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."

Comments

Statistically

[alphaseven]

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.

That's not that impressive at all

[sam_handelman]

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."