Plenty of movie fans think Hollywood fare has become too rote.
Now, some professors at U Penn’s Wharton School and NYU’s Stern School present a case for making it even more formulaic.
In their paper “Green Lighting Movie Scripts: Revenue Forecasting and Risk Management” Jehoshua Eliashberg, Sam K. Hui, and John Zhang show Hollywood how it’s done. Never mind the stars or directors hired— they say it’s possible to predict a movie’s eventual box-office success by simply applying their mathematical formula to the script.
The academics analyzed the scripts of 200 movies released between 1995 and 2006. They coded the scripts for different variables ranging from the percentage of interior scenes to whether they included a strong nemesis.
Their conclusion: the most important variables in predicting box-office performance are whether the film is in the action genre, how conflict builds, and whether the conflict is multidimensional.
They also looked at risk-adjusted return on capital, and conclude that the movies with the best returns are in what they call the family-movie genre, followed by comedy. The worst risk-adjusted returns are on horror movies, the academics say.
“Based on our interactions with industry executives, forecasting and risk management are the two capabilities that are sorely needed in the movie industry in order to transform it from an intuition and experience-based decision making into a more science-based decision making,” Eliashberg, Hui, and Zhang write. “A science-based approach can pay off handsomely.”
Maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for a little less greenlighting of the “Prince of Persias” of the future and a little more like “Toy Story 3.”
Read the white paper : http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/news/docs/hui_scripts_5.6.2010.pdf
The last couple weeks, television commercials for ‘Clash’ have been airing that are downright stunning. There’s just one problem: The pristine 2D version we’re catching a glimpse of on TV looks far better than the dark, choppy 3D version we’re paying extra cash for in theaters.
Moviefone co-founder Russ Leatherman (aka Mr. Moviefone) said he “was one of the very first on the 3D bandwagon, but I’m about to jump off. Because of pure greed, Hollywood studios [and theater chains] are about to kill the golden goose. There’s a huge difference between the immersive experience of seeing ‘Up’ or ‘Avatar’ in 3D or the lousy, suffocating experience of the retrofitted ‘Clash of the Titans.’”
And we’ve been here before. ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ a film that also did quite well at the box office, was, like ‘Clash,’ up-converted to less-than-stellar reviews. ‘Avatar’ director James Cameron, who now seems to be the go-to guy when discussing 3D technology, doesn’t believe these films should even be considered 3D. “It’s never going to be as good as if you shot it in 3D,” Cameron said recently, “but think of it as sort of 2.8D.” And even 2.8D, as Cameron notes, is only possible if the proper time — six months to a year — is spent on the up-conversion.
Speaking of ‘Avatar,’ director James Cameron, always a visionary it seems, appears to be temporarily jumping off the 3D bandwagon just as everyone else is jumping on — announcing that his re-release of ‘Avatar’ (called ‘Avatar: Home’) this summer, with 55 minutes of new footage, will not be released in 3D.
