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Wikipedia Can Predict Box Office Flops
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Despite a record year, like every year before it, 2013 remained fraught with its fair share of box office disasters. What if studios could minimize their loses and predict when the next Pluto Nash-level flop was imminent? According to new research published in PLoS One, they may actually be able to. Using data gleaned from Wikipedia articles, researchers measured the likelihood of a film's financial success based on four parameters: number of total page views; number of total edits made; number of users editing; and the number of revisions in the article's revision history, or 'collaborative rigor.'"
... because what we REALLY need is more studios taking LESS chances...
Some of the greatest movies have been box-office flops.
To know it was not only a flop, but a typical crap-scripted Disney attempt to run another character through the PoTC money making machine.
Armie Hammer is an idiot, the movie was a stinker, out of control in more ways than budgetary and there was no conspiracy to slag heavily on it - on look at the trailer and you knew
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I love that movie!
Once there's a wikipedia article, with content, and page views, the movie's already made. Not releasing at that point, to avoid losing money on a flop, would only cause more money to be lost. Or am I missing something?
when the currency is perpetually devalued
Roamin' thru the theater late at night
Remakes and reboots what a common sight
Pulled to the box office getting played like a sucker
Don't fight the power boycott the mother fucker
I can envision the next Hollywood producer seeing this, and proclaiming that all future productions will outdo each other in each of the relevant wikipedia statistics, even if those million monkey-keystrokes are immediately rolled back by beleaguered wikipedia editors.
Cargo-cult executive thinking to the rescue!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
By the time they know it's a flop, isn't a bit late? They've already spent pretty much all the money. At best, it might persuade some theaters to *not* show the movie.
It doesn't really help to find out that the oncoming light in the tunnel is a train 30 seconds earlier than you might have realized otherwise...
But by the time these factors are measured, the film has already been made and most of the money spent on it. There's no point predicting THEN whether it will succeed or fail.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If the Film's Wikipedia page already exists, then isn't the film at least in production? What's the point of knowing it will flop once the money's spent?
I can predict that it rains today, today!
Those four items are obvious measures of audience interest in the movie based on what they are able to see. The number of people looking at its wiki page, the number and intensity of the editors, are all pretty directly proportional to either how many people are interested at all in the film, or how interested they are.
There are three things to note:
1) Artificially increasing any of these will not actually increase interest in the movie, except perhaps improving the quality of the page itself (essentially making it "advertising", although not as biased or controlled as normal advertising would be). I'm sure most of us grasp that, but I imagine plenty of Hollywood suits are preparing to hire teams of Wikipedia editors based on this flawed understanding of cause and effect.
2) The interest measured is pre-release. It is based on trailers, interviews, everything except the film itself. There are plenty of movies that may fail to garner initial interest, either due to shoddy marketing or even just misunderstanding who will be interested in your film, that later become successes on home release (or the modern-day equivalent, streaming and download services). So I worry this may cause movies to become even more focused on the initial theater profits, ignoring the longer profitability of the film.
3) By the time you have a Wikipedia page worth measuring, it's basically too late to change the film itself. All that you can really do is alter the marketing plan, unless you happen to have material to re-cut in response to pre-feedback. Now, they may notice what they expected to be a small film is getting a huge amount of early interest, and scale up their marketing to widen the audience. Or they may see that despite spending a fortune making it, nobody wants to see their next big-budget film, and decide to slash the marketing push (which can often be the largest part of the budget) to try to minimize losses.
What good is it to be able to predict if the movie will flop when you have to spend $100 million making the damn thing first! Maybe you could just make the trailer, and see how well its wikipedia page does?
Sorry, that film is about Windows Vista.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
http://xkcd.com/545/
Studying metrics on how often people edit Wikipedia is interesting, but cannot possibly tell the whole story. Some movies come out of nowhere and succeed.
For example, the quirky film Napoleon Dynamite became a critical success and made a great deal of money, but you really need to watch it to get it. It has no famous actors, it isn't based on any previous brand, and there would be no reason for anyone to pay attention to it on Wikipedia before it was released.
I'm pretty sure that the Wikipedia metrics would have predicted that Napoleon Dynamite would be a total flop.
I remain hopeful that technology will reduce costs so that more really unique movies can be made. The more a studio is spending on a movie, the more the studio wants the movie to be "a sure thing" and thus like every other movie.
