Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University and an expert in book publishing, summarizes the entertainment business this way: “A complex, adaptive, semi-chaotic industry with Bose-Einstein distribution dynamics and Pareto power law characteristics with dual-sided uncertainty.” That is quite the disfluent multisyllabic mouthful, but it’s worth breaking down word by word: “Complex”: Every year, there are hundreds of movies released to billions of potential viewers, who are watching ads, reading critics, and mimicking each other to decide what movie ticket they will buy next. In the short run, the best indication of next week’s movie sales is this week’s movie sales. But since everybody is constantly influencing everybody else, predicting the distant-future box office of a movie is like predicting the final resting place of sixteen billiard balls crisscrossing a table and smacking into each other. “Adaptive”: When a book in one genre succeeds—e.g., porny romance, dystopian young adult fiction, or nonfiction pop psychology books—the rest of the industry will adapt to copy it. But aggressive mimicking will eventually chase away the trend, rendering it obsolete by the time some adaptive products hit the market. Paying through the nose for A-list stars seemed like the best bet in 1980s and 1990s Hollywood, and superstar salaries entered a period of hyperinflation, until a few flops, like 1993’s Last Action Hero, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, shattered the Hollywood...