Digital Tracking: Audiences to Venture ‘Into the Woods’ Over Holidays

Does digital data offer indicators that can be used to monitor marketing effectiveness and predict box office success even before awareness turns into intent? Moviepilot – which studies social data and box office trends – analyzes this weekend’s new movies across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google (the methodology behind the numbers is laid out in the appendix below) over the seven days leading up to their release, when marketing campaigns should be at their peak.

“Into the Woods,” Disney
Moviepilot Prediction: $43 million

Hot on the heels of Disney’s massive successes “Frozen” and “Maleficent” comes “Into the Woods,” a modern musical intertwining of several beloved fairy tales — which is set to be another smash hit with female and family audiences. Those titles were driving more search interest than “Into the Woods” on their way to opening with $67 million and $69 million on release. “Maleficent” also had an enormous 70 million trailer views on release compared to (a still impressive) 23 million for “Into the Woods,” so we should see an opening in the mid 40s this holiday.

“Unbroken,” Universal
Moviepilot Prediction: $17.5 million

Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial effort will look to attract older audiences with a tale of perseverance in the face of adversity. Jolie’s spouse Brad Pitt’s gritty World War II tank movie “Fury” recently made $23.7 million on opening and was performing similarly to “Unbroken” on search at this point before release, indicating an opening in the low 20s for the Zamperini biopic.

“The Gambler,” Paramount
Moviepilot Prediction: $12 million

“The Gambler” is a smart case of counterprogramming, standing out as a slicker choice among the family-oriented Christmas fare and appealing to male demographics that are, for once, underserved. Last year’s holidays were bountiful for Mark Wahlberg with “Lone Survivor” opening well in limited release. Wahlberg will be shooting for an opening around $12 million this week — a similar take to his lauded boxing biopic “The Fighter” from 2012.

Tobias Bauckhage (@tbauckhage) is co-founder and CEO of moviepilot.com, a social-media-driven movie community reaching over 28 million Facebook fans and 20 million monthly unique users. Based on community data, Moviepilot helps studios to optimize their social media campaigns, identifying, analyzing and activating the right audiences. The company works with studios like Sony, 20th Century Fox and A24.

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Appendix

Facebook fan (or like) numbers are a good indicator for fan awareness for a movie, even months before the release. For mainstream movies with younger target audiences, fan counts are particularly important. However, big fan numbers can be bought and movies with older target audiences typically have lower fan counts. Fan engagement measured by PTAT (People Talking About This) is a more precise but also a fickle indicator, heavily driven by content strategy and media spending. Both numbers are global and public facing numbers from the official Facebook fanpage.

YouTube trailer counts are important for measuring early awareness about a movie. We track all English language original video content about the movie on YouTube, down to videos with 100 views, whether they are officially published by a studio or published unofficially by fans. The Buzz ratio looks at the percentage of unique viewers on YouTube that have “liked” a video and given it a “thumbs up”. Movies with over 40 million views are usually mainstream and set to dominate the box office, while titles drawing around 10 million indicate a more specific audience. If a movie does not have a solid number of trailer views on YouTube four weeks before its release, it is not promising news. But again, it is important to understand whether trailer views have been bought or grew organically. These numbers are global and public facing.

Twitter is a good real-time indicator of excitement and word of mouth, coming closer to release or following bigger PR stunts. Mainstream, comedy and horror titles all perform particularly strongly on Twitter around release. We count all tweets over the period of the last seven days before release (Friday through Thursday), that include the movie’s title plus a number of search words, e.g. “movie” OR a list of movie-specific hashtags. The numbers are global, conducted using a Twitter API partner service.

Search is a solid indicator for intent moving towards release as people actively seek out titles that they are aware of and are thinking about seeing. Search is particularly significant for fan-driven franchises and family titles as parents look for information about films they may take their children to see. We look at the last seven days (Friday through Thursday) of global Wikipedia traffic as a conclusive proxy for Google Search volume. We have to consider that big simultaneous global releases tend to have higher search results compared to domestic releases.

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