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Sure, here's a bit more info.

Posted by: horlicks on Jun 06, 18:50 in response to edzep's post Fine. But, if the OP was meant to persuade us...

So in essence I track all tweets for all films in the next 4 months daily. Some films are very easy to grab all tweets for thanks to a unique name (Knight and Day for instance), whereas some are nightmares (ala Nine or Red) and I have to come up with filters to get the data I want. That aside, once I'm happy with the quality of data then a log that against the movie for the day. Fine.

After the data is collected and a sizeable sample size is collected (I currently have ~9 months of data for openers 4 weeks out to release daily. I can then start to pick movies which appeal to similar audiences and compare them. So even a kiddies movie which has a target market outside of the Twitter user base still generates traffic (a la Marmaduke), but it a significantly less than a film such as Twilight which plays right to the heart of Twitter. So would you compare the two? No. But you would look at films like The Tooth Fairy, Spy Next Door etc. which you think would have played to the same demographic. Once this link has been made then it is possible to come up with predictions. Now obviously its not an exact science because even movies that play to the exact same audience can have artificially inflated numbers due to a ton of reasons: better advertising via social media, better looking trailers, whatever. This is what makes it difficult and why it is not an exact science.

Now I do some additional things such as grab positive and negative percentages for tweets which I am less convinced is related to Box Office or legs simply because of the snarky nature of Twitter but some interesting trends with that are emerging such as films with a highly negative slant tends to have a higher ratio in general.

Take my preview column for this week.

Here is how A-Team did from Mon-Thur last week on Twitter:

Date	Movie	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Total
6/11/10	*The A-Team*	492	950	962	976	3,380

So I say to myself, I wonder how other films which I thought appealed to a similar demographic did the Mon - Thur on the week before they got released. Then I came up with the below list from my database:

Comparisons

Date	Movie	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Total
11/13/09	*2012*	681	1,271	1,365	1,227	4,544
12/25/09	*Sherlock Holmes*	758	905	729	991	3,383
2/12/10	*The Wolfman*	351	345	298	435	1,429
4/2/10	*Clash of the Titans*	1,232	1,267	1,209	1,278	4,986
5/14/10	*Robin Hood*	635	597	694	648	2,574

I then figured out how those numbers translated to tweets in their week of release and their ratio for their first Friday. Project this onto A-Team and my early guestimate based on last week alone is high teens to low $20s million. This is a wide spread yes and might change drastically if it falls flat this week coming but such is life with trying to guage a commodity for which demand is in flux for and not perfectly defined. Then what I do is comment on its numbers next week before coming up with a final prediction Thursday morning.

Hope that makes a little more sense. I'd be more than happy to elaborate further if you'd like.

So, the Twitter prediction 'myth' scored another win this weekend. horlicks Jun 06, 12:01

Not bad at all. Thanks for your time in compiling the info. {nm} grammar Jun 06, 12:04

Impressive average but I still don't understand what it's counting. {nm} BuenaOnda Jun 06, 12:43

Yah, I don't see how the tweet count and (theater?) count are calculated into a prediction. And, don't see what that ratio is. {nm} edzep Jun 06, 12:52

Trade secrets, I bet :) {nm} RogerMore Jun 06, 13:36

It's explained pretty well on the site. {nm} secretstalker Jun 06, 15:51

Fine. But, if the OP was meant to persuade us dunderheads, then it should have been explained. As is, it's kind of meaningless. {nm} edzep Jun 06, 16:12

Sure, here's a bit more info. horlicks Jun 06, 18:50

Helpful. You're certainly putting a lot of work into it. {nm} edzep Jun 07, 04:10

Since this is probably aimed at me, I'll give you a couple of good replies AB_Excello Jun 06, 14:20

If 74% is a D+, there isn't a box office predictor who does better than a C- {nm} RogerMore Jun 06, 14:37