If youāre making bets on the Oscars, consider taking some advice from artificial intelligence.
Donāt put money on comedies with sad endings. Avoid thrillers with happy endings. And keep your eyes peeled for buzz-worthy tragedies.
led by Prof. Ganna Pogrebna at the University of Birmingham, studied 6,147 films released over the last 83 years in hopes of finding a common thread among award-winning movies and blockbusters.
The report used artificial intelligence to study scripts on a sentence-by-sentence level. The AI tool assigned a sentimental value to every line in the film. For instance, if a sentence carried negative words, it would score minus one, and positive words earned a plus one.
The algorithm then categorized the films into six āemotional arcsā:
- Rags to riches: Rise in emotional trajectory (Shawshank Redemption, The Nightmare Before Christmas)
- Riches to rags: Fall in emotional trajectory (Toy Story 3, Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
- Man in a hole: A fall followed by a rise (The Godfather, The Departed)
- Icarus: A rise followed by a fall (Mary Poppins, A Very Long Engagement)
- Cinderella: A rise-fall-rise pattern (Babe, Spider-Man 2)
- Oedipus: A fall-rise-fall pattern (The Little Mermaid, As Good As It Gets)
After grouping the movies into emotional arcs, researchers then cross-referenced the groups with a wide range of criteria including revenue, viewer ratings on IMDb, length, Oscars won and other awards.
āMan in a holeā films had the highest gross domestic revenues, earning $37.48 million on average, followed by Cinderella films ($33.63 million) and Oedipus films ($31.44 million.)
As for Oscar success, researchers found that tragedies tended to fare the best, winning an average of 2.14 Oscars per film.
Interestingly, genre and production budget didnāt seem to change the financial success of āMan in a Holeā films. Researchers suggest that these films arenāt successful because theyāre particularly popular, but because theyāre buzzworthy.
āIn other words, the Man in a Hole emotional arc tends to generate most ātalked aboutā movies and not necessarily āmost likedā movies and thereby achieve higher revenues than movies in other categories,ā researchers wrote in the report.
Movies that begin on an emotional rise but then fall -- Icarus films, like āOn the Waterfrontā -- donāt tend to do as well at the box office. The reason, researchers suggest, may be because audiences are less willing to experience an emotional fall that isnāt lifted by an equal-sized emotional rise. In other words, we donāt like sad endings.
But that doesnāt mean all Icarus films fail. Low-budget films with a rise-then-fall pattern tend do well.
Of course, the findings offer insight into trends, not rules, and researchers say production companies shouldnāt misread the report as suggesting that āMan in a Holeā films equal money.
Instead, researchers say Hollywood producers should do what they likely already do: carefully consider a movieās script, budget and genre and weigh whether or not, as a whole, these criteria mean success.
āIt would be over-simplification to say the motion picture industry should concentrate on producing Man in a Hole movies ā¦ A carefully chosen combination of production budget and genre may produce a financially successful movie with any emotional shape,ā Pogrebna said in a statement.
