Hollywood looks to geeks to find formula for success
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- yearold 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.
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.
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 triumph 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.
The 28- year- old Oxford University physicist 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.
“It is less biased than a poll: it shows what people really think, not what they say they think.”