Can Twitter predict Hollywood movie success?

It’s no secret that it costs big bucks to make a Hollywood movie; the average film budget is now up over $107 million per film. The technology involved in generating computer-generated scenes is very expensive and can sometimes be responsible for almost half of a movie’s cost.

Also contributing to the high cost of film-making are marketing costs; even a modest film budget can require millions of dollars in advertising in order to make a profit. The challenge for film-makers and Hollywood moguls is how to market effectively at the lowest cost.

Twitter Social Media Marketing is Cost-Effective

Recently, scientists at Hewlett-Packard published a research study showing that Twitter is more effective at predicting the success of a Hollywood movie than any other method currently used. Hewlett-Packard studies are not casual attempts at gathering random data: their study “Predicting the Future with Social Media” analyzed 2.89 million tweets from 1.2 million users, referencing two dozen movies over a three month period.

Tweet for Popularity

The study followed the relationship between tweets and movie popularity at three stages:
1. Pre-launch publicity
2. Opening weekend
3. Growth/decline in following weeks

One of the benchmarks for the study was whether each movie’s URL was re-tweeted. It was assumed that re-tweeting a URL would be a sign of the movie’s popularity. As it turned out, that was not the case; URLs in the pre-release tweets had little effect on a movie’s popularity.

During a movie’s opening weekend and first week, there was a correlation found between the rate of pre-launch tweeting and the success of the opening weekend. More frequent tweets generally resulted in better opening box office receipts.

The study was not just counting numbers, though; the researchers also applied a sentiment analysis to the tweets. Tweets were classified as positive, negative, or neutral. It was no surprise to find that movies with a high number of positive tweets generally had a good opening week. Continued positive tweets led to a movies increasing popularity, in spite of sometimes poor opening weekends.

Non-Hollywood Applications

Researchers say that this study method has applications to other subjects as well. Study authors Sitaram Asur and Bernado Huberman state that:

“While in this study we focused on the problem of predicting box office revenues of movies for the sake of having a clear metric of comparison with other methods, this method can be extended to a large panoply of topics, ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes. At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.”

The New Crystal Ball

Whether predicting box office success for Hollywood movies or the winner in the next election, Twitter has become the new “crystal ball” of social media marketing.