This fascinating Leonard Mlodinow/LA Times special (registration req.) explains why I am utterly incapable of predicting which movies will be successful. In reality, nobody can:
The magic of Hollywood successóhow can one account for it? Were the executives at Fox and Sony who gambled more than $300 million to create the hits “X-Men: The Last Stand” and “The Da Vinci Code” visionaries? Were their peers at Warner Bros. who green-lighted the flop “Poseidon,” which cost $160 million to produce, just boneheads?
The 2006 summer blockbuster season is upon us, one of the two times each year (the other is Christmas) when a film studio’s hopes for black ink are decided by the gods of movie fortuneónamely, you and me. Americans may not scurry with enthusiasm to vote for our presidents, but come summer, we do vote early and often for the films we love, to the tune of about $200 million each weekend. For the people who make the movies, it’s either champagne or Prozac as a river of green flows through Tinseltown, dragging careers with it, sometimes for a happy, wild ride, sometimes directly into a rock.
But are the rewards (and punishments) of the Hollywood game deserved, or does luck play a far more important role in box-office success (and failure) than people imagine?
We all understand that genius doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s seductive to assume that success must come from genius. As a former Hollywood scriptwriter, I understand the comfort in hiring by track record. Yet as a scientist who has taught the mathematics of randomness at Caltech, I also am aware that track records can deceive.
That no one can know whether a film will hit or miss has been an uncomfortable suspicion in Hollywood at least since novelist and screenwriter William Goldman enunciated it in his classic 1983 book “Adventures in the Screen Trade.” If Goldman is right and a future film’s performance is unpredictable, then there is no way studio executives or producers, despite all their swagger, can have a better track record at choosing projects than an ape throwing darts at a dartboard.
That’s a bold statement, but these days it is hardly conjecture: With each passing year the unpredictability of film revenue is supported by more and more academic research.
Read the entire highly entertaining article. The money quote comes from Art DeVany, who really should have been an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Disney-Ovitz:
“Today’s Hollywood executives all act like wimps,” [DeVany] says. “They don’t control their budgets. They give the actors anything they want. They rely on the easy answers, so they try to mimic past successes and cave in to the preposterous demands of stars. My research shows you don’t have to do that. It’s just an easy way out, an illusion.”
“[A] careful study reveals that no strategy the studios devise is going to give them any kind of advantage at all. So any studio executive getting paid more than the salary of a comparable executive at your local dairy is getting paid too much.”
Larry Ribstein, who knows a thing or two about the movie business and the way in which it portrays business, comments on the article here.
