Professional website of James Cutting, author of the study. Full PDF of the study (James E. Cutting, Jordan E. DeLong and Christine E. Nothelfer, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film” Psychological Science, XX(X) 1-8, published online on Feb 5, 2010).

Interesting study (it’s far from being the first scientific attempt at explaining box office success), VERY BAD TITLE from the New Scientist. Nothing was “solved”, for at least two reasons.

1) Some common aspects were observed in 150 movies, after the fact. Therefore, the study could have the value of a good but limited deduction. Its inductive and predictive potential still needs to be demonstrated.

2) More importantly, one won’t be able to find any satisfactory description of what a “blockbuster” is in this study. In fact, there isn’t any mention of the word “blockbuster” in it. Instead, one will notice a normative effort to classify a number a films according to a certain number of criteria :

“We chose 150 films, 10 released in each of 15 years, every 5 years from 1935 to 2005. The Supplemental Material available on-line provides the complete list. Assembled from information in several on-line databases, the films from 1980 onward were among the highest grossing of their year and the earlier films were among those with the largest number of viewer ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb; http://us.imdb.com). The films were also chosen, as best we could, to represent five genres—action, adventure, animation, comedy, and drama— although their distribution could not be uniform because of vagaries in Hollywood production and changes in social milieu and viewers’ taste. Genres were defined by the first-designated category for each film on the IMDb.”

Same problem with the title Neatorama chose for the post they published about the story : “The Code for Making Hollywood Blockbusters”. But Neatorama is no weekley international science magazine…