Computer Spots Box Office Stinkers

Everyone knows what a shoddy year it’s been for movies. Cinema-goers have been underwhelmed left, right and centre by pap like The Island, Stealth and Bewitched. But it looks like a solution is in sight.

An American scientist claims that he has invented a computer program that will be able to spot whether a Hollywood movie will be a soaraway success or a giant turgid flop before the movie has even been made. Think of the money that the makers of Aeon Flux could have saved if they’d have just waited a few more months…

Professor Ramesh Sharda of the Oklahoma State University says that
he has come up with a computer program that will be able to spot a box
office disaster before it has even been made. The movie program isn’t
just some fly-by-night crackpot invention, either. Ramesh Sharda has
been working on the program for seven years - in which time, stinkers
like Catwoman, Swept Away, Pearl Harbour and even Blues Brothers 2000
have been needlessly inflicted on unready audiences.

Sharda is an expert in information systems, and he says that he has
used the movie computer program to analyse more than 800 movies, based
on their rating by censors, competition from other films at the time of
release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether they are
sequels or not and the number of theatres they open in.

According to the results - graded on box office takings from ‘flop’
to ‘blockbuster’ - the program is 37% spot on and 75% close to
correctly predicting a movie’s success. Professor Ramesh Sharda said:

"Our goal is to try to find oil in a way. We are trying to forecast the success of a movie based on
things that are decided before a movie has been made."

Sharda’s
paper on his findings will be published early next year in the Expert
Systems With Applications journal, and he is already in talks with a
major Hollywood movie studio to further increase the accuracy of his
movie machine.

However, we’re not so sure that Ramesh Sharda’s flop-spotting
computer program is necessarily a good idea. For one, if it goes
mainstream then all movies produced in the future will be worked out by
a strict formula, meaning we’ll all be spoonfed cynically-produced
ultra-bland idiot-pleasing movies. And also, we’ll be out of a
job if we can’t laugh at shit films anymore.

Read more:

Computer spots a blockbuster from a box office flop - ABC

[story by Stuart Heritage]