By Beanie Barnes
Data is a funny thing. It can, at once, confirm and discredit the exact same theory. For example, if a $500m film makes $100m at the box office on its opening weekend, it could mean that the film is a) a bust or b) gaining momentum. Such was the case with Avatar. By the end of 2009, several people were calling the film a “flop,” but by mid-2010, it was obvious that, of all the words to describe Avatar, “flop” was not one of them. And although the film has been hailed as a marketing and technological success, if it had failed, it very likely would have been called it a marketing and technological bomb (with marketing heads rolling at the studio).
Misreading data is prevalent in film. It isn’t so much that we misread the tea leaves, so much as it is that, rather than reading the tea leaves as they are, we’re more prone to read the leaves the way we want to see them or only read the leaves at the surface while overlooking others hiding below.
The term “big data” gets thrown around more often in technology circles then within film producing circles — but recently there’s been a shift. A noticeable shift that becomes obvious when a producer steps back and analyzes how the majority of their pre-production, production and post-production problems are solved. Whether it’s financing a new project, searching for potential talent or calculating an ROI structure.
In Adventures in the Screentrade, William Goldman famously opined that “nobody knows anything” in Hollywood, a curious concession for a man with such a marked record of success. The truth, though, is that Hollywood has always known something — its very business centered not just on creating hits but also on predicting future ones.