Early Predictions of Movie Success: the Who, What, and When of Profitability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decision support system that predicts movie profitability early in production by analyzing social, textual, and temporal features, outperforming benchmarks and offering insights into factors influencing success.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel predictive system using social network analysis and text mining to forecast movie profitability early in production, with significant performance improvements.

Findings

System outperforms benchmark methods in profitability prediction

Proposed features significantly improve prediction accuracy

Analysis reveals key factors influencing movie success

Abstract

This paper proposes a decision support system to aid movie investment decisions at the early stage of movie productions. The system predicts the success of a movie based on its profitability by leveraging historical data from various sources. Using social network analysis and text mining techniques, the system automatically extracts several groups of features, including "who" are on the cast, "what" a movie is about, "when" a movie will be released, as well as "hybrid" features that match "who" with "what", and "when" with "what". Experiment results with movies during an 11-year period showed that the system outperforms benchmark methods by a large margin in predicting movie profitability. Novel features we proposed also made great contributions to the prediction. In addition to designing a decision support system with practical utilities, our analysis of key factors for movie profitability may also have implications for theoretical research on team performance and the success of creative work.