Just forget the words and sing along

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

I've got to share this bit of news before going to bed.

A scientist down at the Universersity of Oklahoma has devised an equation that predicts whether a movie will be a hit or not. He says he's been working on this for seven years and has analyzed more than 800 movies.

How it works is he assigns seven criteria to a film:

- the film's rating
- competition from other films coming out around the same time
- strength of cast
- genre
- special effects
- whether it's a sequel or not
- number of screens it plays on

The whole thing is then calculated by a neural network computer, and it drops the film into one of nine categories. the worst category is "flop" (the movie makes less than $1 million) and the best is "blockbuster" (the film makes more than $200 million).

After testing this equation on a number of films, it's right 37% of the time, and it's off by one category 75% of the time. This scientist is currently in negotations with a Hollywood studio to get more funding to make this equation more accurate.

Wow. And you thought a lot of movies felt manufactured before....

No comments: