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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."
King Kong is flopping like a pancake...
Wait, so bigger budgets score AGAINST a movie?
And, this formula WONDERFULLY explains the COLOSSAL sucess of 'Showgirls'...
Honestly, you're right. I forgot that there is a distinct difference between a good movie and a successful one plus the fact that they rarely go hand-in-hand in Hollywood.
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.
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.
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.
No, it's how much they can lift.
Seriously - most of these parameters aren't very quantitative. I want to see some code.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
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!