I was all set to attend what sounded like a great discussion on "The Dumbing Down of American Culture: Fact or Fiction?," featuring our own Michael Hirschorn (he of "The Case for Reality TV") - but then it was cancelled. So as a poor substitute, I'll offer a link to this Slate piece, in which Erik Lundegaard argues that once you control for marketing budgets and theater saturation (big things to control for, obviously), well-reviewed movies tend to outgross their badly-reviewed competitors. Lundegaard goes on to suggest that this proves that "quality matters," and that this means in turn that movie critics matter as well. I'd like to think so, and I'm sure they matter on the margins - I know I've avoided films I was intending to see because a critic I respected panned them - but in the aggregate I think his model is slightly flawed: He looks at the relationship between good reviews and good box office across a movie's entire run, a period in which word-of-mouth presumably becomes a big factor in how the movie performs. On the assumption that what your friend tells you about a given film may matter way more than what a critic tells you, I'd like to see the same analysis re-run but confined entirely to opening weekends, when word-of-mouth presumably is close to a non-factor, and when the critics are a moviegoer's only guide to which films are worth seeing and which can be safely skipped.
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Do Critics Matter?
02 Jul 2008 03:29 pm
Comments (17)
Agreed. The only conclusion I think could be reasonably drawn from the data presented in the Slate article was not that big of a surprise: Americans prefer to see good movies.
As a movie critic, I don't find the act of offering my personal opinion all that exciting. The differences in quality among films are generally too objectively obvious too spend much time on -- "Wall-E" is a well-made movie, while "The Happening" is not. Most of the rest of the disagreements -- such as between fans of, say, "Wanted" and "Sex and the City" involves identity differences, which are worth exploring. But working to put yourself into other kinds of peoples' shoes so that you can understand why they like the films they do works against having a high regard for your own opinions, which are obviously also biased by your own identity.
I spent about half an hour complaining to my wife about this article for exactly the reasons you've pointed out.
Lundegaard basically pointed out that all things being equal better films do better than worse films. Genius. He then says that publishers should put after each review a message board so that moviegoers can talk about the movies (because they really love to talk about movies) then he never makes the connection between these moviesgoing evangelists and box office success.
To do the study right, you should look just at films that debut only in Los Angeles and New York -- i.e., films that are hoping to break out based on buzz in the free media.
I suspect that critics make a big difference between these films making, say, $0.25 million and $2.5 million. Beyond some point like that, however, word of mouth takes over. "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" didn't make it to $200 million on the critics' backs.
The other point is that critics do influence Academy Award voters who do influence box office. So the critical consensus is important, indirectly, for the six or eight movies per year whose revenues are boosted by Oscar nominations.
Finally, every so often, critics save a film from obscurity that its own studio is out to sabotage. I suspect that Reihan and some other critics, such as myself, saved Idiocracy from Warner Bros.'s passive-aggressive anti-marketing -- not at the box office, but in the popular culture. You can now make references to Idiocracy (e.g., "Wall-E" is "Short Circuit" meets "Idiocracy") and have a hope that people will have a clue what you are talking about.
I'd like to see the same analysis re-run but confined entirely to opening weekends, when word-of-mouth presumably is close to a non-factor, and when the critics are a moviegoer's only guide to which films are worth seeing and which can be safely skipped.
I agree with the sentiment, but opening weekend is when advertising really makes a difference. Heavily-advertised but poorly reviewed/poor word-of-mouth movies often have good opening weekends but fall off a cliff, while the well reviewed movies that also have good word of mouth, as you note, build week after week.
He seems to be doing a bit of finagling on some of this. The films that got from 40s to the 90s at RottenTomatoes mostly seem to do about the same on the per-screen measure he's using. For example the top per-screen average was for "300" even though it was in the 60s at RT and not the 90%+ of the Bourne movie.
Still there is a fairly noticeable drop-off when the film got less than 40% at RT. Then a further drop for those under 20% at RT. So essentially critics "matter" mostly on the margins. If a high majority of them dislike a film it will do bad per-screen. Also they're significant for independent films.
Although even then they may not matter as films that get under 40% at RT might just not be crowd-pleasing anyway. Audiences may not read any critic and hear that "Norbit" was a terrible film to be avoided.
My guess is critics matter most when it comes to independent and foreign films. Which might be part of why many critics go out of their way to promote such films when they're any good.
