Want to know how “Clash of the Titans” will fare at the box office this weekend?
Check Twitter.
So say two Silicon Valley researchers who claim they have discovered a way to use the popular social-media service to gauge real-time interest in movies and accurately predict how they will perform at the box office on opening weekend.
Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, two social-computing scientists at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., contend that computational methods using Twitter feeds can predict with as much as 97.3 percent accuracy how a movie will perform on its first weekend of release.
That far surpasses the traditional survey-based “tracking” reports that studios have long relied upon to forecast movie-ticket sales, or the popular online site Hollywood Stock Exchange that lets users wager on box-office predictions with pretend money.
The computer models based on Twitter chatter could signal a Merlin- like tool for Hollywood, which has long struggled to come up with fail-safe ways to figure out how movies will do at the box office. Among other things, the research could help studios decide whether to make last-minute tweaks to advertising campaigns, or scale back and cut their losses.
Although the studios can often predict some weekend box-office results within 10 percent, their results can fall short on films that target kids or teen fanboys, or are outliers like the recent Oscar-winner, “The Blind Side.” The researchers used the rate at which movies are mentioned in Twitter updates to predict first-weekend box-office returns. The sentiment of the tweets — positive, neutral or negative — also accurately predicted second- weekend returns, they said.
The research comes as movies’ performance in the nearly $11 billion box-office market, once of concern only to Hollywood insiders, has become a national pastime. It also comes as two trading firms, a Wall Street player and a Midwest upstart, are trying to roll out futures exchanges that they say are designed to help studios hedge box-office performance.
Huberman said the research shows that Twitter could be tapped to predict the outcome of all sorts of things, including how well major new products will be received and the outcome of major political races.
That could capture the elusive commercial potential of social media: that services like Twitter, with their vast flow of real-time information, have the power and reach to track people’s interests.
