Assessing the Impact of Movie Plot Summaries on Box Office Sales

Andreea Pocol, Lesley Istead

Abstract: In this paper, we evaluate the impact of movie summaries on box office sales. These summaries are provided by studios as one of the many artifacts used to market a movie to the public. We acquired a set of nearly 74 thousand summaries from English-language films released between 1960 and 2019. We analyzed summary sentiment, length, and vocabulary and compared these metrics to box office sales, studying trends across genres. We observed that movies with negative or neutral summaries achieved greater box office sales than those with positive summaries. While initially surprising, these results correlate to endorphin production caused by negative or traumatic experiences. We also noted that summaries with an average length of 30 words performed better than those with fewer or more words. Finally, we noted that movies with summaries that have a vocabulary level of a college graduate performed better than others.