Moviegoers tweeting reviews to friends may be more than just an annoyance to fellow theatergoers.
If researchers at HP Labs are correct, studios may soon be able to more accurately predict the weekend grosses of their upcoming films by combing through tweets.
Looking at more than 24 films over four months, HP's Palo Alto, Calif.-based techies used the frequency that a movie was mentioned in some 3 million tweets from nearly 2 million users to accurately project box office takes.
From blockbusters such as "Avatar" to bombs such as "Did You Hear About the Morgans?" the team at HP actually beat the predictions of more seasoned tracking systems like the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
To get the inside scoop on what these findings could mean for Hollywood, TheWrap checked in with HP researcher Bernardo Huberman (pictured below left), who co-authored the study with Sitaram Asur.
Why did you decide to focus on movies?
For the past three years we've been working on the economics of social attention. These days information is generated at a phenomenal rate, and consequently it's collapsed in value. We've become really interested in how social media like Twitter documents the public's attention. You could look at any number of things, such as the release of the iPad or the earthquakes in Haiti, to see how meaningful social networks form on Twitter. 
We started to realize that we could measure people's attention along the lines of box office revenue, in terms of how many people prefer one movie to another. We could have done anything, but we chose movies. It was a way to suck data out of a thin straw.
How did your study compare to traditional box-office tracking?
In terms of our top predictions, we did better on average than the Hollywood Stock Exchange, and they're the gold standard for movie tracking. Our predictions were 97 percent accurate, and they were about 96 percent accurate.
Does the box-office disappointment of movies such as "Kick-Ass," which had great internet buzz, show the limitations of relying heavily on Twitter?
Everyone is asking us that. It would have been great to do that one, but unfortunately we weren't doing the tracking needed to make the predictions. I bet by looking at the sentiment analysis, and seeing what people were saying after opening night, we could have seen a steep drop-off in box office. If you looked at what happened with "New Moon" and "The Blind Side," you might see the same trend. There was a lot of activity on Twitter leading up to "New Moon," but the amount of negative feedback increased after the opening weekend when people saw the film. The opposite was the case with "Blind Side," which saw its second-weekend numbers increase.
How did you set up your study?
Basically we set up a computer program that measured the rate and speed with which an upcoming movie was discussed.
