How to Make a Successful Movie: Factor Analysis from both Financial and Critical Perspectives

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, people have seen considerable growth in film industry. There are two common measurements for movie quality, financial metric of net profit and reception metric in the form of ratings assigned by moviegoers on websites. Researchers have utilized these two metrics to build models for movie success prediction separately, while few of them investigate the combination. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze movie success from perspectives of financial and critical metrics in tandem. Here, optimal success is defined as a film that is both profitable and highly acclaimed, while its worst outcome involves financial loss and critical panning at the same time. Salient features that are salient to both financial and critical outcomes are identified in an attempt to uncover what makes a “good” movie “good” and a “bad” one “bad” as well as explain common phenomenons in movie industry quantitatively.