Software uncovers secret of movie success

Professor Ramesh Sharda of the Oklahoma State University says his software is based on looking at the content and seeing it in a context of movies that have been running in the past.

The software has so far analysed more than 800 films and the results will be published in a paper which appears in "Expert Systems With Applications" journal, next year.

According to Sharda there are seven criteria to tell if a film is going to be successful. These include its rating by censors, competition at the time of release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel and the number of theatres it opens in.

The software then uses a neural network to process the results. Films that make less than a million are a flop while a "blockbuster" earns more than $200 million.

Sharda's software is apparently dead-on 37 percent of the time and pretty close 75 per cent of the time. I would have thought that if Hollywood ever uses the software, it will mean that films will stay the same because new types of films will not be tried.

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