848 research outputs found
Quantitative approaches for evaluating the influence of films using the IMDb database
[EN] Why do films certain remain influential throughout film history? The purpose of this paper is to attempt to answer this question. To do so, we adopt some quantitative approaches that facilitate an objective interpretation of the data. The data source we have chosen for this study is the Internet Online Movie Database (IMDb), and in particular, one of its sections called "Connections", which lists references made to a film in subsequent movies and references made in the film itself to previous ones. The extraction and analysis of these networks of citations allows us to draw some conclusions about the most influential movies in film history, identifying their distinguishing features, and considering how their popularity has evolved over time.This work is part of the Project "Active Audiences and Journalism. Interactivity, Web Integration and Findability of Journalistic Information". CSO2012-39518-C04-02. National Plan for R+D+i, Spanish Ministry of Economy and CompetitivenessCanet Centellas, FJ.; Valero Navarro, MA.; Codina Bonilla, L. (2016). Quantitative approaches for evaluating the influence of films using the IMDb database. Communication & Society. 29(2):151-172. https://doi.org/10.15581/003.29.2.151-172S15117229
The statistical laws of popularity: Universal properties of the box office dynamics of motion pictures
Are there general principles governing the process by which certain products
or ideas become popular relative to other (often qualitatively similar)
competitors? To investigate this question in detail, we have focused on the
popularity of movies as measured by their box-office income. We observe that
the log-normal distribution describes well the tail (corresponding to the most
successful movies) of the empirical distributions for the total income, the
income on the opening week, as well as, the weekly income per theater. This
observation suggests that popularity may be the outcome of a linear
multiplicative stochastic process. In addition, the distributions of the total
income and the opening income show a bimodal form, with the majority of movies
either performing very well or very poorly in theaters. We also observe that
the gross income per theater for a movie at any point during its lifetime is,
on average, inversely proportional to the period that has elapsed after its
release. We argue that (i) the log-normal nature of the tail, (ii) the bimodal
form of the overall gross income distribution, and (iii) the decay of gross
income per theater with time as a power law, constitute the fundamental set of
{\em stylized facts} (i.e., empirical "laws") that can be used to explain other
observations about movie popularity. We show that, in conjunction with an
assumption of a fixed lower cut-off for income per theater below which a movie
is withdrawn from a cinema, these laws can be used to derive a Weibull
distribution for the survival probability of movies which agrees with empirical
data. The connection to extreme-value distributions suggests that popularity
can be viewed as a process where a product becomes popular by avoiding failure
(i.e., being pulled out from circulation) for many successive time periods. We
suggest that these results may apply to popularity in general.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure
How a "Hit" is Born: The Emergence of Popularity from the Dynamics of Collective Choice
In recent times there has been a surge of interest in seeking out patterns in
the aggregate behavior of socio-economic systems. One such domain is the
emergence of statistical regularities in the evolution of collective choice
from individual behavior. This is manifested in the sudden emergence of
popularity or "success" of certain ideas or products, compared to their
numerous, often very similar, competitors. In this paper, we present an
empirical study of a wide range of popularity distributions, spanning from
scientific paper citations to movie gross income. Our results show that in the
majority of cases, the distribution follows a log-normal form, suggesting that
multiplicative stochastic processes are the basis for emergence of popular
entities. This suggests the existence of some general principles of complex
organization leading to the emergence of popularity. We discuss the theoretical
principles needed to explain this socio-economic phenomenon, and present a
model for collective behavior that exhibits bimodality, which has been observed
in certain empirical popularity distributions.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figures, A version of the work is published in
Econophysics and Sociophysics: Trends and Perspectives, (eds.) Bikas K.
Chakrabarti, Anirban Chakraborti, Arnab Chatterjee; Wiley-VCH, Berlin (2006);
Chapter-15, pages: 417-44
Global cinema distribution: a large-scale data-driven study of film screenings
This interdisciplinary study combined the fields of digital humanities, new cinema history, and cultural economics. It used innovative visualisation and computational techniques to engage with big data from the global film industry. The study established a method for investigating and analysing the temporal and spatial nature of contemporary cinema distribution
Identification of key films and personalities in the history of cinema from a Western perspective
Abstract The success of a film is usually measured through its box-office revenue or through the opinion of professional critics; such measures, however, may be influenced by external factors, such as advertisement or trends, and are not able to capture the impact of a film over time. Thanks to the recent availability of data on references among movies, some researchers have started to use citations patterns as an alternative method for ranking movies. In this paper, we propose a novel ranking method for films based on the network of references among movies, calculated by combining four well known centrality indexes: in-degree, closeness, harmonic and PageRank. Our objective is to measure the success of a movie by accounting how much it has influenced other movies produced after its release, from both the artistic and the economic point of view. We apply our method on a subset of the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) citation network consisting of around 47,000 international movies, and we derive a list of films that can be considered milestones in the history of cinema. For each movie we also collect data on its year of release, genres and countries of production, to analyze trends and patterns in the film industry according to such features. We also collect data on 20,000 directors and almost 400,000 performers (actors and actresses), and we use the network of references and our score of movies for evaluating their career, and for ranking them. Since the IMDb dataset we employ is highly biased toward European and North American movies and personalities, our findings can be considered relevant principally for Western culture
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