DeepSummary
Joshua Lynn, president of Piedmont Media Research, discusses the research his company provides to studios to determine if a movie concept, cast, and other elements will resonate with audiences before greenlighting the project. Lynn explains their process of surveying representative samples and using predictive models to gauge consumer interest and potential box office performance.
Lynn reveals insights into how certain actors like Denzel Washington can significantly boost audience interest scores, while others may actually detract from a project. He also shares observations on upcoming 2023 films like 'Beetlejuice 2' scoring surprisingly high and potential underperformers like Francis Ford Coppola's 'Megalopolis'.
In the end, Lynn argues that his research is not meant to stifle creativity, but rather to help studios make more informed decisions on budgets and marketing to increase chances of profitability and fund more creative projects.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Piedmont Media Research surveys representative audience samples to gauge interest in movie concepts and predict box office performance before films are greenlit.
- Certain actors like Denzel Washington can boost audience interest scores by 30%, while others may actually detract interest.
- Upcoming films like 'Beetlejuice 2' are scoring surprisingly high interest, while 'Megalopolis' is cause for concern based on low scores.
- The research aims to inform prudent budgeting decisions, not restrict creativity on films the studio is passionate about making.
- Piedmont's 'consumer engagement' metric shows a strong 0.74 correlation with actual opening weekend box office numbers.
- Studios use the data to determine appropriate budgets, casts, marketing and whether to proceed with a film at all.
- Research can't account for factors like poor reviews tanking a film's performance after tracking well like 'Madame Web'.
- The process helps de-risk the inherently risky movie business by aligning budgets with audience demand projections.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “So myself and a friend of mine who was actually working for Nielsen at the time, we started looking around at different metrics, different things that we could play around with to see the strength of people's connections to an idea, to any given concept.“ by Joshua Lynn
- “Let's just say you're the money person and you've got to make a decision on what to put money into. This is basically telling you, a, what people are actually interested in, but then b, let's just say it's a movie people aren't interested in, like Whiplash, but that you really believe in this project, you believe in this director, you believe in this script, you think, this is going to be good. Make that movie, man. I want to see it.“ by Joshua Lynn
- “We would put together the testing material, which I describe it as sort of a, I don't know, a textual description of what you would get for the trailer. And basically what we do is we go out to a representative sample of the ticket buying population and we have a series of questions that we ask that we're able to score together into one or overall score, our consumer engagement metric.“ by Joshua Lynn
- “And the correlation of our consumer engagement metric to opening weekend box office is about 0.74, which is really, really strong.“ by Joshua Lynn
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Episode Information
The Town with Matthew Belloni
The Ringer
6/7/24