Historically, word-of-mouth has been the primary indicator of a movie’s success, and a recent study from Emerson College’s School of Communication may prove that Twitter mentions and hashtags may serve as an appropriate proxy for the often-elusive metric.

The study consisted of manually coding a sample of 12,000 tweets out of a universe of 800,739 tweets from 17 movies in the fall of 2016; in particular, hashtags used by studios to promote their films were used to define a pool of tweets related to these movies.

“This study offers more evidence of the influence of word of mouth on movies,” said Owen Eagan, an executive in residence at Emerson College’s Department of Communication Studies. “Specifically, it confirms our earlier research regarding the significant relationship between movie buzz and revenue.”

Box office response
To conduct the analysis, a random sample of 400 hashtags were analyzed each week after the release of each movie for as many weeks up to four weeks that the data would allow. The movies selected for this study were those that were scheduled for wide-release and were not holiday-themed or released around the holidays to eliminate the possibility of data being skewed by unique audiences.

Once the tweets were coded, researchers then compared the average weekly sentiments with the average weekly percentage change in revenue for each movie. Weekly revenue was defined as the percentage change from weekend to weekend to allow researchers to compare this data to another study which used this methodology.

The correlation analysis between tweet sentiments and revenue found an r value of .75, which indicates a significant relationship between promotional hashtag frequency and box office returns; an r value of .5 is considered high.

While the correlation that Emerson College found was exceptionally high, the study did not run without any exceptions.

A notable outlier was “Miss Sloane,” a John Madden drama about a gun control lobbyist advocating for universal background checks. While the film’s promotional hashtag was widely discussed, much of the conversation surrounding the film could be sourced to pro-gun accounts looking to disparage the film as the product of a liberal agenda.

Another example—not sourced within the study but nevertheless a clear example of an exception to the rule the study presents—is the controversy surrounding Paul Feig’s recent all-female reboot of Ghostbusters, which touted a trailer that put up astounding numbers but was met with significant negative response, both from intransigent fans of the original and conservative commentators. The film and the ensuing controversy was the subject of much discussion in various media outlets, which did not allow the film to evade rumors that it failed to recoup costs when its marketing budget factored in.

Social success
One film that bet heavily on social was the adaptation of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon book “Inferno,” which invited consumers to complete labyrinthine puzzles featuring clues hidden in Google’s applications (see story).

And Paramount Pictures promoted last year’s highly-anticipated Zoolander 2 with a mobilized platform enabling users to transform their selfies so they recreate the main character’s iconic look. The film, despite a broad muiltichannel marketing campaign, still flopped in theatres, proving that the hashtag model is not a bulletproof approach to cinematic social media marketing (see story).