Word of Mouth for Movies: Its Dynamics and Impact on Box Office Revenue

TLDR

The study investigates how real‑world word‑of‑mouth dynamics explain box office revenue. WOM data were gathered from Yahoo Movies and analyzed to track activity patterns. WOM activity peaks during prerelease and opening week, with high expectations that turn critical, and the volume of WOM strongly predicts early box‑office revenue, while sentiment has little effect.

Abstract

This article uses actual word-of-mouth (WOM) information to examine the dynamic patterns of WOM and how it helps explain box office revenue. The WOM data were collected from the Yahoo Movies Web site. The results show that WOM activities are the most active during a movie's prerelease and opening week and that movie audiences tend to hold relatively high expectations before release but become more critical in the opening week. More important, WOM information offers significant explanatory power for both aggregate and weekly box office revenue, especially in the early weeks after a movie opens. However, most of this explanatory power comes from the volume of WOM and not from its valence, as measured by the percentages of positive and negative messages.