A good documentary typically gets extremely high thumbs-up percentages on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics know they can't move the needle on Iron Man's box office, but they can on Spellbound's.
Audacious Epigone calculated correlations of the critics ratings versus domestic box revenues for 133 movies in 2005 by genre:
Action: .55
Comedy: .41
Drama: .28
Horror: .09
Kids: .27
Romance: .06
Sci-Fi: .59
Thriller: .31
This is on a scale where 1.00 equals perfect agreement between critics and box office, and 0.00 equals randomness.
So, critics agreed most with hoi polloi in the guy-oriented genres of sci-fi, action, and comedy, badly in the low-brow horror field, and worst of all in the female-driven romance niche.
In other words, professional critics tend to be fairly smart males.
Money is God. Why do people fight this obvious truth? Wherefore this heresy?
If you want to see what contemporary film criticism at its best can be, here's Michael Blowhard on "300."
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/03/300_2.html
n.b. I thought Idiocracy was a really awful movie.
Well, you must not be a eugenicist like Steve Sailer.
I thought Idiocracy was a mixed bag, but parts of it were funny. It's sad that the president in the movie was brighter and more competent than the actual current White House space-filler, though.
I suspect Steve Sailer and I had vastly different experiences while watching both.
Eliashberg, Jehoshua and Steven M. Shugan. 1997. "Film critics: influences or predictors?" Journal of Marketing 61:68-79.
Critics and their reviews pervade many industries and are particularly important in the entertainment industry. Few marketing scholars, however, have considered the relationship between the market performance of entertainment services and the role of critics. The authors do so here. They show empirically that critical reviews correlate with late and cumulative box office receipts but do not have a significant correlation with early box office receipts. Although still far from any definitive conclusion, this finding suggests that critics, at least from an aggregate-level perspective, appear to act more as leading indicators than as opinion leaders.
Basuroy, Suman, Subimal Chatterjee, and S. Abraham Ravid. 2003. "How Critical Are Critical Reviews? The Box Office Effects of Film Critics, Star Power, and Budgets" Journal of Marketing 67:103117.
The authors investigate how critics affect the box office performance of films and how the effects may be moderated by stars and budgets. The authors examine the process through which critics affect box office revenue, that is, whether they influence the decision of the film going public (their role as influencers), merely predict the decision (their role as predictors), or do both. They find that both positive and negative reviews are correlated with weekly box office revenue over an eight-week period, suggesting that critics play a dual role: They can influence and predict box office revenue. However, the authors find the impact of negative reviews (but not positive reviews) to diminish over time, a pattern that is more consistent with critics’ role as influencers. The authors then compare the positive impact of good reviews with the negative impact of bad reviews to find that film reviews evidence a negativity bias; that is, negative reviews hurt performance more than positive reviews help performance, but only during the first week of a film’s run. Finally, the authors examine two key moderators of critical reviews, stars and budgets, and find that popular stars and big budgets enhance box office revenue for films that receive more negative critical reviews than positive critical reviews but do little for films that receive more positive reviews than negative reviews. Taken together, the findings not only replicate and extend prior research on critical reviews and box office performance but also offer insight into how film studios can strategically manage the review process to enhance box office revenue.
Thanks, but how do you distinguish long run influence of critics from word of mouth?
I think it's easy to overlook the fact that within a lot of narrowly defined genres, such as, say, Noah Baumbach movies, there really isn't all that much difference between critic and audience opinions. The Squid and the Whale was funny and touching and Margot at the Wedding was unfunny and irritating. You don't need to be some kind of an expert to figure that out.
Much of movie quality is a lot like a band having a good night or a bad night. Sometimes they're in a groove, other times they aren't, and it's pretty easy to tell a good night from a bad night, or a good movie from a bad movie. In that case, all that a critic adds in terms of evaluating quality is that he endures Margot at the Wedding a few days earlier, and thus can warn fans away.
Steve asked "Thanks, but how do you distinguish long run influence of critics from word of mouth?"
good question. i think the simplest way to answer that is until the internet became ubiquitous (c 1998) reviews would have their greatest effect on opening weekend and very little thereafter (because most people do not archive their newspapers). note that the eliashberg and shugan paper was published in 1997, implying that for most of the period covered by their data few people would have had access to reviews after opening weekend.
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I can tell you, that, almost invariably, I will not see a movie in the theaters if it has a low score on rottentomatoes.com
Posted by rickm | July 2, 2008 4:34 PM