CarsonWid wrote:ShogunRua, you make some good points.
In regards to studios and their 50 variable equations, I think most of that has to do with the financial success of a movie and very little to do with the critical success. I had originally started this as a prediction of financial success but I didn't find it very interesting. I had various seasonal indices and factors in it but I wasn't getting good results and as mentioned before, wasn't really what I was trying to do.
It's also a far more meaningful, objective, and less fuzzy indicator of success than the RT score or IMDB rating.
CarsonWid wrote:I have a limit on what data is available to me, so as much as I'd like to add more variables I also have to consider that this is just a for-fun after work project of mine.
Most of this data is readily available. Production budget, P&A budget, runtime, time of the year film is released, etc.
CarsonWid wrote:I've thought of things such as release date, budget, production company, etc. but none of these really held a strong correlation to the critical success of the movie.
Have you actually run the statistical analysis to determine this, or are you just guessing? The whole point of mathematical investigations is NOT to just trust your gut instincts, which can frequently be wrong. If you want to ever discover anything meaningful in your analysis, you need to start approaching every problem this way. In this particular case, I also strongly intuitively disagree that the production company does not have an influence on the critical success of the movie.
Maybe if you average it out they don't, but my feeling is that something from the Weinstein Company or Sony Picture Classics is going to generally be higher rated than, say, the average offering from Relativity Media or Warner Brothers.
Carson Wid wrote:I'd love to have a job running analytics of this nature but alas I do not have it, nor do I have the tools or databases to run this at a super effective level.
This might have been true back in the 1980s. Nowadays, no one has this excuse. Even the weakest laptop can run all these Monte Carlo simulations with ease, and there is a wealth of free resources and software online.
Carson Wid wrote:My objective for this blog is to show data and analytics at a high level
Which you have not.
Carson Wid wrote:in a simplified way that people who don't like math can digest it.
Getting people who don't like math to like math seems counterproductive, no?
Carson Wid wrote:The objective is not to 100% accurately predict a movie's score,
Have you heard of "confidence intervals"? You speak very-unmathematically for someone supposedly eager about the subject.
Carson Wid wrote:So, final point/question: What easily-accessible variables do you think would be most relevant when predicting a movie's critical success?
This is a horrible attitude to have for a researcher or analyst. You shouldn't be asking someone else; you should be investigating this yourself.
I still don't understand the point of your project. Predicting movie success in a manner far inferior to what even the most brain-dead 19 year-old quant can cook up in a couple of hours playing with MATLAB?