Based on factors such as whether key stars are still on board, how long it has been since the last film and how that performed, the researchers say they can calculate what producers can expect to gross relative to a film in the same genre that is not a sequel…
The research, which will be published in the Journal of Marketing this month, examined data from all 101 movie sequels released in North American theatres between 1998 and 2006 and a matched subsample of stand-alone films with similar characteristics. According to the formula, upcoming sequel The Twilight Saga: New Moon should be expected to return $34m more for the producers in its US run than a comparable vampire/ teen romance movie with the same characteristics that is not a sequel.
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I know this makes me a dork and the equivalent of a 15 year old but I’m excited about New Moon.
sammypants on November 8, 2009 at 11:11 AM
There used to be stories now there is formula. It’s cinema disco.
BL@KBIRD on November 8, 2009 at 11:12 AM
I think most actual mathematicians would scoff at this sort of “math”. If the data was in front of you already, this sort of thing would take about 5 minutes in MiniTab. In any case, it is pretty dumb.
ggoofer on November 8, 2009 at 11:12 AM
NUMB3RS
It’s all the rage.
IrishEi on November 8, 2009 at 11:14 AM
As someone who has seen every episode of Gossip Girl, I can’t believe you admit that.
exception on November 8, 2009 at 11:14 AM
Hollywierd Sucks. Last film I watched. “The Longest Day”
All downhill after that,for me.
Farfed on November 8, 2009 at 11:24 AM
This type of work is not mathematics. It’s called statistics or econometrics. Projecting revenue from Hollywood’s sequels is a common problem in MBA stat classes. The article is just stupid.
thuja on November 8, 2009 at 11:35 AM
+1
Hollywood is a risk-adversive industry. I’ve seen creative execs lose their careers over one mistake.
John the Libertarian on November 8, 2009 at 11:44 AM
One of the worst aspects of modern science is the tendency for researchers to select subjects which they know are going to make it into the newspapers. So they release studies on the effect of iPhones on dating, or some cock-and-bull about Twitter and collective consciousness. It’s all about publicizing ones self for the purposes of increasing ones chances of procuring grant money, in my opinion. Or dorks trying to get girls to notice them, one of the two.
Sharke on November 8, 2009 at 11:52 AM
Oh, sure. It’s easy to make predictions about sequals, because all sequals consistently suck (except the second Aliens movie). Consistency is the same as accuracy, as my gunsmith boyfriend used to say.
S. Weasel on November 8, 2009 at 11:52 AM
They’re freakin’ mathematicians, what else do they have to do?
Big John on November 8, 2009 at 11:57 AM
I studied math in college. The math biz is weird city.
Attila (Pillage Idiot) on November 8, 2009 at 12:12 PM
This is news? Plenty of people have been running regression analysis on this data for 20 years.
blink on November 8, 2009 at 12:18 PM
I agree, sort of. Nothing pisses me off (as a mathematician) more than the nonsensical popularization, and consequent complete misinterpretation, caused by these sorts of studies. (Witness the stupidity with which the religious and philosophical communities embraced “chaos theory.”)
On the other hand, if they’re not done, people keep saying: “What the hell is all of this junk good for?”
And it’s hard to connect the work you do (my area, not the one in the article) with something like “Well, it means you can store 40,000 songs in your iPod instead of maybe 1000, and you can download your tunes in seconds instead of hours, and you can watch streaming video on your computer.”
I mean, it’s true, but if someone asks me to explain the connection, it will take several hours with the listener staring mostly blankly at me, nodding their head out of politeness, and sucking down my beers, hoping to achieve some higher plane of enlightenment.
And I’m a teacher, so I’m usually pretty good at explaining things….
notropis on November 8, 2009 at 12:48 PM
Hmmmm, nothing like a thread-killer comment BUT do the phrases “compression theory” and “self-similarity” mean anything to you?
ExpressoBold on November 8, 2009 at 1:11 PM
Mathematics.
Yeah, and unless I misread the article, it’s not mathematicians that did this, in spite of the title, it’s people with MBAs.
RINO in Name Only on November 8, 2009 at 1:23 PM
Yup. Definitely.
