Beyond the box office: are industry experts getting the movie business wrong?

What is it that makes a movie successful? A faculty member from the Judge Business School believes that the industry and experts are looking in the wrong places when it comes to measuring the financial gain of a film - so often the bottom line when determining a 'hit'. My article offered the first wide-scale literature review of research on film performance and I only uncovered the tip of the iceberg." - —Allegre Hadida The legendary screenwriter William Goldman famously claimed that "nobody knows anything" when it comes to predicting a smash-hit movie, but for decades movies have lived and died on the box office receipts of opening weekend - and, with the advent of social media, a movie's window of opportunity has shrunk even further. Whereas once Hollywood executives could be found sweating over the earliest box office receipts as they ticked over, now they are just as likely to be glued to Twitter during the opening 20 minutes of the very first screenings - as audiences brandish their smartphones to either champion or potentially condemn a movie at the very point it emerges blinking into the public purview. But for Allegre Hadida, University Lecturer in Strategy at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, this extremely narrow approach to a film's success runs counter to the array of platforms and factors that feed into whether a film is ultimately 'profitable' - which in the 21^st century stretches far beyond attendance and initial box office.