If the movie studios start using Wikipedia metrics to try to predict which movies will succeed, I sure hope they will only do that on big-ticket movies, so there is at least a chance for really new stuff to get made. Otherwise, the really new stuff will have to come from outside of the studios.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I never did understand that...I mean, yeah, the plot, acting and special effects weren't top shelf, but frankly I felt that the same could have been said about Spiderman or Resident Evil: Apocalypse or Signs, all movies that also came out in 2002...in fact, I was so disappointed in Spiderman that I haven't even bothered to see 2 or 3 (is there even a third one now? Bleah, who cares?)
Basically I found it a fun, light story with a little action, a little (okay, very corny) humour, and a couple of interesting 'background tech' concepts (the body shop, pizza vending machine, cars, even the virtual pool table). The cameos were good, I really loved John Cleese's character as a smartass vehicle AI :) Overall, I wouldn't call it a blockbuster, but it's certainly no Ultraviolet...so why the extreme hate? It's basically Beverly Hills Cop set on the moon, is what the plot and acting felt like to me, and I always liked the BHC movies...
Meh.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I see people hiring people to edit pages-- paying people to have software "view" the pages.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Isn't it easier to get more accurate results from say... Rotten Tomatoes?
..bummer being, its always *after* they are drawn, tho..
As soon as they can predict something, then it will be news.
Can somebody rename this story to "Wikipedia can correlate box office flops with page edits and views"
I guess it could help a studio decide whether to pursue a theatrical or home video release, especially now that digital projection makes cinema just video with a bigger projector and stronger digital restrictions management.
Getting some qualified critics other than a fucking yes man to go and watch the fucking movies. Movies are not a series of random numbers that may or may not sit well with the general population.
How fucking stupid that it resorts to this to know what makes a good movie or not. Get the fuck out of your industry if you need wikipedia to tell you how to do your job.
When i looked at the chart in the article it looked to me like it had a hard time predicting the 'flops'.
Even then it seemed so compressed i am not sure how accurate any of it was.
If the prediction was $10 million and the dot is at about $40-50 mil, is that a good guess or a bad guess. None of the low end ones looked accurate. Seems to be one with a prediction of $1000 (huh!!!) and a result of $1 mil.
As absurd as it may seem, the PR agencies working for major film studios frequently FAKE signs of early success for forthcoming movies. They seed forums with shills attempting to give the impression that people are really enthusiastic about the film, its stars, and other associated concepts. And why? Because they have the promotional budget, and no better idea about how to spend it.
So, film producers as savvy as Spielberg will immediately have their people use this information to blitz Wikipedia.
Real success tends to come from real quality. While dim-witted pseudo-intellectuals suggest that the success of populist or franchise movies is proof that the general audience lacks critical faculties, most successful blockbusters are clearly very well made movies. The proof of this fact is shown when Hollywood attempts to cynically clone the success of genre film X with something they are convinced must be similar, but that tanks at the box-office. Hollywood would be ecstatic if the audience was as dumb and easily pleased as the idiot 'film snobs' suggest.
Consider the desperate and hopeless attempts made by studios to emulate the success of 'Harry Potter', "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games". Crappy book franchise are acquired simply because the target teen demographics have apparently made them 'best-sellers'. Directors and actors with a solid track record are employed to make the film version. PR companies create fake enthusiasm for the movie. Film is released and flops (see 'Mortal whatsit: the whatsit of whatsit' for the latest example- and couldn't the moronic studio considered changing the title to something a potential cinema goer might have remembered?)
I see few 'flops' that deserved to do much better, and few successes that I thought deserved to flop, and this is regardless of my personal liking of each movie. Of course, Hollywood has ALWAYS respected the 'magic' of talent that knows how to get it right, and rewarded such talent with much increased trust. This is the Hollywood System- success breeds success. However Hollywood is capable of looking past simple financial success- go look at the directors that Disney's Marvel production company has entrusted to helm their movies.
The most depressing sight of this Summer was genre-fan-favourite director Guillermo del Toro humiliating himself in every interview for "Pacific Rim" by dribbling PR department enforced crap about how Summer blockbusters MUST be made for 12-year-old boys. Directors of repute are supposed to have higher artistic vision, not pander to focus-group 'research'. It is notable that del Toro RUINED the box-office of his movie in English speaking nations (where people got to hear him spout this dribble), but the movie was saved by audience response in nations like China.
...people don't talk about crappy movies.
Film at 11.
The entire premise is bogus. Despite the headline, it's based on HINDSIGHT; it has no predictive value whatsoever.
It doesn't do much good to "predict" what movie will be a flop, after it was a flop.
Even saying "big deal" in sarcasm gives it too much credit.
There. FTFY.
This isn't about Wikipedia. It's really about consumer interest. Know what's far better than a giant flop? Measuring consumer interest before you blow the money in the first place. That's why crowd funding is taking off.