Although I’m into the slightly more theoretical areas of Operator Theory and Functional Analysis — even I’m sometimes not completely clear on the connections with the applications, but applied mathematicians assure me they’re there….
(BTW, I’d think the headline itself would be a thread killer!)
notropis on November 8, 2009 at 1:46 PM
I can’t stand the whole concept of vampires.
Count to 10 on November 8, 2009 at 1:49 PM
Heaven forbid that we should apply actual logic and mathematics to multi-million-dollar business decisions. And a Professor of Marketing and Media Research working on this? Why, that’s just nuts!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Headline writers don’t care about accuracy and, as a result, write the most ridiculous things in the world. Many times I’ve been steamed at a headline an editor gave my article, and it wouldn’t surprise me if author Katie Allen felt similarly. To an idiot newspaper editor taking less time to read the article than we have, this is about “mathematicians.” Only it’s not.
calbear on November 8, 2009 at 1:58 PM
Funny, I recently read a preprint on what seemed like a similar topic, precisely applied to image compression (so it was actually much more engineering-related, which is honestly also mine). I suppose DCTs and filter banks are bounded operators, though I must admit I’ve never thought about them that way and didn’t realize that this viewpoint is crucial to data compression. I always thought it was more about energy compaction and perception-based quantization. But if you’d like to let us more, it seems there are at least two people here willing to hear you out….
calbear on November 8, 2009 at 2:08 PM
…even if it is just what the applied mathematicians tell you about it.
calbear on November 8, 2009 at 2:12 PM
Sorry, I wasn’t ignoring you, I was trying to find some notes — but I’m not at my office.
I’m thinking of a couple of examples, but I’m going to get the details wrong, so I’ll leave them out.
One was a couple of years ago, when a colleague showed me a family of operators satisfying some properties, and I was supposed to explore conditions that would ensure boundedness — what they were really looking for was uniform convergence, which would ensure good (finite) approximations. I’m really unclear, without my notes, what they were using them for, but it involved data compression.
Another example involved wavelet compression, and I was working on conditions on a particular family of wavelets that would guarantee that they’d admit a multiresolution analysis, so that they could be used for both encoding and decoding.
A stranger one involved some questions from my cousin (a computer science guy out in Silicon Valley) about sparse matrices, that I think had more to do with error correction than with compression.
I’m on sabbatical this year, so I’m hoping to get back into some of these things in the Spring Semester. I suppose I could be working on it now, if I weren’t wasting my time on HotAir and other political blogs….
notropis on November 8, 2009 at 3:04 PM
I’m just picking up math after years of fearing it and being stymied by my lack of understanding. I wonder if people like me need to be “led” to the idea of “patterns” in math. I have to admit that some of my difficulties were in not learning the rules (by rote) and making sloppy mistakes in things like sign transformation and such.
.
I took it upon myself to get some deeper understanding of such “patterns.” It was a big deal for me to understand the application of “x” and “x+h” in terms of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus but now I see all kinds of relationships I never saw or thought of before. I recently heard or read something which used the term “inflection” or “inflection point” and I immediately thought of the curves defined by inflection points and the concept of “relative range” between the points.
.
I even heard an architect use the phrase “self similarity” in relation to “green economies” and I wondered if he was just using a buzz phrase or actually applying Factional Geometry to some aspect of his work. These Global Warming advocates are now advancing the principle of “leasing a right to use” rather than outright real property ownership. Another one of the bulwarks of the capitalist economy and common law principles, right to own and transfer property, is under attack.
ExpressoBold on November 8, 2009 at 3:48 PM
Hope you have a fruitful sabbatical. What you’re doing seems to apply to the quantization side, whereas I’m usually doing a different part, but both are needed for compression. I do a lot of bounding, but it’s all 1-D — no transformations — so the math is a tad simpler.
Fractals always seemed to me to be more interesting in theory (and as a way of looking at things) than in application, since self-similarity isn’t 100%. To take the example of compression, fractal compression works well, but not well enough to dethrone the types of things mentioned above. Many researchers and companies have found that out the hard way….
calbear on November 8, 2009 at 4:29 PM