Movie Reviews and Revenues: An Experiment in Text Regression

We consider the problem of predicting a movie’s opening weekend revenue. Previous work on this problem has used metadata about a movie—e.g., its genre, MPAA rating, and cast—with very limited work making use of text about the movie. In this paper, we use the text of film critics’ reviews from several sources to predict opening weekend revenue. We describe a new dataset pairing movie reviews with metadata and revenue data, and show that review text can substitute for metadata, and even improve over it, for prediction