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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

how can you know if the movie industry is really manipulating the public at all.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

What De Vany's research suggests (see comment above) is that existing attempts to manipulate perceptions about movies are largely ineffectual. What drives ticket sales is word of mouth. People tell their friends about movies and those friends trust the judgments of people they know who have actually seen the film.

There's no good way of assessing a film's viability short of actually releasing it to market. It's about the "fit" between the "information" content of the film and the "information" needs of the market place. We've yet to find a decent proxy for such huge amounts of information. So, you have to make the film and release it. Then you'll know.

I doubt that speculative markets will change things all that much.

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