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…

Very interesting article offering a critic of the “long tail” model developped by Wired editor Chris Anderson. The article was written last November. By now, Avatar has become the second highest grossing film of all time, just behind Titanic (1997). In the summer of 1998, a few months after the success of Titanic, the relative failure of Godzilla had some analyst wondering if the “blockbuster era” was coming to an end. At the time, Peter Bart (then Variety’s editor-in-chief) offered a good portrait of the situation in his book The Gross (Amazon link).

Previously on Skandalon: First feedback from audience and critics for James Cameron’s Avatar

A good critic by Ebert, 8,4 on IMDb (as for now, only 3821 members voted), a promising 83% on Metacritic : that’s not a bad start. People playing on HSX seems to think the film will be able to make a little over 200M$ in the next four week (estimations are a little more optimistic on Cantor Exchange, a parent company of HSX). The estimated budget is 230M$ (though it as been speculated it cost much more: there’s a good paper on the subject in The New York Times). Gross numbers related to first day and first week-end of exploitation should give a more precise idea of the situation.