About predicting success

Hello to you all readers out there, I hope you are feeling well!

This week's task was to read an article about predicting success in the movie business. It was indeed an interesting read.

I agree partially with William Goldman's opinion about "nobody knows anything" in movies and actually with all art in general. I can't deny the success Epagogix and Platinum Blue have had with predicting success but as an artist I can't say that everything can be predictable. If we could predict everything, nothing new would ever be created. We can always create something new that can't be measured with science. But saying that "nobody knows anything" is a bit off, since as the article proved, we do know something. Maybe we could think of it more like "somebody knows something, but it's still not the whole truth"...? This all also depends on how you view success: for others it's only the monetary worth, but for people like me, a movie is successful if it awakens emotions and makes you really experience something new. You can measure the success of a piece of media with so much more than just how much money it made. What good is a blockbuster movie if nobody actually cherishes it? I hate seeing people lose their ambition in front of money.

I personally am very, very frustrated with media content being produced using a formula. I want people to broaden their horizons and create whatever they want to create, not just calculate what masses like. It's very uncreative... I feel like making everything by formula is in the way of some sort of general artistic progress. Art is all about freedom and doing whatever you like. Trying to fit that into a formula is impossible. But this is a matter of perspective and opinion, others see media, culture and art as a tool for business and it's working, but for me it's something else entirely.

Seeing all these same, used movie plots over and over again... Hearing all these songs which use the same melodies, same atmospheres... I find myself question the masses all the time. Why are these sort of songs and movies working? Don't people have thirst for anything more special? Why are they so easily satisfied? It's all very confusing. And very frustrating.

I didn't strongly agree or disagree with the article. It told a story and that's why it was biased towards the predicting mechanisms, but it didn't fully agree with them either. It showed that even the mechanisms can be flawed, although most of the time they seemed to be working. Or they just picked the success stories to that article, who knows.

Be ambitious, people.
Happy thoughts,
Oona