Journal Article

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

Zhang, Z. John, Hui, Sam K, Eliashberg, Jehoshua

2007

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences,INFORMS
• Subject: Applied sciences / Artificial intelligence / Business management / Carts / Computer science; control theory; systems / contingency data analysis / Data analysis / Decision theory. Utility theory / Economic aspects / entertainment industry / Exact sciences and technology / Film criticism / Film industry / Film makers / Film studios / Forecasting / Forecasting models / Forecasts and trends / Industry forecasts / Investment returns / Investments / Language processing / Lighting / Management science / Modeling / Money / Motion picture industry / Motion pictures / Movies / new product development / Operational research and scientific management / Operational research. Management science / Organizational effectiveness / Organizational structure / Product development / Production and direction / Return on investment / Screenplays / Screenwriting / Scripts / Speech and sound recognition and synthesis. Linguistics / Studies