A bowling alley. A severed toe sporting a neatly polished nail. An aging hippie and his best friend, a Vietnam War veteran with a hair-trigger temper. If those images don't add up to anything for you, feel free to flip the page. If they do, it means you're familiar — perhaps intimately so — with one of the most analyzed, deconstructed and eclectically interpreted films of recent decades: The Big Lebowski. Joel and Ethan Coen's subversive comedy, in which a slovenly slacker (Jeff Bridges) in modern-day L.A. gets caught up in a convoluted kidnapping case, was neither a critical nor a ... Read More
Oscar Winners Should Thank Their Economist
March 6, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
As anyone who has channel surfed past Entertainment Tonight is aware, movie studios put massive energy into their Oscar campaigns each year. But does this effort to sway the voting members of the Motion Picture Academy of America pay off in terms of increased revenues? A series of studies over the past decade have reached conflicting conclusions. In a 2001 analysis titled “What’s an Oscar Worth?” a team of economists led by Randy Nelson and Michael Donihue of Colby College compared the box-office take of 131 nominated films with that of 131 less-heralded movies released in the same ... Read More
Hollywood’s Sigh of Relief
March 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Despite a record-breaking 2009, Hollywood is still roiling from shaky DVD revenues, a global recession, increased piracy, intense foreign competition and lingering questions about the dollar value of the medium. Although hope has now been pinned on resurgent 3-D revenues (and ever-rising ticket prices), insiders are still questioning whether the industry can remain a dominant force in worldwide movie distribution. Perhaps a few of these fears can be put to rest. A new study, headed by researchers at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, finds that despite the challenges mounted ... Read More
The Art of Predicting Box-Office Gold
January 15, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Accurate prediction is never easy. In Hollywood — like the ESPN-dominated sports world — pundits and analysts feed off the hype that precedes the latest blockbuster news. On Dec. 18, that frenzy reached a fever pitch as Fox's Avatar hit screens and both studio execs and otherwise indifferent moviegoers found themselves speculating whether the epic could ascend to Titanic-like heights in ticket sales. Seizing upon this casual interest in following movie returns, third-party box-office analysts were quick to post their (educated) predictions for the first weekend's results. These ... Read More
Bare Breasts Don’t Beget Boffo Box Office
November 18, 2009 • By • 5 Comments
Want your movie to make more money? Throw in a gratuitous sex scene. At least, that seems to be the working assumption among certain studio executives, who assume a flash of female flesh will increase the box-office take by attracting young male audiences. It turns out they haven't been keeping abreast of the latest research. "Analyses of 914 films released between 2001 and 2005 indicated that sex and nudity do not, on the average, boost box office performance, earn critical acclaim or win major awards," reports a new study titled "Sex Doesn't Sell — Nor Impress." According to the ... Read More
Critics’ Input Colors Consumer Choices
August 15, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
A new study showing how certain film critics can influence box office gross has implications beyond the multiplex. The basic findings also apply where "people can't evaluate (consumer goods) or don't want to bother evaluating and are willing to cede their decisions to someone else," said Peter Boatwright, an associate professor of marketing at Carnegie-Mellon University and one of the study's co-authors. "Reviewing the Reviewers: The Impact of Individual Film Reviewers on Box Office Performance" identified two different types of critics: influencers, whose opinions correlate with early ... Read More
