Movie Analytics and the Future of Film Finance. Are Oscars and Box Office Revenue Predictable?

Leveraging analytics to produce compelling and profitable film content

“…Eliashberg, Hui, and Zhang 2014). Bruneel et al (2018) draw a "sobering lesson", based on the state-of-the-art data mining models, that "it remains difficult to actually predict box office revenues with decent accuracy because of the presence of very strong outliers in the dataset". The impact of those outliers reinforces the fundamental dynamics of revenue distributions and the impracticalities of substantial reliance on such forecasting for investment decisions.…”

“…Examples of such impacts include content proliferation driven by SVODs' multi-billion-dollar investment in content production, reduced entry barrier to production, and user generated content (Fontaine et al 2018). 1 To compete in an environment where SVODs' revenues will rise to overtake theatrical revenues in 2019 2 , producers are increasingly turning to analytics as a promising route to produce compelling and profitable content (Bruneel et al 2018;Fuselier 2017). 3 Meanwhile, the substantial growth of digital consumption has generated a vast volume of granular individual level data, propelling the diffusion of analytics across entertainment industries that conventionally operate upon creative intuition (Hennig-Thurau and Houston 2018;Fontaine et al 2018).…”