Apparently Positive Reviews Do Lead to Box Office Success
The debate has raged on for years over whether or not film critics matter anymore and whether reviews actually have an effect on the box office success of a movie. Judging by the disparity between some of the biggest blockbusters from the past few years and the terrible reviews they received, it would seem that the two are not in any way related. However, the crack staff over at Slate recently sat down and did some fiddling with numbers and came to the conclusions that positive reviews do, in fact, matter.
Now granted, statistics are pretty easy to manipulate in a lot of different ways, and Slate’s research on the whole Tom Cruise Valkyrie Photo Scandal ended up being not so reliable. But their approach is an interesting one, and, I think, worth a look. The basic idea is that they broke down movies to their per-screen average, and found that the biggest blockbusters seemed critic proof only because of the sheer number of ticket sales. The bottom line? “Critically acclaimed films average about $2,000 more per screen than critically lambasted films.” According to Erik Lundegaard, quality still matters, which is a somewhat reassuring thought. Do you agree?
Comments (2)
It seems to me that well reviewed films are also subject to great word of mouth. I’m much more likely to see a film if one of my best friends gives it a great review rather than the sadly muted Roger Ebert. So that correlation made by Slate (if roughly accurate) probably has more to do with word of mouth which obviously can’t be measured.
Posted by Ryan M. on July 4th, 2008Because most people are gullible fools who will believe anything they read in the mass media. These lemmings would rather jump on the bandwagon so as not to appear too different from popular (ie mainstream) thought.
Gotta be on the winning team! (sarcasm)
Posted by Baychuk on July 4th, 2008Leave a Reply