Every weekend, a small industry of box office pundits and prognosticators – some using sophisticated market research, some just throwing darts – try to predict which movies will be hits and how much they'll earn at the multiplex. Of course, the very unpredictability of the box office (nervewracking for nail-biting executives and filmmakers, exciting for everyone else) keeps the pundits in business.
Now, scholars think they've found the key to predicting how much money a movie will make its opening weekend in North America, up to a month in advance of its release. And no, it's not social media buzz – those metrics are so five minutes ago. Rather, it's the activity surrounding the movie's Wikipedia entry.
According to the study by mathematicians from Oxford University, the Central European University at Budapest, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics, who published their study in August in the journal PLoS ONE, there's a general correlation between a movie's first-weekend earnings and its Wikipedia activity – the number of page views for the movie's entry, the number of human editors who've built the page, the number of edits they made, and the diversity of the online users. Plugging these numbers into their formula yields an accurate prediction of the movie's opening-weekend take some 77 percent of the time. While not perfect, it beats the 57 percent accuracy rate the scholars claim for professional market research firms.
According to the study by mathematicians from Oxford University, the Central European University at Budapest, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics, who published their study in August in the journal PLoS ONE, there's a general correlation between a movie's first-weekend earnings and its Wikipedia activity – the number of page views for the movie's entry, the number of human editors who've built the page, the number of edits they made, and the diversity of the online users. Plugging these numbers into their formula yields an accurate prediction of the movie's opening-weekend take some 77 percent of the time. While not perfect, it beats the 57 percent accuracy rate the scholars claim for professional market research firms.
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