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From Story Line to Box Office: A New Approach for Green-Lighting Movie Scripts

Author

Listed:
  • Jehoshua Eliashberg

    (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104)

  • Sam K. Hui

    (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104)

  • Z. John Zhang

    (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104)

Abstract

Movie studios often have to choose among thousands of scripts to decide which ones to turn into movies. Despite the huge amount of money at stake, this process--known as green-lighting in the movie industry--is largely a guesswork based on experts' experience and intuitions. In this paper, 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. We test our model in a holdout decision task to show that our model is able to significantly improve a studio's gross ROI.

Suggested Citation

  • Jehoshua Eliashberg & Sam K. Hui & Z. John Zhang, 2007. "From Story Line to Box Office: A New Approach for Green-Lighting Movie Scripts," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 53(6), pages 881-893, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:53:y:2007:i:6:p:881-893
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1060.0668
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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