"Nobody knows anything"

Slate summarizes a 55 page meta-analysis by three B-School profs on the economics of the movie industry, but misses the key questions of "How can you tell whether a movie is going to be good or not? And how can you tell whether it's going to be a hit or not?" Consider Ron Howard's last three movies:

A Beautiful Mind -- Good / Hit

The Missing -- Not good / Not a Hit

Cinderella Man -- Good / Not a Hit

I'm obviously over-summarizing here (I didn't much like "A Beautiful Mind," but it's reasonable to say it was well-made; "The Missing" isn't bad, but it seemed to be missing something.)

Back in the early 1980s, screenwriter William Goldman pointed out that "Nobody knows anything" about whether a movie will work or not. Obviously, that's an exaggeration. Everybody knows that a movie made by high-priced talent is likely to be better and do better than one made by nobodies who are financed by their rich grandparents. But we already knew that, so how do we get beyond that to determine whether the latest Ron Howard - Russell Crowe - Akiva Goldsman movie will be or do better or worse than the last one?

I put a fair amount of thought into this because I'm constantly trying to pick out ahead of time which movies will catch the educated reader's interest and make him or her want to read my review. That way, I don't have to go see every single movie that's released. But, it remains almost a complete crap shoot.

Most things that are interesting to us are difficult to predict: the nightly news has a weather forecast, not a forecast on whether the sun will come up in the east or west tomorrow.

I suspect that the quality of movies is particularly difficult to forecast because each one is a one time only operation where the interaction effects are at least as important as the individual contributions.

Furthermore, the popularity of sub-genres goes in and out of fashion in mysterious ways. For example, "Seabiscuit" made a sizable amount of money in the "inspirational Depression true sports movie" subgenre. So, when "Cinderella Man" came along two years later, with at least equal critical and audience responses, it had to do at least as well, right? But apparently the audience decided it was sick of that subgenre...

In sum, nobody knows anything.

P.S., the bigger economic mystery is why so many people buy DVDs rather than rent them for a quarter of the cost. Hollywood takes in a lot more these days from DVD sales than from tickets. Do people really re-watch movies over and over enough to make paying about four times the rental cost worthwhile? Sure, it's economical to buy "Peter Pan" for your three-year-old, but are grown-ups really going to want to watch "Anger Management" five times, the minimum number needed to make purchase more economical than rental? Or do people just like to buy and own stuff? Do they buy "Anger Management" instead of rent it because they want to give more money to Adam Sandler. That's sounds weird, but I think there's some truth to the idea that people get pleasure out of wasting resources to worship their gods, kind of like burning a goat to honor Jehovah.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer