Sabermetrics come to ... film writing?

Awesome, we don't have enough blatantly derivative movies already.

 

Honestly, never saw it. They're right though.

 

Charlie Wilson's WAR.

 

Do I win?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097637/

 

Nate Silver interviewed on the subject:

Q: How much can statistical analysis apply to the entertainment world?

A: I think probably more than is taking place. I did a consulting project a couple of years ago for a big Hollywood company. In that company, you had some people who were very data driven and very progressive in their attitudes and some people who said, "This is art, you can't boil it down to science. We don't want to use math" kind of thing. So really it ran the whole gamut between those two polarized views.

At the same time, I think you have some of the same issues that you might have in a lot of industries, which is there's a tendency to think in the short term a lot. You have more and more films that are marketed toward your typically 22-year-old male audience, which is pretty likely to go out and see the films on opening weekend but may not give the film as much longevity. You have more and more sales made outside of the movie theater environment, and with social media, I think the buzz tends to matter a lot more, and films that are getting poor Twitter reaction, for instance, will have very, very sharp drop-off in their box office gross, not even from one week to the next but from the Friday night to the weekend even.

So this environment is changing. Statistics don't provide all the answers; you have to measure the uncertainty in a problem. But if you're not doing the stuff at all, then sooner or later your competitors will, and you really put yourself at a disadvantage.

Q: What are the statistics that people are paying too much attention to, and what are the ones that they're not paying enough attention to?

A: There maybe still is a somewhat old-fashioned fixation on opening weekend numbers, where that might not be all that large a part of the revenue pie and might not be as predictive as it used to be. … One analogy I sometimes make is what happened to the sport of boxing, of all things, where when they started having more and more of their bouts on pay-per-view, (they) kind of milked the revenue cow while they could, and you didn't have people growing up with boxing as a sport in their lives anymore, and it really kind of harmed the long-term audience.

Q: That's similar to the Blackhawks, who generated a lot more interest when more of their games became accessible on TV again.

A: Yeah, people are used to getting open access to things. For anyone in the media, this is a big challenge, where you have an audience that's used to having things on demand and not paying very much for them necessarily, which is obviously a threat to the industry in a lot of ways. But it also means you have to cater to it, and that means you have opportunities to distribute your product very, very cheaply, cut down on distribution costs and help build your brand. I really think the way things are now, differentiation is the key. People think, well, it's so easy to transmit information out there and distribute that it's a volume business. I think the reverse is true: that people have so much choice that they gravitate toward companies that are doing it well, and you'll have kind of a winner-take-all type environment in some fields.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-0516-nate-silver-20130515,0,6391441.column