The Formula for a Blockbuster
Penguin June 10th, 2008
I’m used to the whole concept of screenplay structure. You have 3 acts, hero’s journey etc. But what if there was an underlying formula that could tell if your script would be good or not? It seems like they’ve done just that. Created a formula for the blockbuster.
Dick Copaken and Nick Meaney created Epagogix, a neural net that guesses how much a movie will take in at the box office. The most interesting part about the article, is that even if the software can identify areas where a script can be improved, it still needs a writer to improve it. What else is interesting is that it doesn’t seem to care about structure at all. The software seems to care about details.
At the center is the creation of art is the question, “Is there a basic formula?”
“Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
But Hume had a Scottish counterpart, Lord Kames, and Lord Kames was equally convinced that traits like beauty, sublimity, and grandeur were indeed reducible to a rational system of rules and precepts. He devised principles of congruity, propriety, and perspicuity: an elevated subject, for instance, must be expressed in elevated language; sound and signification should be in concordance; a woman was most attractive when in distress; depicted misfortunes must never occur by chance.
Granted, there may or may not be a formula for the blockbuster. Even if there is, you still have to write it. But how can we use this knowledge to improve our writing? We watch great films and ask, what makes it great? We watch terrible films, and ask, what makes it suck? Most importantly, we live life so we can find those memorable moments. Build up our library of small stories that we can link together to make something great.
-Penguin
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