Studios search for new ways to predict film flops
Everybody loves Casablanca. Generations have watched Bogart and Bergman rekindle their love in war-torn Morocco. It’s often named the greatest film of all time. Nick Meaney disagrees. “It was gloomy, downbeat and too long,” insists the 55-year-old who uses a computer program to tell Hollywood studios how to rewrite their films.
He points out it was only the sixth best-performing film of 1943. “A mass audience is looking for a happy ending,” he insists.
Hollywood may need to listen to such advice. Figures published this week show 2013 was the worst year ever for flops, with studios churning out four turkeys estimated to have lost more than $100 million each.
The Hobbit and Gravity were blockbusters, but Johnny Depp’s Lone Ranger lost $120 million, Jack the Giant Slayer $101 million and R.I.P.D. $115 million, despite a stellar cast including Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds.
Indeed, so poor was last year’s crop that Diana, the dismal biopic of the late Princess of Wales, was not quite bad enough to make the list of top bombs.
The latest Keanu Reeves film, 47 Ronin, has fared so badly in its first week that it’s predicted to lose $150 million.
No wonder, then, that studios are searching for new ways to predict whether a film will tri- umph or flop.
Hollywood is now preparing to cede more creative control, outsourcing decisions on how a film should be marketed, who should play the lead roles and even what should be in the script to statisticians.
These analysts are crunching “big data” — historic box office takings and audience surveys for thousands of films. They are, says Meaney, the “geeks who shoot turkeys.”
Taha Yasseri is the latest scientist to attract attention from Hollywood. He claims to be able to predict the takings of a film up to a month before it is released.
His research was published last year and two Hollywood companies have contacted him about using his formula.
The 28-year-old Oxford University physicist is more used to analyzing atoms than chick flicks, but he and his team have now examined 312 blockbusters, from Avatar to Sherlock Holmes.
By tracking how many filmgoers visit a film’s Wikipedia page in the months before it is released, he is able to predict its box office.
“If there are many more edits to a Wikipedia page about a film, it means people really like to share their knowledge about that movie,” he says. “It is less biased than a poll: it shows what people really think, not what they say they think.”
Yasseri’s model only works once the writers and actors have finished work and the public knows about it.
Nick Meaney, however, claims to be able to make the same prediction after only reading a script.
His company, Epagogix, occupies scruffy offices in south London. Each employee marks a script, giving it a score in hundreds of different categories, including strength of location and proposed actors.
The scores are entered into a computer program driven by an algorithm, which compares the film to the scores Meaney’s team gave hundreds of previous hits, to predict its takings.
The results are not good news for highly paid A-listers. “Assuming the people you replace them with are reasonably competent, nine times out of 10 it has no bearing on the box office figure,” reveals Meaney.
Meaney used to keep a “Johnny Depp list,” named after the Pirates of the Caribbean star who was certain to increase takings in any role. Will Smith and Brad Pitt were also on the list, but Meaney has now stopped making even these exemptions after all three recently appeared in duds.
Worldwide Motion Picture Group works for all the major Hollywood studios, including Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros.”