Data-driven Blockbuster Planning on Online Movie Knowledge Library
This addresses movie industry planning by making it data-driven rather than heuristic-based, though it appears incremental as it applies existing data-driven methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of planning low-budget, high-return movies by learning from an online movie knowledge library, introducing the BigMovie framework that maximizes estimated gross with a given budget and achieves a 0.26 mean absolute percentage error for gross estimation.
In the era of big data, logistic planning can be made data-driven to take advantage of accumulated knowledge in the past. While in the movie industry, movie planning can also exploit the existing online movie knowledge library to achieve better results. However, it is ineffective to solely rely on conventional heuristics for movie planning, due to a large number of existing movies and various real-world factors that contribute to the success of each movie, such as the movie genre, available budget, production team (involving actor, actress, director, and writer), etc. In this paper, we study a "Blockbuster Planning" (BP) problem to learn from previous movies and plan for low budget yet high return new movies in a totally data-driven fashion. After a thorough investigation of an online movie knowledge library, a novel movie planning framework "Blockbuster Planning with Maximized Movie Configuration Acquaintance" (BigMovie) is introduced in this paper. From the investment perspective, BigMovie maximizes the estimated gross of the planned movies with a given budget. It is able to accurately estimate the movie gross with a 0.26 mean absolute percentage error (and 0.16 for budget). Meanwhile, from the production team's perspective, BigMovie is able to formulate an optimized team with people/movie genres that team members are acquainted with. Historical collaboration records are utilized to estimate acquaintance scores of movie configuration factors via an acquaintance tensor. We formulate the BP problem as a non-linear binary programming problem and prove its NP-hardness. To solve it in polynomial time, BigMovie relaxes the hard binary constraints and addresses the BP problem as a cubic programming problem. Extensive experiments conducted on IMDB movie database demonstrate the capability of BigMovie for an effective data-driven blockbuster planning.