The "far right" is a label you created in an attempt to discredit honest hard working folks.
So will the studios now hire more editors to game the metrics?
Measuring consumer interest before you blow the money in the first place. That's why crowd funding is taking off.
But that process is equally flawed as it doesn't address the basic failing in the industry. Almost every film starts with what someone thinks is a good idea (and ideas, even good ones are ten-a-penny). The difference between a flop and a success isn't the idea, it's how well that idea is converted into a film. You only get an inkling of that when the film has been made and the edits done.
It makes no difference whether the film (idea) was backed by studio money or crowd-funded money. The possibility of turning a workable idea into a total failure is just as great.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Even if it was previously a reliable model, now that it is known it will be gamed relentlessly, skewing the metrics so they don't correspond to the desired indications of success any more.
It's like a company I heard of who bought 20K facebook likes and then got the grand total of 10 downloads for their mobile app. Facebook likes are a poor indicator at the best of times; we have only about 4000 gained slowly and at great labour, for a 1M download game. But when all they indicate is that you are faking the numbers, it's about as pathetic as it would be to pay people to say they like you in real life.
All this is going to do is make it harder for the wikipedia editors and reduce the real quality of information about new movies.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
Look at the graph. Whenever the movies are predicted to rake in massive revenue, the predictions are very close to the actual revenue. Meanwhile, the predicted flops generally turn out better than expected by an order of magnitude. This method predicts blockbusters, not flops.
a popular thing being popular. All their metrics expose one thing: something popular will have broad appeal. Big whoop-dee-do. We already knew that.
What this basically says is that audiences have already decided whether or not the movie will be a success before it's been released.
Think about it, sure a preview is somewhat limited by the film its based on, you'll know the actors, director, maybe the writers and producer. And you might get a very rough idea of the characters and plot, but that's about it.
Is there any reason why the previews for Evan Almighty couldn't have been as good as the previews for The 40-Year-Old Virgin?
The film industry is designed to push as much money into the opening weekend as possible to avoid giving audiences a chance to talk about the film and potentially not see the film. This study seems to suggest they're succeeding.
Just look at the top movie on IMDB, The Shawshank Redemption
"In total the film made approximately $28.3 million in North American theaters, making it the number 51 highest grossing film of 1994 and the number 21 highest grossing R-rated film of 1994."
What's that say about the correlation between film quality and box office success? Maybe the only reason Evan Almighty flopped is because it was finally a chance for all the people who made Bruce Almighty a hit to make up for their mistake.
I stole this Sig
If you use enough computing power to find even seemingly random correlations, if they hold up for long enough there has to be a common factor somewhere and it can be used to predict with surprising accuracy.
They are movie studio. They don't really care if a movie is good or bad. They only care about how much money they made with a movie. Most of a movie's earning are made the first few weeks. So whatmatters to them, basically boils down to "Are many people going to see a movie during its openning week ?".
Lot of noise online (Wikipedia activity in today's article. Or google activity in a previous article mentionned elsewhere in this thread) is a sign of how much a movie is talked about. The more a movie is talked about, the more interest there is about this movie, the more it occupies attention.
The more poeple talk and are interested about a movie, the more likely they are to go see the movie once it out to see how it finally looks like.
Thus more movie goers in the first few weeks and more cash for the studio. They are happy and call it a success and pat each other on the back and ready their writers to prepare a few extra sequels.
It doesn't matter if the movie is actually bad. If a lot of people are interested, they are going to see it. Even if afterward they think the movie is bad, they still paid their ticket and the movie studio still earned wads of cash. So the criteria mentioned by the parent poster (people have to see it to mention if it's good or bad on a wiki) aren't ultimately relevant for what a studio want. They would be relevant to determine if a movie is good or bad. But not how much it will sell.
Conversly if a movie turn out to be actually quite good, but isn't very well known initially, it wont generate that much sales, and the studio will call it a flop due to poor revenue. Even if through word-of-mouth, the reputation of the quality of this movie spreads, and lots of people end up seeing on time or another, and over the years it becomes a cult classic, it doesn't matter to the studio. They don't give a fuck that 10 years down the line, people would like to rewatch it at cine-clubs or that the rare 2nd hand copies on eBay will sell for big price. The only thing that matters to the studio is that movie (even if it turned good on the long run) didn't sell as much tickets as the regular summer-blockbuster or 33th sequel of Chipmunks or movie adaptations of current bestseller "50 sahdes of gray, the movie".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yup, probably the next chef d'oeuvre will be coming out of a Indiegogo, Kickstarter or Wreck-a-movie project.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]