Japanese physicists crack box office code
I don’t know exactly what their formula is, but given the text in the article you provided…
…Tell that to John Carter.
Rather than studying the money, I think the content of the marketing strategy is much more telling. Usually when a trailer is filled with quotes and not much content, the movie has been deemed a failure by the studio and they’re just reaching. When a trailer doesn’t give you a sense of the story and seems too much like something else, it’s not going to do well. Even if the film is bad (Prometheus), a mysterious trailer that makes you want to know more will get butts in seats.
Yeah,since they rely on market strategies they can only know how well a film can fare at the box office but can they tell how well the audience can receive a movie?For that they have to take into account a lot of factors since the tastes of audience vary
Is it really possible to predict a film’s success on a mathematical or scientific basis?
I doubt it. Box office success is, by all accounts, a chaotic system, and those cannot be modelled with any substantial predictive power.
Why are a bunch of research physicists doing market research to help enable profits for movie distributors? They sound more like corporate hacks than scientists.
The article says it takes buzz on social media into account.
So basically, they already know how interested the audience is in seeing the movie.
@My Name Is Bruce
I dunno, I think if most of us saw a film a month before it was released we could predict in ballpark figures how much money the film is going to make.
I need to look at the data. If it really worked for a significant number of films then I’ll believe it. Wouldn’t surprise me if it did.
This isn’t exactly eye-popping news, is it? With pun intended, it’s not exactly rocket science that effective marketing of a film usually translates to commercial success.
And of course, I know the OP mentioned this as well, but who gives a shit how much a film makes anyhow?
The paper itself can be read here.
^Mathematics scares the shit out of me
I’m not a statistician but I’ll give my two cents anyway:
First, the study analyzes the Japanese box office, not the American one. That automatically rules out ‘sleeper’ hits (as detailed in the paper), and it doesn’t even begin to look at cultural differences between Japan and USA/North America. Another problem is basing statistical analysis on social media results. There’s obviously going to be voluntary response bias when analyzing tweets or blog posts.
The paper also shows graphs of blog posts versus film revenue and concludes that they’re proportional. But which of these two variables is independent? That is, do people go see a movie because they read a blog post about it that morning, or do people write blog posts about films they’ve just seen? After all, it’s only natural that websites will post more about a movie if it makes more money. Case in point: the Globe and Mail (as a Canadian example) has more Prometheus coverage than an indie film like Lola Versus does.
The authors conclude that movies that make more money also get more buzz and that there’s some sort of proportional relationship at play. This is of course only one small part of box office appeal (other factors being star power, marketing, brand loyalty et al.). It’s an interesting start but I don’t think there’s anything conclusive here.
This seems effective as a mathematical model of peoples’ purchasing decisions, but it’s not, as the headlines seem to state, a magic predictor of revenue. It can’t predict revenue until it sees the word of mouth generated by the film.
I live under the belief that if you filled five shelving displays at a Hastings with Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, the mere amount of it will get people to pick it up, look at it, and purchase it in higher amounts than Symbiopsychotaxiplasm currently sells. The problem is that the cost of filling five displays with that movie is prohibitive to the amount it would finally make, so Hastings only stocks one copy per several stores and leaves the rest to special order in order to make a tiny profit off of an even tinier investment, rather than lose a small amount on a larger investment.
So in that sense regardless of how bad John Carter failed, it still made more money than most profitable indie films. Only, the profitable indie films were profitable, and John Carter wasn’t.
What the studios want is a huge profit. They know they can only expect a small profit out of indies, so they bankroll huge John Carter sized movies in the hopes of making hundreds of millions, not mere thousands, of dollars.
That science is already known and dips in profits of John Carter are not going to break the measurement that John Carter sized productions make more money in box office than lower budgeted films, say, Another Earth. The research is box office, not profits.
So everyone here is mostly on the same page. This is old news, well known, and unsurprising, and considering how the Japanese are typically capable of coming up with really neat shit like robots and invisibility cloaks and so on, why this?
—PolarisDiB
^Rather than compare to Another Earth, compare to In Time. In Time and John Carter are both science fiction features released nearly the same time and applying themselves to a particular sci fi nerd audience.
John Carter made $280million . In Time made $173million.
John Carter cost $250million to make. In Time cost $40million.
John Carter made $107million more than In Time, but only made a 12% profit. In Time made $107millon LESS, but made a 332.5% profit.
John Carter cost 6.25 times as much as In Time, but made back less than In Time’s budget. In Time cost .16 times John Carter’s budget, but made back less than half of it’s budget.
What the studio wants is In Time’s multiple for John Carter’s budget. 332.5% profit off of 250million is $831.25million. John Carter is a flop despite making 6.25 times as much money as In Time’s ‘success._ _In Time’s_ success, however, is not enough to bankroll another John Carter, even by half, so it disincentivizes bankrolling that many In Time’s because the studio is still wanting that $831.25million from a John Carter sized movie.
—PolarisDiB
Thought this was a little funny and relevant, so I’ll just leave this here.
This isn’t anything new. I mean, you wrap a turd in aluminum foil, call it a baked potato (or McTater), sell it for $1.00 on the value menu at McDonald’s, and…here’s the kicker…ADVERTISE THE FACT THAT EVERYONE’S EATING IT BUT YOU…even if no one has eaten the turd yet, you might see this fact plastered all over Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, ESPN, People, Sports Illustrated, American Idol, KISS radio station (aka. oligopoly owned media moguls)…and you’ll eventually begin to believe it’s true and buy into the hype and actually eat a piece of shit….then you’ll take a photo of yourself eating your McTater with your iPhone…upload it to Instagram…#MmmMmmMcTater and like it hoping people will recognize how unique you are for eating shit and aspire to be like you…perpetuating the cycle of shit eating…until it’s logarithmic decay of interest reaches it’s 7th iteration of half lives (usually a week)…then it’s time to do the following…
Change the name of the McTater to McDoubleTot, up the price to a $1.75 and advertise how there’s 25% more shit in it (call it beef, whatever), because marketing knows you don’t know math and that a 25% increase is not “double” and that a 25% increase would actually mean the value should jump up no more than a $1.25…so you pay more money to eat more shit and the cycle continues…
Nothing new.
Next.
Varun Anisetty
Link
I know that most of us don’t give a F about box office results bu I wanted to know what you guys think about this.
Two years ago a similar research was done to estimate the results of films using a different approach.
Is it really possible to predict a film’s success on a mathematical or scientific basis?
I know it sounds stupid but those researchers and physicists are educated enough to know that a film’s success depends on the audience.
Is it foolish enough for anyone to venture into such a task?