For those people with some extra time to kill this extended holiday weekend, don’t miss this fascinating article in today’s LA Times by former screenplay writer and current Caltech math professor Leonard Mlodinow. It’s a thoughtful, well-reasoned and, um, scientifically illuminating article on how hit Hollywood films are in fact little more than random events. Mlodinow argues that studios might as well throw darts to pick a box office winner because there are so many variables that go into a film’s success that it’s impossible to predict which movies will make a splash.
What the research shows is that even the most professionally made films are subject to many unpredictable factors that arise during production and marketing, not to mention the inscrutable taste of the audience. It is these unknowns that obliterate the ability to foretell the box-office future.
But if picking films is like randomly tossing darts, why do some people hit the bull’s-eye more often than others? For the same reason that in a group of apes tossing darts, some apes will do better than others. The answer has nothing to do with skill. Even random events occur in clusters and streaks.
The piece absolves ousted top Paramount chief Sherry Lansing for poor box office results in her latter years at the studio’s helm because hot streaks and cold streaks are simply luck.
That’s where the economists come in. “The moviemaking process is so complicated,” says Anita Elberse of the Harvard Business School, “that at the green-lighting stage it is unclear whether you can even pull off making the movie that you think you are planning to make.” Adds Charles Moul of Washington University in St. Louis: “There are two schools of thought. According to one, you can’t know the appeal of a film until you’ve completed it, but once you have the movie you can run focus groups and determine whether it is a hit or a dog. According to the other school, you can’t tell even then. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for your ability to make $80-million green-lighting decisions that are more than just guesses.”
Of course, Hollywood won’t buy this chaos theory. Otherwise, why even have high-powered decision-makers? And like all people, studio executives are prone to seeing patterns in random events, even when they don’t exist. So, studios will continue to look for the next sure thing.
Although economists and psychologists have no problem understanding Hollywood’s randomness, Hollywood executives, not surprisingly, are generally less convinced. “They are hostile to ‘the nobody knows anything’ school of thought,” says Moul, “because it completely undercuts what they do.” Jehoshua Eliashberg of the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania says that unlike executives in other industries he has analyzed, in Hollywood “most executives feel threatened.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 2:17 PM|Comments(0)
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