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

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Operations, Information and Decisions Papers
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entertainment industry
new product development
forecasting
contingency data analysis
Growth and Development
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Recreation Business
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Eliashberg, Jehoshua
Hui, Sam K
Zhang, Z. John
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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-lightingin 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.

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2007-06-01
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Management Science
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