Scientists find the formula for box-office cinematic success. Producers of ‘Asura’, please take note
‘Man in a hole’ movies, with a happy-sad-happy trajectory, are the most financially successful films across all genres, researchers say
A team of UK scientists believe they have found the formula for box-office success.
After analysing data from 6,147 movie scripts and filtering it through a series of algorithms, the researchers have identified the emotional arc that makes the most money, called the “man in a hole” arc.
It could be gamechanging for both film producers and audiences, said Ganna Pogrebna, a professor of behavioural economics and data science at the University of Birmingham, who led the research team. And the findings may provide some salutary reading for producers of box-office bombs like China’s Asura, recently yanked from cinemas after just three days, earning a paltry 49.05 million yuan in receipts during the opening weekend.
“We know that when we talk about movie production it is a small group of people that make decisions for the viewers. We were essentially trying to listen to the viewer, to see what they actually want.”
These are: rags to riches – an ongoing emotional rise as seen in films such as The Shawshank Redemption; riches to rags – an ongoing emotional fall (Psycho); man in a hole – a fall followed by a rise (The Godfather); Icarus – a rise followed by a fall (On the Waterfront); Cinderella – a rise followed by a fall followed by a rise (Babe); and Oedipus, a fall followed by a rise followed by a fall (All About My Mother).
They were able to then map the clusters that were most successful at the box office across 21 genres.
For biographical films, rags to riches came out on top, but it was far less successful in mysteries and thrillers. For comedies the riches to rags arc, which allows for a sad ending, was by far the least successful.
The researchers found that man in a hole films were not the most liked but they were likely to be the most talked about.
The researchers gathered their data from a range of public sources including scripts on opensubtitles.org, revenues from the-numbers.com and audience satisfaction ratings from IMDb.
Pogbrena hopes the academic research will help film companies be more creative, because if they know what will be commercially successful it could give them security to widen their portfolio to produce more experimental movies.