From story line to box office: a new approach for green-lighting movie scripts

From story line to box office: a new approach for green-lighting movie scripts

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Article ID: iaor20082669
Country: United States
Volume: 53
Issue: 6
Start Page Number: 881
End Page Number: 893
Publication Date: Jun 2007
Journal: Management Science
Authors: , ,
Keywords: forecasting: applications, decision: applications
Abstract:

Movie studios often have to choose among thousands of scripts to decide which ones to turn into movies. Despite the huge amount of money at stake, this process – known as green-lighting in the movie industry – is largely a guesswork based on experts’ experience and intuitions. In this paper, we propose a new approach to help studios evaluate scripts that will then lead to more profitable green-lighting decisions. Our approach combines screenwriting domain knowledge, natural-language processing techniques, and statistical learning methods to forecast a movie’s return on investment (ROI) based only on textual information available in movie scripts. We test our model in a holdout decision task to show that our model is able to significantly improve a studio’s gross ROI.

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