Assessing the Impact of Movie Plot Summaries on Box Office Sales

What is it about?

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of movie summaries on box office sales. These summaries are provided by studios as one of the many artifacts used to market a movie to the public. We acquired a set of nearly 74 thousand summaries from English-language films released between 1960 and 2019. We analyzed summary sentiment, length, and vocabulary and compared these metrics to box office sales, studying trends across genres. We observed that movies with negative or neutral summaries achieved greater box office sales than those with positive summaries. While initially surprising, these results correlate to endorphin production caused by negative or traumatic experiences. We also noted that summaries with an average length of 30 words performed better than those with fewer or more words. Finally, we noted that movies with summaries that have a vocabulary level of a college graduate performed better than others.

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Photo by Tyson Moultrie on Unsplash

Photo by Tyson Moultrie on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Movies are one of the most popular sources of entertainment in modern life. Box office revenue has been on the rise for years, and amounted to nearly 42 billion USD in 2019. Producing a movie is an enormous task, involving thousands of individuals and millions of dollars. For example, Avengers Endgame together employed 14 thousand visual effects artists citetr21 and cost nearly 400 million USD. These films were huge successes, earning over 4.7 billion in box office sales between them. To ensure a return on their investment, producers and investors perform various market analyses to determine if a movie is worth making, and how much money to put into production to ensure the best return. They must also decide how much money to invest in the marketing of the movie, what types of marketing artifacts to produce, and when to release these artifacts. A common and inexpensive artifact is the movie summary. Movie summaries are used in advertisements to provide a short description of the plot in a manner that entices and informs the prospective audience. Hence, the language used in a movie summary is important in evoking interest.