How exact a science is movie tracking? Lately -- not very.
Over Memorial Day weekend, Warner Bros.' “Sex and the City 2” was forecast to take in around $60 million. It ended up making just $36.8 million.
A week earlier, DreamWorks Animation’s “Shrek Forever After” was on track to take in about $90 million, but it ended up opening to just $70.8 million.
Then last weekend, the opposite happened with Sony's "The Karate Kid." Its domestic opening beat the high end of pre-release forecasts by a stunning $20 million.
What's going on?
These days studio executives are not the only ones to wonder why the opening predictions of research firms -- to which they pay millions of dollars each year -- are so frequently off?
Talk to top executives at one of the major tracking services -- OTX, MarketCast and National Research Group -- and they’re likely to tell you that predicting a film’s opening gross at the domestic box office is really a “parlor trick” and not what their core service is all about.
“The real use of tracking is to measure the effectiveness of the marketing weeks out from release, so you can make adjustments while there’s still time,” said Vinny Bruzzese, president of the worldwide motion picture group for OTX. “By the time the official prediction comes out on the day of the release, it’s fairly useless.”
(See accompanying story: "Tweeting Beats Tracking.")
“The purpose of tracking is to provide a snapshot of the marketplace and how (studio marketing) materials are being received,” added an official for another tracking firm, who declined to be named. “The purpose is not to project what the market is going to be.”
Except that's really how studios use the information.
The movie market-research business is more competitive than ever, with yet another new firm, Screen Engine -- started by former OTX research guru Kevin Goetz -- getting off the ground.
While research films for the most part use similar methodologies -- and all employ subtle proprietary differences -- each is trying to stand out as the leading predictive force in a business that often defies accurate forecast.
Like it or not, these research companies are often defined by their ability to accurately predict what films will make their first weekend in the marketplace.
And while most seem to understand that gauging the precise amount of intent-to-see among hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people remains an imprecise science, studio officials still find themselves surprised when the predictions are off on Sunday morning.
So what gets in the way of the numbers being right?
Well, there’s the well-known cause of the expectations game. Tracking firms are under intense pressure to deliver a number that doesn’t put their client studio in the position of looking like it didn’t meet or exceed the estimate.
“I’d much rather estimate too low than too high,” conceded one tracking-firm official.
