing computer programs that claim to know Quality, having knowledge of nothing outside of a large data set that is, as we have seen, largely jerk-influenced and low-quality. Even carbonbased critics have difficulty in rising above the level of mere trend-recognizing. It doesnt take a machine to tell me that Michael Bay is hot, hot, hot. If the machine could begin to give useful insight, that is, perpective on elements of the film and how they interact, that would seem of more use than the temporal sepia snapshot: "it works because it works".
What would be particularly interesting is to examine the movies it failed on and attempt to understand why.
and then there are some...well...less visually pleasing folks, that are fantastic actors/actresses.
The accepted word for them is character actors. They make up a very important part of Hollywood, and a lot of movies that don't have good performances from character actors flop because everything looks so artificial.
Depends on what you do. In my R&D work, if I'm successful 37% of the time, people begin to wonder if I'm pushing the envelope hard enough.
that this won't be very marketable. unfortunately, my software success detector says the same thing about itself, so i haven't bothered posting and ad for it on Slashdot
It doesn't seem to factor in current trends in society (theme, etc), which seems to play a big role in which movies are big and which ones flop.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
Is 2005 the year of the remake, or what?
What movies were not remakes were almost all sequals, TV show adaptations, comic/children's book adaptaions, or biographies. What ever happend to an original idea? Can't you get that from software?
Remakes:
"King Kong"
"Willy Wonka"
"Yours, Mine, and Ours"
"The Bad News Bears"
"War of the Worlds"
"The Fog"
"Oliver Twist"
"The Longest Yard"
"Damn Yankees"
"Fun With Dick and Jane"
revenge of the nerds
Remakes in the works:
"Doberman Gang"
"Superman"
"Bullit"
"The Birds"
"Warriors"
"Fahrenheit 451"
"Revenge of the Merds"
Sequels:
"Herbie: Fully Reloaded"
"Harry Potter"
"Starwars"
TV:
"The Honeymooners"
"Bewitched" starring Nicole Kidman
"The Dukes of Hazzard"
"Serenity"
"rating by censors (e.g. G, PG, R)"
What are you a retard? The MPAA is not a censorship board. Companies pay it to rate their movies. It's a marketing organization. (Yeah, and it's involved in anti-piracy but that's a separate issue.)
Or, if the Officer is Ballmer, "Throw Chair at it..."
From the end of the article, the author notes that the software is less capable of predicting the success of "off-beat" films like the Blair Witch Project.
Suddenly I'm reminded of Asimov's fictional science of Psychohistory, which, in later books set in that universe written by Brin, Bear and Benford, which alluded to the fact that psychohistory was accurate only because humanity, under control for years by robots bent on making humanity happy, had managed to mane humanity incredibly predictable.
Most movies are so processed, so homogenized, so regularized, that it's no surprise that some software program can calculate the estimated success of a film based on such superfluous factors as the actors, the category of film, it's rating and if it has special effects.
I have created a formula similar in intent, but much simpler in practice, to determine the most underappreciated movies of a given year:
Link
What the hell is the point of this? Why would someone spend time developing an algorithm that uses budget as one of the variables? Budget is something that would be based on an algorithm like this. So, this is basically saying: some group of people already decided that this movie is a good investment based on a number of factors; based on that,our formula thinks this movie will be successful, and it performs at a whopping 26% higher than chance.
Well pop the champagne.
I can predict the success of a movie, also... ready?
Where R = Ratings,
R
There you go.
Thanks, I'll be in all night.
the software tells us what we already know.. nice. I haven't seen the software, but really I don't see what it can do that the average joe can't. But this app probably would have considered Pulp Fiction to be a flop, and Gigli to be considered a hit. Any coder out there with a bit of movie sense can assign weights to actors/directors/etc and come up with what this software does.
Gives a whole new meaning to the word "formulaic".
I thought that such software already existed, and was called P2P. Really, it's simple: create a 700MB file containing some video footage (doesn't have to have anything to do with your movie) and share it on Fasttrack / Gnutella / whatever. The number of downloads = the amount of interest in the movie, which correlates directly on how many people will go see it on the theater.
To keep from pissing people off too badly - remember, these are the people who are interested in the movie, and therefore most likely to go to a theater to see it, and only an idiot pisses off his own customer base - you could use either some public domain movie or porn, depending on your movies predicted content rating.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Oh my god, all they need to do now is to combine this thing with a random script generator, and they'll get... AWESOM-O 4000!
...yes, it's flawless!
Producer: Watch this. AWESOM-O, given the current trends of the movie-going public can you come up with an idea for a movie that will break a hundred million box office?
Cartman: Um... okay. How about this. Adam Sandler is like, in love with some girl, but then it turns out that the girl is actually a... golden retriever, or something.
Staffer: Oh, perfect!
Another Staffer: We'll call it "Puppy Love"!
Staffer: Give us another movie idea, AWESOM-O!
Another Producer: Yeah yeah!
Another Staffer: Let's hear it!
Another Producer: Yeah, we wanna hear it!
Another Staffer: Come on, come on!
Cartman: Okay, how about this. Adam Sandler... inherits like, a billion dollars, but first, he has to, like, become a... boxer, or something.
Another Staffer:
Another Producer: Punch-Drunk Billionaire!
Hell, you could have a machine pick an excellent plot (say from a book that sold excellently), choose a bunch of top-notch actors, and still have a bomb. How many book-adapted scripts sucked incredibly on the big screen?
There is no magic bullet, if you make a stew from the best ingredients of 5 different other foods you can still end with something that tastes overall like strawberry-flavored-fish-in-marinara-sauce.