Entertainment Science

Abstract

The entertainment industry, enlightening billions of people with movies, games, books, and music, is often characterized by its “Nobody-Knows-Anything” mantra. This mantra, coined more than 30 years ago by screenwriter legend William Goldman, argues that survival and success is a function of managerial intuition and instinct only and refuses the existence of economic rules and laws for entertainment products. The Goldman adage strongly collides with today’s production and marketing budgets for entertainment products which often exceed $100 million and can reach up to $500 million—for a single new movie or video game. This book introduces Entertainment Science as an alternative, and more timely, paradigm. Entertainment Science builds on the assumption that in the era of almost unlimited data and computer power, the combination of smart analytics and powerful theories can provide valuable insights to those who have room for them in their decision making. Our aim to retire the Goldman mantra must not be confused with any desire to retire creativity and intuition—Entertainment Science considers data analytics and theory as complementary resources to these basic skills, not as their substitutes. Entertainment Science (the book) offers a systematic investigation of the knowledge that has been accumulated by scholars in various fields such as marketing and economics regarding the factors that make entertainment products successful—or let them flop. This knowledge has gone unnoticed by many who manage entertainment products and determine the industry’s course. But the knowledge has also suffered from a lack of integration, with most studies being relatively isolated scholarly endeavors of particular aspects of the entertainment business.