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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
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?
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...
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
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.
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.