With Cary Cheng and Vaibhav Sharma, Elle prepared a statistical model to predict factors elemental to total box office for the 100 highest grossing films in U.S. history. Predicting film box office success has been a fascinating subject for the three, and in the Fall of 2014, they found, as Hollywood often confirms, results are erratic, and the biggest predictors of box are not production budget, nor lead actor salaries, but the degree of magic, stemming from buzz and press coverage. The following is our model.
