

Google Says It Can Predict Which Films Will Be Huge Box-Office Hits - givan
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-study-can-predict-success-of-movies-2013-6

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smackfu
This is essentially just Google using their search data to replace the
tracking polls that movie studios do already. It's not hard to predict a
movie's box office right before it comes out, but what good does that do you,
since all the money has been spent already?

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durum
_It 's not hard to predict a movie's box office right before it comes out_

Well, there's the Netflix prize[0] which tells otherwise

Predicting movie appreciation is actually very hard to solve. One of the
infamous examples is the "Napoleon dynamite problem"[1]

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize)

[1]
[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081123/1212542927.shtml](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081123/1212542927.shtml)

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teraflop
The Netflix prize results show that recommending movies that an individual
viewer is likely to enjoy is, in certain cases, a hard problem. That doesn't
say much about the difficulty of predicting a movie's aggregate popularity
over a large population.

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smountcastle
Based on this, why aren't movie studios creating trailers based on minimal
treatments, releasing them with dates a year or two in the future and then
only creating the movie if the data shows that it'd be a blockbuster?
Basically Lean development for movies.

Granted, I think we'd miss out on potentially great movies, but it seems like
a way for the studios to further reduce their risk, so I think they'd be all
over this. Perhaps they're already doing it and I'm just unaware.

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maxerickson
I would guess part of what is being measured is enthusiasm to go see the movie
in the near future. I tend to only search on upcoming movies that I am
thinking about going to see.

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omegant
There are also early adopters on movies. I follow some projects even before
they start shooting.

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sigzero
I am not sure "predict" is the correct word here.

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rtkwe
It's still a prediction, even if the immediate interpretation is that they
have some ability to predict before they start filming/not in the few months
before release.

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ambiate
IBM has made a similar claim using Twitter's Firehose and natural language
processing to determine a general overview of people's feelings towards a
film. The solution was to tell the film advertisers to toss out more engaging
trailers. It all seemed somewhat odd. Pay IBM tons of bucks just to be told
you should probably make more trailers (which would most likely fail too.)

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ape4
They have so much data they can "predict" a lot more about you.

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sagacitynow
Check for Granger Casuality?

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evolve2k
This is a resubmission of this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838570)

