Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Attended democamp number 5 last night. Another great event that somehow put itself together last (kudos to camp councelor David and and all those who helped out). Wow, some impressive technology demo’d last night including blogmatrix and DableDB. Even with democamps running every 4 weeks, this town is not running out of technology to show off.

more photos here. None of me though so far 🙁 guess I’m not as photogenic as these characters. (Bryce and Chris Nolan btw)

It’s popular to criticize Big Media and say stop whining about this into mediation we are falling profits or whatever, if you just made better quality content you would be making more money. Hmm I’ve always secretly wondered if that latter statement was true and so when I was, for some unknown impulse, browsing last weekend’s North American box office numbers, this relationship seemed to jump right out at me and made me laugh. (cry?)

So here you have a scatter plot of the top 12 grossing movies (vertical scale) this weekend versus the RottenTomatoes rating (a measure of critic approval) for each of those same movies (horizontal scale). The pinkish line represents excels best guess at the linear regression for this relationship.

sigh. what does this tell us? possible theories:

1. People don’t actually like good content. In practice, they prefer not to be overly challenged by their entertainment and rather prefer the trashy stuff.

2. Bad content is actually good, or viceversa — a longstanding conspiracy of critics if you will.

or…

3. It’s All About the Distribution Stupid. Consumers will consume industry portion amounts those products which are disproportionately put in front of their noses.

It’s all about the distribution, is I feel a point the new economy Web2.0 hypesters tend to forget about. Sure information technology should be helping to level the playing field, but if so, why are we still lining up in droves to see these terrible movies?

Or say I’m wrong and distribution scale advantages or not, say these are all the movies we really did want to see. What does that say about the wisdom of crowds? Another cherished tenet of the web 2.0 ethos…

Now caveat caveat these are only 12 data points from one weekend and there are all kind of statistical biases at work here so, for the time being, consider these “stat’s” as for entertainment purposes only. Also I realize the movie business is more complicated than this, one would hope that good movies make more money over time etc etc. Still, this should be worth investigating a little further don’t you think?

for the record, here is the data set I used, courtesy of RottenTomatoes.com

This Week Last Week Title Weeks Released Weekend Gross Total Gross Theater  Average  # Of  Theaters   T-Meter  1 new   Silent Hill 1 $20.2M $20.2M $6.9k  2926    25% 2 1   Scary Movie 4 2 $16.8M $67.5M $4.6k  3673    38% 3 new   The Sentinel 1 $14.4M $14.4M $5.1k  2822    31% 4 2   Ice Age: The Meltdown 4 $13.3M $168.3M $3.8k  3540    58% 5 4   The Wild 2 $8.3M $22.2M $2.9k  2854    19% 6 3   The Benchwarmers 3 $7.3M $47.1M $2.3k  3094    13% 7 5   Take the Lead 3 $4.2M $29.5M $1.7k  2413    45% 8 6   Inside Man 5 $3.7M $81.3M $1.9k  2021    89% 9 new   American Dreamz 1 $3.7M $3.7M $2.4k  1500    44% 10 15   Friends With Money 3 $3.2M $5M $3.2k  991    67% 11 8   Thank You For Smoking 6 $2.8M $15.8M $2.7k  1020    86% 12 7   Lucky Number Slevin 3 $2.5M $18.7M $1.4k  1735    50%