Can computers predict which movies will flop?:
Sharda, an expert in information systems, has been working on the model for seven years and analyzed more than 800 films before publishing a paper that appears in the February 2006 issue of the journal Expert Systems With Applications.Sharda applied seven criteria to each movie: its rating by censors, competition from other films at the time of release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel and the number of theaters it opens in.
Using a neural network to process the results, the films are placed in one of nine categories, ranging from ‘flop,’ meaning less than $1 million at the box office, to ‘blockbuster,’ meaning more than $200 million.
The results of the study showed that 37 percent of the time the network accurately predicted which category the film fell into, and 75 percent of the time was within one category of the correct answer. Among the correct predictions: ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘Shrek’ were rated as blockbusters, while ‘Waking Up in Reno’ and ‘Running Free’ were pegged as flops.