These results also show how easy it is for humans to culturally understand things that machines can't (yet). It would have been foolish of Fox to follow some of Merlin's suggestion and, for example, advertise Logan to fans of The Hunger Games. Having even a fuzzy frame of reference based on data would be a useful thing when it comes to deciding on advertising budgets or deciding how to market upcoming films.īut just because they're based on data doesn't mean that Merlin's predictions alone are worth betting money on. From 20th Century Fox's point of view, their software correctly predicted more than 50 percent of movies that Logan viewers also went to see. Looking at the results shows that Merlin predicted 11 of the top 20 likely movies, which certainly isn't a total miss. I'm not sure that Merlin has really captured the essence-or even the appeal-of Hugh Jackman's haunting portrayal of old-man Logan, an aging but violent cowboy struggling to live in an increasingly sterilized frontier. Jason Bourne and Tarzan weren’t even in the top 20. It's easy to see how "man," "beard," and "gun" would draw recommendations for The Magnificent Seven and John Wick 2, but I suspect Tarzan was chosen mostly on the strength of "tree." Out of the top five movies that real audiences saw prior to Logan, Merlin only got one ( John Wick 2) correct. Merlin watched the trailer for Logan and tagged every object it recognized, like "vehicle," "car," "man," "facial_hair," and, most frequently, "tree."Īccording to Merlin, if you saw Logan, you'll most likely pay to see The Magnificent Seven, Jason Bourne, John Wick 2, and The Legend of Tarzan. To see Merlin’s limitations, we can look a its analysis of Logan, the 2017 superhero western from director James Mangold, which Google used as a test-case in its blog post. Merlin uses its method of categorizing movies and historical data of a moviegoer's preferences to predict whether they will buy a ticket for the next big summer action movie, Man With Beard And Gun And Car.īeginning with 2017's The Greatest Showman, 20th Century Fox has been using Merlin's predictions to decide which movies to make and how best to market them, according to a Google blog post. According to the paper describing Merlin, the system pairs attendance records with “basic demographics information” at the individual level. Fox and Google claim that the data is "fully anonymized" and "user privacy-complaint," but it’s not clear exactly what data is included or how it is gathered. Merlin compares these tags to a large dataset that includes hundreds of movies and millions of attendance records. For example, Merlin knows that cars going fast may break into a car chase "followed by a car flipping, and a car explosion." A car chase with explosions is very likely in an action movie, so Merlin can use that information to tag the movie with "action" and "car chase," and in turn use that to recommend other movies with car chases. Merlin can use its knowledge of common tropes in trailers to understand how sequences of actions in trailers play into our expectations for genre films. "A trailer with a long close-up shot of a character is more likely for a drama movie," the study's authors write, "whereas a trailer with quick but frequent shots is more likely for an action movie."
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