Movie Math Reveals the Formula for a Hollywood Blockbuster

What was the last movie you saw in the theaters? I rarely go to the cinema, partly because I prefer actions in particular in the TV series with spies (welcomers welcomers!). But I go to the real blockbuster cinema, for example Dune Movies. I must admit, watching the epic story on the big screen is still a unique experience.

In 2020 he was in the middle of the pandemic cinema panel. Since then, the attendance has been Ascending In many parts of the world, but still below the prepannic level. Inflation, rises in streaming services like Netflix and the famous TV series can participate in these trends. The cinema industry, therefore, is more pressure than ever to attract people to movie theaters. Can help math.

In 2020 British Date Scientists Ganna Pogrebna and his colleagues published a paper Income, expenses and reputation studied ratings More than 6,000 movies. The findings were filmed in history lines through films and linked these types of narratives with the approval of the audience and made.

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Storytelling: Aristotle from Hollywood

The study of researchers was based on the basis of First study of literary works Researchers at the University of Vermont and Adelaide University in Australia. The majority of the stories, the majority of the stories can be maped with just a few narrative arches.

This idea has been for a while. About 2.300 years ago, PolyMath Aristotle was already thinking Building stories And how can the audience move. And xx. Century, Kurt vonnegut The emotional progression of well-known stories has been studied from start of starting every story that is sent to the end of sadness or joy.

Inspired by Vonnegut’s “Story Forms, and the University of Adelaide University scanned 1,327 stories with a fictional collection algorithm and narratives were identified six major emotional arches (classical films and spoilers before classic books):

Rags to wealth

These stories begin with a negative situation and a protagonist who should do over time. It is a classic cinema Groundhog dayThe main character is found in a strange preaching day and ending the same day, and improves his situations because he learns more and more from his situation.

Tragedy (or wealth to rags)

This is a reverse arch. In tragedies, things begin positively and end negatively. Think Romeo and Juliet: The couple is happy in love at first, but in the end, the two protagonists are dead.

Man in a hole

In these stories, the protagonist is doing well, and then things take a negative turn, but in the end, they tend to be more good at the beginning. It is a classic example Grandfather. The Corleone Family is at the beginning of the film’s peak in the beginning of the film, but then the head of the family is seriously injured and his main son died. The youngest son, the protagonist, then it does not take a unique amount of power when he takes the role of the leader and did the new grandfather.

Omit

This bow makes a man in a hole vice versa. Think Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Tokoki: Falls in love with a poor adventure at the glamor but eventually loses the hypothermia. Eponymous nature Great Gatsby He also starts the story of wealth and ends with his murder.

Rare

Cinderella stories begin with a bad situation that improves the start of the protagonist, and then it gets emotional emotion, but after being happy. Think Babe, the film fighting his place on the farm in the farm, but things around the area begins to learn the shepherds. Unfortunately, while he defended the flock, he entered a dangerous situation. Luckily, according to the end of the story, everything is cultivated and has won the Babe grazing competition.

Oedipus

Emotional Arch of Oedipus Cinderella is the opposite. Things start well, but then it’s bad luck. The protagonist reuses the end of the poor situation. Examples of characters are the protagonists of convicted examples Frankenstein, Moby Dick or Aside.

Pogrebna’s team wanted to know if the feature films follow these six emotional progression, if so, what structs pay the most. Researchers downloaded subtitles of the 6,174 film and then examined the sentence sentence for emotional phrases. Each word is based on a score based on feelings: -1 for a negative, 0 neutral and +1 positive. The researchers then assigned each sentence to the words an emotional value based on words and to fall between the phrase values ​​-1 and +1. To compare movies from different lengths, each story cooked 100 individually data points.

To group the narratives, researchers needed a way to measure the distance between the emotional arcs of both films. According to researchers, the difference between two tensions corresponding to the data points X and Y It can be calculated as follows:

With this equation, researchers could compare the differences between the two movie points (t) In narrative. Because the absolute value in the square root is the box, the signal does not play the role in the comparison; So it doesn’t matter if one curve is above or below the other, away from each other.

Using this measure, experts could group them with similar arches. Thus, they studied all the films that they identified earlier the first study that fell into one of the six emotional arches.

Interestingly the genres of the film often found with an emotional progression of the story, they found. For example, horror films usually have a tragedy structure, and comedies continue to man in a hole or crush. Biographies are often riches, and Thriller have a man in a hole structure.

What are the most successful movies?

Pogrebna’s team then calculated the production and income data of a Film Industry website NumbersAlong with cinema ratings Internet film database (IMDB).

First, each cinema examined the income generated by each cinema, which is the only information available for all work studied. The man in the hole category did the best, raising the average $ 37.48 million, comparing $ 33.63 million in the second most successful category, Cinderella.

It seems that people suffer for the movies that suffer, but ultimately receive happy endings. Intriguing, the simpler rags of the richness of the arc created the average amount of income.

But maybe the great winners were the most expensive movies, just? The answer to that question is the nuance. The group did not find any correlations in a story between the budget for the man and success. These films look great, at least spent dollars or gender.

The tragedies, however, generate less money unless high cost costs ($ 100 million in the region). “This can explain the economic success of large historical drama, such as Last samurai or epic survival Pi life“The Pogrebna team wrote on paper.

Which movies are most popular?

When experts studied user ratings in IMDB, another photo was created:

On a scale from 1 to 10, mostly favorable and 10-beneficial, films with men of a plot of holes gave 0.19 points worse than stories of wealth than rags. In fact, classifying the categories of the film Depending on the rating, the income is almost the opposite of the result obtained in the ranking.

It may be a reason that men draw more audiences in the tales of the tales and generally more rates are generally received and more than IMDB users are negative review than positive. But Metascore IMDB is a score of the metacritic of the aggregator. It is based on the average weighted critics, in reviews of a film critic. “The man on the emotional hole career does not create” favorite “movies, but the film creates the most” talking about movies “,” said the researcher.

Meanwhile, tragedies are the best in critical reviews, seem to prefer “serious films” than happy endings.

With this information, the cinema industry can take data guided decisions. To attract as many people as possible to the cinema, filmmakers can create more movie lists in a hole configuration. Because of critical claims, the tragedies of getting hearts are the best. But the audience must keep in mind that they still love the ascending promise of a ragne richness.