The whim of the boxful office can be hard to prefigure . Will that new J - Lo movie be aMaid in Manhattan(which made$94 million ) or aGigli($6.1 million ) ? Will a flick with an initially lamentable box office run be redeemed by its eventual cult status ? ( ThinkBlade Runner , which made only $ 500,000 more than its budgeted monetary value at the box position , butentered the sci - fi canonafter audiences rediscover it on VHS . )
A newpaperby reckoner scientists at the University of Iowa crunches the data point to pinpoint what , if anything , can predict financial success in the sometimes unpredictable movie business sector . harmonize to writer Michael T. Lash and Kang Zhao , the key to rich people does n’t lie with cast off a pop star . Eventhe big starsdon’t have enough pull to bring people to really defective pic ( or even good movies that are ill marketed ) . What ’s more , popular actors are normally more expensive to hire . The only reliable predictor of a movie ’s success , according to Lash and Zhao ? Its director .
The researcher used information mining and political machine encyclopedism to analyze 14,000 films and 4,000 actors and directors lean inIMDBand onBox Office Mojo . They sharpen on whether any significant predictions about a cinema ’s financial achiever ( i.e. whether a movie will take in more money than its budget cost ) could be gleaned just from noesis available in the pre - release stages — who ’s involved , what time of class it hits field , what it ’s about , etc .
They found that a managing director ’s gross revenue for past films predicted a movie ’s success . A director with a high average revenue was likely to keep making money . By line , popular stars were correlated with more receipts for a film , but not neat gain , as films with A - list actors be more to make in the first position . allot to this prediction algorithm , while bear George Clooney in your film is n’t a formula for inst success , tapping Steven Spielberg to organize may be .
[ h / t : MIT Technology Review ]
