Eliashberg, Jehoshua
Hui, Sam K.
Zhang, Z. John
2007
From Story Line to Box Office: A New Approach for Green-Lighting Movie Scripts

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The argue the green-lighting process of movie studios is based too much on “guesswork based on experts’ experience and intuitions.”
“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.”

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“One may argue that the premise underlying our approach is formulaic script writing, which in turn may lead to a potential narrowing of the new product-development process, leading to unmet demand. We would like to point out that rather than coming out with a set of rigid rules to follow, our approach will only suggest the structural regularities that a successful script generally possesses. We believe that there is room for creativity within the structural regularities.”