Significance: Hollywood’s best supporting actors

Robert Bain writes about Hollywood movies and why it is so difficult to predict how they will perform at the box office. Allègre Hadida, University Senior Lecturer in Strategy at Cambridge Judge, has been studying performance in creative, arts and media organisations. She said: “Most studios at the moment are using very sophisticated statistical methods to look into their audiences, their distribution patterns and in some instances the creative side of the industry. But there is still immense resistance to talking about data and using it to drive decisions in the industry. There’s still this idea that there is magic, at the level of alchemy, that either happens, or doesn’t. So using data to try to predict what will make a successful movie is almost heresy for some people.”

Read the full article [onlinelibrary.wiley.com]