Irfan Kamal on Digital Marketing » Blog Archive » Predictive Value of Buzz for the Dark Knight Opening Box Office

Predictive Value of Buzz for the Dark Knight Opening Box Office

Irfan Kamal July 21st, 2008

In an earlier post, I summarized the results of a study suggesting that several characteristics of movie word of mouth or buzz correlated well with expected total revenue over the movie’s release cycle.

There’s been a tremendous amount of word of mouth buzz surrounding this past weekend’s release of The Dark Knight, so I wanted to see what types of opening box office might be associated with pre-release buzz.

As a comparison, I also looked at volume of word of mouth around Hellboy II (the top release last weekend).

For comparison purposes, here are the data for last weekend’s top movie, Hellboy II. I want to look at predictive value of word of mouth volume, so I look at data 3 days before the release date.

Word of mouth volume index (from www.blogpulse.com) 3 days prior to official release date (7/11/08):

Hellboy, on 7/8/08: .0600

Opening Weekend Box Office (from www.boxofficemojo.com):

Hellboy II, per screen $10,779 (total $35 million)

For the Dark Knight, here’s the comparable data:

Word of mouth volume index (from www.blogpulse.com) 3 days prior to official release date (7/18/08):

Dark Knight, on 7/15/08: 0.26

Opening Weekend Box Office (from www.boxofficemojo.com):

Dark Night, per screen $35,579 (total $155 million)

So, Dark Knight’s word of mouth volume index was about 4.5x higher than Hellboy’s. Per screen box office came in at about 3.5x higher than Hellboy II and total weekend take came in at about 4.5x higher.

Note that of course this is more anecdotal than a deep study (a deep study would include other competitors, various other metrics referenced in research, e.g. tone of word of mouth, and would also look at total revenues - and would look at all variables over an extended period, not just point estimates).

Also, in case you’re a fan of the movie Journey to the Center of the Earth (also a top release the 7/11/08 release weekend), I didn’t include the movie because it had the atypical aspect of a 3D release.

Also, in case you’re wondering when/why I picked “3 days” before the release date, you’ll have to trust me when I say that I picked that date *before* seeing the blogpulse data. It seemed like a good point to have sufficient trend data.