Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data

Use of socially generated "big data" to access information about collective states of the minds in human societies has become a new paradigm in the emerging field of computational social science. A natural application of this would be the prediction of the society's reaction to a new product in the sense of popularity and adoption rate. However, bridging the gap between "real time monitoring" and "early predicting" remains a big challenge. Here we report on an endeavor to build a minimalistic predictive model for the financial success of movies based on collective activity data of online users. We show that the popularity of a movie can be predicted much before its release by measuring and analyzing the activity level of editors and viewers of the corresponding entry to the movie in Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia.Comment: 13 pages, Including Supporting Information, 7 Figures, Download the dataset from: http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/SupplementaryDataS1.zi

Advertising and Word-of-Mouth Effects on Pre-launch Consumer Interest and Initial Sales of Experience Products

This study examines how consumers' interest in a new experience product develops as a result of advertising and word-of-mouth activities during the pre-launch period. The empirical settings are the U.S. motion picture and video game industries. The focal variables include weekly ad spend, blog volume, online search volume during pre-launch periods, opening-week sales, and product characteristics. We treat pre-launch search volume of keywords as a measure of pre-launch consumer interest in the related product. To identify probable persistent effects among the pre-launch time-series variables, we apply a vector autoregressive modeling approach. We find that blog postings have permanent, trend-setting effects on pre-launch consumer interest in a new product, while advertising has only temporary effects. In the U.S. motion picture industry, the four-week cumulative elasticity of pre-launch consumer interest is 0.187 to advertising and 0.635 to blog postings. In the U.S. video game industry, the elasticities are 0.093 and 1.306, respectively. We also find long-run co-evolution between blog and search volume, which suggests that consumers' interest in the upcoming product cannot grow without bounds for a given level of blog volume

Could you guess an interesting movie from the posters?: An evaluation of vision-based features on movie poster database

In this paper, we aim to estimate the Winner of world-wide film festival from the exhibited movie poster. The task is an extremely challenging because the estimation must be done with only an exhibited movie poster, without any film ratings and box-office takings. In order to tackle this problem, we have created a new database which is consist of all movie posters included in the four biggest film festivals. The movie poster database (MPDB) contains historic movies over 80 years which are nominated a movie award at each year. We apply a couple of feature types, namely hand-craft, mid-level and deep feature to extract various information from a movie poster. Our experiments showed suggestive knowledge, for example, the Academy award estimation can be better rate with a color feature and a facial emotion feature generally performs good rate on the MPDB. The paper may suggest a possibility of modeling human taste for a movie recommendation.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Exploring the Value of Online Reviews to Organizations: Implications for Revenue Forecasting and Planning

One of the most intriguing social phenomena brought forth by advances in information and communication technologies is the vast amplification of the power of word-of-mouth. With the help of the Internet, wireless networking, and mobile telephony, today’s citizens and consumers are forming a bewildering array of technology-mediated communities where they exchange opinions and experiences on companies, products, services, and even world events

Movie’s box office performance prediction: An approach based on movie’s script, text mining and deep learning

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceA capacidade de prever a bilheteria de filmes tem sido atividade de grande interesse para investigadores. Entretanto, parcela significativa destes estudos concentra-se no uso de variáveis disponíveis apenas nos estágios de produção e pós-produção de filmes. O objetivo deste trabalho é desenvolver um modelo preditivo de bilheteria baseando-se apenas em informações dos roteiros dos filmes, por meio do uso de técnicas de processamento de linguagem natural (PLN), mineração de texto e de redes neuronais profundas. Essa abordagem visa otimizar a tomada de decisão de investidores em uma fase ainda inicial dos projetos, com foco específico na melhoria dos processos seletivos da Agência Nacional do Cinema do Brasil.The ability to predict movies box-office has been a field of interest for many researchers. However, most of these studies are concentrated on variables that are available only in later stages as in production and pos-production phase of films. The objective of this work is to develop a predictive model to forecast movie box-office performance based only on information in the movie script, using natural language processing techniques, text mining and deep learning neural networks. This approach aims to optimize the investor’s decision-making process at earlier steps of the project, with special focus on the selection process of the Brazilian Film Agency (ANCINE – Agência Nacional do cinema)

Improving productivity in Hollywood with data science: Using emotional arcs of movies to drive product and service innovation in entertainment industries

Improving productivity in the entertainment industry is a very challenging task as it heavily depends on generating attractive content for the consumers. The consumer-centric design (putting the consumers at the centre of the content development and production) focuses on ways in which businesses can design customized services and products which accurately reflect consumer preferences. We propose a new framework which allows to use data science to optimize content-generation in entertainment and test this framework for the motion picture industry. We use the natural language processing methodology combined with econometric analysis to explore whether and to what extent emotions shape consumer preferences for media and entertainment content, which, in turn, affect revenue streams. By analyzing 6,174 movie scripts, we generate the emotional trajectory of each motion picture. We then combine the obtained mappings into clusters which represent groupings of consumer emotional journeys. These clusters are then plugged into an econometric model to predict overall success parameters of the movies including box office revenues, viewer satisfaction levels (captured by IMDb ratings), awards, as well as the number of viewers’ and critics’ reviews. We find that emotional arcs in movies can be partitioned into 6 basic shapes. The highest box offices are associated with the Man in a Hole shape which is characterized by an emotional fall followed by an emotional rise. This U-shaped emotional arc results in financially successful movies irrespective of genre and production budget. Implications of this analysis for generating on-demand content and improving productivity in entertainment industries are discussed

Leveraging analytics to produce compelling and profitable film content

Producing compelling film content profitably is a top priority to the long-term prosperity of the film industry. Advances in digital technologies, increasing availabilities of granular big data, rapid diffusion of analytic techniques, and intensified competition from user generated content and original content produced by Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) platforms have created unparalleled needs and opportunities for film producers to leverage analytics in content production. Built upon the theories of value creation and film production, this article proposes a conceptual framework of key analytic techniques that film producers may engage throughout the production process, such as script analytics, talent analytics, and audience analytics. The article further synthesizes the state-of-the-art research on and applications of these analytics, discuss the prospect of leveraging analytics in film production, and suggest fruitful avenues for future research with important managerial implications