The Soul of Design: Harnessing the Power of Plot to Create Extraordinary Products by Robert Austin & Lee Devin

Author:Robert Austin & Lee Devin [Austin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-09-04T14:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.1. Three Movies in Summer 1999: Weekly Gross.

FIGURE 4.2. Three Movies in Summer 1999: Number of Theaters.

Similarly, The Haunting and The Sixth Sense both had stars, but The Haunting had more, and its stars, especially Catherine Zeta-Jones, were considered bigger draws than the up-and-down Bruce Willis, the name in The Sixth Sense. Neither film had an especially prominent director (at the time—Shyamalan has since become quite well-known, or “bankable”). Thanks to analyses by marketers, who based their thinking on category comparisons, The Haunting opened on over 600 more screens than The Sixth Sense and 2,773 more than The Blair Witch Project. Over the next few weeks though, The Haunting proved to have little audience appeal (and to suffer derision reviewers), while the other two proved that there was something about them that audiences (and reviewers) really liked.

5

We’ve briefly met movie industry researcher Arthur De Vany who, working with various coauthors, has thoroughly and scientifically analyzed returns in the movie industry. “We have been able to show,” he reports, “that movie revenues follow a non-linear dynamics that bifurcates into two separate paths, one leading to long lives and high revenues and the other leading to brief lives and low grosses.”8 De Vany and his colleagues show that these differences result from an “informative” rather than “uninformative, information cascade.”

When moviegoers look at how many people saw a movie last week, and use only that information to decide what to see this week, De Vany calls that an “uninformative information cascade”: moviegoers as lemmings.

But that’s not what happens. Moviegoers exchange information about what they thought about a movie, what they saw within it, and how they experienced what they saw. Word-of-mouth and other information (such as reviews and social media) about that special something within a good movie gets around and influences audience behavior more and more as the weeks pass. What happens to a movie’s box office next week does depend on what has happened this week, but the nature of the dependency tips into one or the other of two categories—call them hit and miss. Once established as one or the other, the two kinds of “products” behave very differently. A hit’s success is driven by past success, but nothing can save a miss from rapid descent into obscurity.

Maybe, we suggest, audience members make judgments on the basis of coherence, on the way the parts of a movie function together. People who see the movie reason out its unity of form, and they tell other people about it (though probably using feeling words, not our technical terms).9 It’s not the sheer numbers of people who “contemplate” such a product that matters. It’s what people tell each other about their experience. What they think and feel about that experience has important influence on a movie’s eventual commercial success, for better or for worse.

6

Sequels are an especially interesting part of this discussion of category comparisons. The decision to launch a sequel is usually a decision to construct a form with category similarities to one that audiences in the past found coherent.

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