The Perfect Formula For Box Office Success

Julez writes "According to icLiverpool, the formula for creating the "perfect" film has been discovered by a UK academic. The research will be used to assess the potential success of possible film sponsorship deals. Apparently, the perfect feature must have: action 30pc, comedy 17pc, good v evil 13pc, love/sex/romance 12pc, special effects 10pc, plot 10pc and music 8pc "

Span This Study Over Time

[doctechniqal]

Carry this study further: determine the ratios of the elements of what made for a "perfect film" for each decade since the birth of motion pictures. This would shed light on how audience tastes have evolved and where they might be going.

pc?

[Efgé]

Why would one use "pc" instead of "%", which is shorter and less confusing ?

No, seriously, that's a real question. Is this some local usage in some part of the world?

Are they assuming too much?

[viking099]

I've walked out of movies where the acting was so horrible that it totally invalidated what pleasure I may have gained from the rest of the movie.
Additionally, what about camera work? I almost got motion sickness from movies like "Behind Enemy Lines" and "The Blair Witch Project".
I think that they are putting the cart before the horse in a lot of ways here by just analyzing the statistical makeup of the movie.
They're forgetting to take into account that most of those huge movies have the acting required to let you forget that you're not watching a movie, but experiencing a story.

Bollywood?

[SgtChaireBourne]

How about the Bollywood flicks? They have a pretty standard formula complete with the songs, the dance in the forest, the wet sari, and the big fight. The plot comes much lower on the priorities than the music.

Between Bollywood getting slightly better and Hollywood shovelling out drivel, it seems that there'd be more money in the Bollywood offerings.

Nothing new

[kinnell]

Maybe this is the first academic research of it's kind published, but I think it's clear that Holywood has had a good grasp of "the perfect movie formula" for quite some time, just like the music industry has "the perfect pop record" well understood. There are of course exceptions where genuine quality counts, but I'd be prepared to bet that the majority of low grade blockbusters churned out by the big studios come fairly close to this formula.

Profit != Quality

[Joe the Lesser]

You can get a lot of people to see a movie if you hype it enough, or people may just see it anyway because they're bored, but it should be noted that just because your film made money, doesn't mean it was good.

I hope filmmakers don't fall into any sort of rut when it comes to filmmaking despite findings like this, because the movies I most remember and enjoy are ones like Momento, because they are so different and force me to think about the world and how I percieve it. Moreover, what people like changes. Certainly most of the 80's movies I liked, I would scoff at nowadays.

Suffice to say, I won't be seeing 2Fast 2Furious or whatever.

Re:Where Lucas got it wrong

[DrXym]

Lucas got it wrong because he thought he'd bake a cake that was advertised as delicious marzipan and sprinkles, not telling anyone that it had a dog turd baked into the centre of it.

That was the problem with the prequels. Great CGI used excessively and lousy script, acting, direction and everything else. I don't blame the actors for their wooden performances, after all it must be be impossible to deliver a natural performance when nearly the entire film is shot on bluescreen. Perhaps if Lucas bothered to spend more time on the other things he might make a better film for once. I don't hold out much hope for episode three. I wonder if people will even bother queueing for it it this time.

Academic idiocy at its "best"

[guacamolefoo]

The article didn't really dig into what the research said, so I am somewhat hesitant about the title of my response, but...the fact that the article is scanty never stopped an intrepid Slashdotter from running his mouth, so away we go...

The "perfect film" is obviously highly subjective. From a sentimental standpoint, perhaps it is something like Casablanca. From a producer's standpoint, it may well be "Deep Throat" or "Behind the Green Door" with their respective cost to profit(!) ratios. Artistically, it could be whatever floats your boat. I'm partial to Empire Strikes Back or Unforgiven as my favorite films.

Statistical analysis of elements contained in films is only useful to the extent that the elements are cohesive, well-executed, etc. This all reminds me of the assinine film from the eighties about the robot that wrote a love song based on analysis of popular music, resulting in a meaningless spouting of bubblegum phrases.

Besides, the research only looked at top-grossing films. How much money a film earns is not necessarily a proxy for how "good" it is. It is frequently the result of pimping and media hype. It is quite possible that some of the films which were top grossing lost money (even under sensible non-film industry accounting methods) and were terrible.

The reference article is total fluff coverage and is highly instructive from a media analysis standpoint. You get no analysis of the underlying research. It in fact smells like a press release copped from some idiot researcher which was dumped almost unchanged into a "news" story. The percentage of shit that appears in newspapers that is derived in this exact manner is frightening -- it gains the imprimature of "news" instead of PR and there is no value-added journalism component. Journalists of the world, hang your heads.

Whew. Had to get out my morning rant. I feel much better now. Get me some coffee.

GF.

Re:age difference ... speaking of CZJ

[adzoox]

Speaking of Catherine Zeta Jones - I think the movie Chicago proves this whole ratio thing wrong. It was an EXCELLENT movie 60% music 10% plot 10% Comedy 10% Action 10% sex/romance

Here's the actual formula for a good movie:

Great visuals (set designers, hair dressers, costuming)

Great visuals (Special effects to a level of realistic integration)

Great talent (not just actor clout, but role accuracy)

Great music (john williams, danny elfman, or james newton howard, or fosse) Background Music made Jaws scarey, background music made the first Star Wars and Gone With The Wind emotional. and ...

