“What does tracking mean?”

Well, Casey that’s a very interesting question, I’m glad you asked. Oh, and sorry it’s taken so long to respond.

“To track” comes from the Dutch, meaning to ‘follow or trace the footsteps’—first recorded in 1565. Thus, ‘tracking’ in and of itself could conjure a host of meanings dealing with merely following something, but in terms of movie tracking, what I had meant to say, more specifically, would be tracking prerelease movie buzz. You see, movies are multimillion dollar investments by movie studios, their shareholders as well as a surprising number of banks. All of these parties are interested in how these movies are going to perform at the box-office because it will obviously affect their wallets. In order to minimize risk then, movie studios will ‘track’ the movies through a number of different areas before they are released to help determine what kind of impact they’ll have on box-office receipts. Increasingly, opening weekends have become extremely important to movies’ revenues as these three days account for 30 to 50 percent of total box-office take. Some of the companies that movie studios have been known to use are Buzzmetrics, Cymphony, and Motivequest. The information that they gather is so sensitive that most of it isn’t published for the public to view. However, there are other places you can look if you were to say bet on opening weekend take of a movie such as blogpulse, yahoo! buzz, or imdb’s Moviemeter Top 10.

Basically, like any investment, movie studios are just trying to forecast with the most accuracy possible. The main things that they look at in order to determine a potential box-office haul are the following: prerelease buzz, rating, genre, early reviews, theatre count, and the movie’s marketing budget. What’s interesting about reviews is that it’s been proven that the more ‘buzz’ surrounding a movie, the more likely it’ll open big for the movie studio on opening weekend—regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. However, if a movie is going to continue to make a lot of money then it needs positive ‘word of mouth’ after opening weekend that will propel movies into higher levels of revenues. For instance, the Matrix sequels are notorious for their second weekends dropping off by a large amount because of poor word-of-mouth (wom), proceeded by a lot of prerelease buzz. On the other hand, there are other movies (sleepers) that really don’t have a lot of buzz going into them, but because of strong wom continue to perform well. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the ultimate example of this.

The most interesting thing about wom is that for a long time, it was really hard to quantify, but with the advent of weblogs, such as this one, there are now blog tracking websites that determine prerelease buzz as well as post-release wom. These blog tracking websites are now being used by major movie studios in attempts to forecast box-office proceeds. For instance, in relation to my other post, Beowulf was tracking high when compared to other holiday movie fare, so most industry experts knew that it would open at number one. And, from what I read, they pegged it a $30 million dollar opening weekend, which happened to be $2 million short of what it actually took in—not bad. Now, of course, its overall profit destiny might lie in the nimble fingertips of the blogosphere. And on that note, I think I might see it tomorrow. Any takers?

Finally, here's an interesting paper related to this subject. Exploring the Value of Online Product Reviews in Forecasting Sales: The Case of Motion Pictures