Music Machinery

Feeling like I’d burned through my standard sources for movie recommendations, I recently decided to turn to box office failures. I was seeking out an automated way to explore the world of such movies and find “overlooked” films that are actually very good, but were ignored in theaters and dismissed by critics.

Using Nathan Rabin’s popular “My Year of Flops” series on The AV Club and follow-up book as a starting point, I designed an algorithm to predict whether a box office failure is actually a film worth seeing. The algorithm examines multiple aspects of a movie’s cultural response to make its prediction – such as applying sentiment analysis to capture the tone of reviews, and understanding whether critics and audiences responded differently to a movie. The output is a list of 100+ movies released over the past decade with high likelihood of being quality, “overlooked” films.

Here’s how it…