MEMORABLE writing (good writing has memorable lines) Remember Looney Tunes are only a masterpiece of cartoon art because of the lines each character were noted for (+ all the other elements mentioned)

Arnold Swartzenager and Keanu Reeves CAN make great movies under this formula. Total Recall .... Matrix

There's no certain percentage.

Re:Bollywood?

[Alan Partridge]

I REALLY like the wet sari.

Bollywood babes are the best - better than those idiotic, silicone distorted frankensteins that Americans seem to love. I'm excepting Halle Berry from that.

Get over it

[clary]

Did anyone else feel it was an insult to those with intelligence that plot took only an 8% grab?

Not at all. I watch movies for the eye candy and adrenalin. What I want to think, I read a book.

By the way, LoR has plenty of both, as well as plot...bonus.

An ML Perspective

[Gingko]

While this woman doesn't look like a scientist, this is quite an interesting problem for Machine Learning, I guess.

We can use learning and classification techniques to have a proper go at something like this. Rather than work out the supposed 'best' film, we can look at proposals and decide whether they're going to be a success.

See, in the vast array of films that have been produced, and their box-office takings (the metric I assume we'd use for measuring success) we have an annotated training set to train a learning algorithm with. We then run candidate films past that algorithm, and see what it decides. Might work.

The interesting thing, as with many of these classification problems, is the 'feature vector' representation we use to describe a film. I suppose we'd need things like release date, budget, some kind of 'star-quality' rating (average Kevin Bacon distance? ;), these alleged 'percentages' that this woman is talking about... could be a fun research project on the side.

Henry

Re:Good grief!

[alchemist68]

Couple of things to point out here:

1. You read and are a registered member of Slashdot, therefore your intelligence is likely at least 40 points above the average population.

2. This "successful movie formula" is geared for the masses, i.e., people with an IQ of approximately 100 or so.

3. You'll probably get more from reading the books (substance, plot, and detail from The Lord of the Rings).

4. Recognize that you're at least somewhat "gifted" and have an avenue to discuss your point of view in a geek forum.

5. Don't worry, be happy that you're a little (or a lot) different from the bulge in the bell curve.

All your molecule and energy are belong to the universe.

the Perfect Novel

[drjoe1e6]

Supposedly, Robin Cook did a similar analysis for the Perfect Novel, mixed the ingredients, and came up with Coma, a best-seller.

-Joe

Research on painting

[figa]

Sotz artists Komar and Melamid did similar research to create ideal paintings [diacenter.org]. They broke out their results by country. They did some work with music, as well.

Re:Good grief!

[watzinaneihm]

Somebody notice that while most of the "good" movies are well balanced and sticks to the plot of the article, the most [movieweb.com] succesful ones had an overdose of one element or another or were missing one of those? (Well except Titanic that is)

Re:Good grief!

[joto]

1. You read and are a registered member of Slashdot, therefore your intelligence is likely at least 40 points above the average population

Ha, ha ha!

At once, it might have been true that slashdot-readers had an average IQ of, say 110-115 (average person taking or having taken academic education would typically lie around 120). But 140, don't make me laugh...

But today, I believe we are about as average as it possibly can be, if not a little below... Just look around, buddy!

2. This "successful movie formula" is geared for the masses, i.e., people with an IQ of approximately 100 or so.

I doubt their script-makers are smart enough to say, "ok, this might look stupid to someone with 150 in IQ, but to the average movie-goer with IQ around 100, it will feel just fine". I find it much more likely that they simply base their stories on "research" like this, focus groups, trends, fashion, and of course also what they want to make themselves.

4. Recognize that you're at least somewhat "gifted" and have an avenue to discuss your point of view in a geek forum.

Well, a lot of so called "gifted" people are also unemployed, without a girl(boy)friend, without any kind of social intelligence, etc... If it makes you feel better, go brag about your IQ, but don't expect us to sympathize much...

As in art: low risk can mean low gain, too

[ianscot]

Wasn't there a pop media story a couple of years back where someone composed the "perfect" painting, based on focus groups and "research" much like this? The result was set in a lovely little landscape at sunset, it had a family at its focus, and so on, in well-considered proportions that had to do with what respondents said they liked. Not quite one of those bogus Kincaid prints that were supposed to be so valuable, but just as bland.

The earlier thing was intended to provoke people to ask why the idea of "ideal" art was so wrong... This one's just an advertiser's formula for avoiding risk.

Sorry, though -- low risk means lower gain, too. Out of Africa doesn't match up with the formula all that well, but in the mid 80s it had a huge marketing impact. That movie set fashions going -- none of the big designers were planning on a sort of "Safari" line at the time, but the movie touched it off. Banana Republic owed a ton of its business to that one movie for maybe five years. And I don't think advertisers could have figured that out using this formula; they'd have had to see the movie and get the idea it was going to look a certain way and appeal to a certain type of person.

Been Tried for Real

[jratcliffe]

Back in the mid-late 90s, a couple of the Hollywood studios put some serious dollars into trying to build a predictive model of film success. Problem is, they couldn't make it work. They could make the model match _prior_ outcomes, but getting it to correctly forecast the success of _future_ films was well-nigh impossible. The project was scrapped, I believe. Given how incredibly valuable a working model like this would be, though, I wouldn't be surprised if the idea keeps making a comeback.