From Story Line to Box Office: A New Approach for Green-Lighting Movie Scripts

Jehoshua Eliashberg (), Sam K. Hui () and Z. John Zhang ()
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Jehoshua Eliashberg: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Sam K. Hui: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Z. John Zhang: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104

Management Science, 2007, vol. 53, issue 6, 881-893

Abstract: Movie studios often have to choose among thousands of scripts to decide which ones to turn into movies. Despite the huge amount of money at stake, this process--known as green-lighting in the movie industry--is largely a guesswork based on experts' experience and intuitions. In this paper, we propose a new approach to help studios evaluate scripts that will then lead to more profitable green-lighting decisions. Our approach combines screenwriting domain knowledge, natural-language processing techniques, and statistical learning methods to forecast a movie's return on investment (ROI) based only on textual information available in movie scripts. We test our model in a holdout decision task to show that our model is able to significantly improve a studio's gross ROI.

Keywords: entertainment industry; new product development; forecasting; contingency data analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:53:y:2007:i:6:p:881-893

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