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michael_cooney
Senior Editor

Program predicts box office success

Opinion
Dec 15, 20051 min
Data Center

A professor at Oklahoma State University says he’s developed a program that can predict how movies will fare at the box office.

Professor Ramesh Sharda has been working on the model for seven years and analyzed more than 800 films, applying them to seven criteria: rating by censors, competition from other films at the time of release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel, and the number of theatres it opens in. His Netflix queue must be enormous.

The program then predicts which of 9 categories the movie will in, from flop (earning less than $1 million) to blockbuster (more than $200 million). Sharda says the program has proven accurate 37% of the time and 75% of the time is accurate to within one category. Those stats sound similar to the “Guess Your Weight” carneys at the fair. But, naturally, Hollywood is on the phone for Sharda.

Via Drudge