Prediction of Foreign Box Office Revenues Based on Wikipedia Page Activity

摘要

A number of attempts have been made at estimating the amount of box officerevenue a film will generate during its opening weekend. One such attempt makesextensive use of the number of views a film's Wikipedia page has attracted as apredictor of box office success in the United States. In this paper we developa similar method of approximating box office success. We test our method using325 films from the United States and then apply it to films from four foreignmarkets: Japan (95 films), Australia (118 films), Germany (105 films), and theUnited Kingdom (141 films). We find the technique to have inconsistentperformance in these nations. While it makes relatively accurate predictionsfor the United States and Australia, its predictions in the remaining marketsare not accurate enough to be useful.