Will the 3-hour special-effects-loaded remake of King Kong be a box office smash or a complete turkey? For movie producers, getting such questions right can be worth millions, and now they have a computer system to help them work it out before a film is even made.
The idea is based on the findings of entertainment industry market researcher Edith Bodnar, who while at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1998 came up with the idea of training a type of software package called an artificial neural network to learn the key factors that influence a movie’s likely success.…
