Which of the following two independent films is more likely to succeed?

Film A:

“An accomplished narrative about the complex journey of love and romance as a girl dreams in her bedroom about academics. The superbly directed film uses intelligent dialogue as it explores the relationship of sex and death.”

Film B:

“A fascinating and inspired story about an American who goes to a beautiful lake in Africa. The sexy and emotional film shows that there is still truth and vision in the world. Subtitled. Sundance debut.”

Using the same tools that are used to filter out spam email, a group of technologists have descended upon the Sundance Film Festival with a mathematical model for deconstructing film success by looking at a variety of a factors including the words used to describe the films. The results are both surprising and humorous:

The lower the number of producers the higher likelihood of failure.

If a film is preceded by a short at the festival it has a 20% chance higher of failing.

If shot on HD, probably a bomb.

The funniest aspects of the model however have to do with the adjectives used by the festival to describe the films. The techs segmented the words into “golden” and “kiss of death”:

Golden: academic, accomplished, bedroom, complex, dialogue, dream, death, focus, girl, human, high, journey, love, mother, narrative, romance, relationship, superbly, sex, ultimately.

Kiss of death: Africa, America, American, beautiful, black, best, emotional, fascinating, great, inspired, lake, new, riveting, Sundance, sexy, story, subtitles, truth, vision, world.

So in the above example, we would expect Film A to do well while Film B languishes.

See the complete LAT story for their predictions on what Sundance films will be successful at the box office this year.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 10:17 am by Insider and is filed under Not the conventional wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.