Microblog Mood Predicts the Box Office Performance

Abstract

Zhan Lang 2 (Wolf Warrior 2), an action movie directed and acted by Wu Jing, won a huge success in the Chinese film market in 2017. Its earned 5.6 billion yuan in the box office, become the biggest film of all time in China. The discussion of the movie on social media plays an indispensable role in influencing the box office performance. This study aims to predict movie box office performance based on affective computation on the related feeds on social media. Since the research on Chinese sentiment analysis is limited, and the accuracy of the analysis highly depends on the context, this study proposes to combine topic's hotness degree with emotion score to improve the accuracy of the prediction. Based on 16,496,675 related Sina Weibo feeds and Douban movie reviews in a restricted time zone, with the prediction algorithm proposed in the paper, the prediction result yields an R2=95.71%. Which means the success of Zhan Lang 2 is utterly predictable.