If youâre making bets on the Oscars, consider taking some advice from artificial intelligence.
Donât put money on comedies with sad endings. Avoid thrillers with happy endings. And keep your eyes peeled for buzz-worthy tragedies.
led by Prof. Ganna Pogrebna at the University of Birmingham, studied 6,147 films released over the last 83 years in hopes of finding a common thread among award-winning movies and blockbusters.
The report used artificial intelligence to study scripts on a sentence-by-sentence level. The AI tool assigned a sentimental value to every line in the film. For instance, if a sentence carried negative words, it would score minus one, and positive words earned a plus one.
The algorithm then categorized the films into six âemotional arcsâ:
- Rags to riches: Rise in emotional trajectory (Shawshank Redemption, The Nightmare Before Christmas)
- Riches to rags: Fall in emotional trajectory (Toy Story 3, Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
- Man in a hole: A fall followed by a rise (The Godfather, The Departed)
- Icarus: A rise followed by a fall (Mary Poppins, A Very Long Engagement)
- Cinderella: A rise-fall-rise pattern (Babe, Spider-Man 2)
- Oedipus: A fall-rise-fall pattern (The Little Mermaid, As Good As It Gets)
After grouping the movies into emotional arcs, researchers then cross-referenced the groups with a wide range of criteria including revenue, viewer ratings on IMDb, length, Oscars won and other awards.
âMan in a holeâ films had the highest gross domestic revenues, earning $37.48 million on average, followed by Cinderella films ($33.63 million) and Oedipus films ($31.44 million.)
As for Oscar success, researchers found that tragedies tended to fare the best, winning an average of 2.14 Oscars per film.
Interestingly, genre and production budget didnât seem to change the financial success of âMan in a Holeâ films. Researchers suggest that these films arenât successful because theyâre particularly popular, but because theyâre buzzworthy.
âIn other words, the Man in a Hole emotional arc tends to generate most âtalked aboutâ movies and not necessarily âmost likedâ movies and thereby achieve higher revenues than movies in other categories,â researchers wrote in the report.
Movies that begin on an emotional rise but then fall -- Icarus films, like âOn the Waterfrontâ -- donât tend to do as well at the box office. The reason, researchers suggest, may be because audiences are less willing to experience an emotional fall that isnât lifted by an equal-sized emotional rise. In other words, we donât like sad endings.
But that doesnât mean all Icarus films fail. Low-budget films with a rise-then-fall pattern tend do well.
Of course, the findings offer insight into trends, not rules, and researchers say production companies shouldnât misread the report as suggesting that âMan in a Holeâ films equal money.
Instead, researchers say Hollywood producers should do what they likely already do: carefully consider a movieâs script, budget and genre and weigh whether or not, as a whole, these criteria mean success.
âIt would be over-simplification to say the motion picture industry should concentrate on producing Man in a Hole movies ⌠A carefully chosen combination of production budget and genre may produce a financially successful movie with any emotional shape,â Pogrebna said in a statement.