Here’s the key bit in this Variety story about how studios and press continue to initially undervalue and then be surprised by the success of movies like God’s Not Dead, Straight Outta Compton and more:

There are issues, too, with how studios and analysts read tracking. Privately, distribution and marketing executives say that traditional tracking is better for assessing how films play to broad audiences, as opposed to targeted demographics. Predicting the inclinations of a specific band of prospective filmgoers requires drilling deep into the data.

That’s a pretty broad oversight. That’s like a ship’s captain saying he’s sure that they’re going across the ocean but he’s not that concerned about weather patterns because that would require digging deep into the data.

straight outta compton still

I’m not a stats guy, goodness knows. But if you’re approving the production or purchase of a movie that obviously is going to have significant appeal to a specific segment of the audience then one would hope you’d have the research to know just how big that segment is and therefore have a good idea of how the investment is going to pay off. There are resources within studios to market to these niches, so how come they’re so consistently undercounted?

The Variety story offers a couple easy possibilities, mostly involving the white male studio leadership being too focused on what movies are going to appeal to all four audience quadrants to see anything close to the true value of movies that fall outside the “blockbuster” category. And there’s a lot of truth in that, I imagine. But while I agree with the story’s statement that social media can often offer a better predictive model than the one that’s currently in place – that’s the gist of this post – I also think there’s an extent to which this is a problem that is, to some extent, artificial.

While it is somewhat demeaning to constantly label anything that doesn’t feature white dudes beating up or talking to other white dudes a “surprise hit” I actually think there’s method in this madness. If – and this is purely conjecture – the predictive numbers for a movie are lower than what everyone believes it will actually do than the executives get more out of it than if a niche movie’s success were presented as a fait accompli: 1) They get to look even better by having supported a movie that did better than it was believed to have any right to and 2) The studio gets an additional news beat from the media that are all too willing to play along.

Again, this is just speculation. But with studios passing on movies all the time it’s hard to believe they don’t have some idea will perform well. True, not everything does. But those that do can’t all be surprises.

Yes, social media can help solve a lot of these problems. As I stated in my previous post, it can dive much deeper and naturalistically into people’s sentiment and opinions and therefore give a better snapshot of what to expect. Even so, with more and more activity moving to the dark web of apps like Snapchat and others where there’s no permanent record of someone’s intentions or conversations, that tracking is going to get more and more difficult.

So while better tracking can help fill in the gaps, the point remains that feigning surprise of something that appeals to less than 70% of the population is going to be seen as ignorant at best and sometimes discriminatory at worst. Studio heads would do well to both adopt better data tracking so they can have a more accurate picture of their movies’ chances at success and a better attitude about the niche audiences that are potentially going to turn small investments into big hits.