| dc.description.abstract | The entertainment industry, enlightening billions of people with movies, games,
books, and music, is often characterized by its “Nobody-Knows-Anything”
mantra. This mantra, coined more than 30 years ago by screenwriter legend
William Goldman, argues that survival and success is a function of managerial
intuition and instinct only and refuses the existence of economic rules and laws
for entertainment products.
The Goldman adage strongly collides with today’s production and marketing
budgets for entertainment products which often exceed $100 million
and can reach up to $500 million—for a single new movie or video game.
This book introduces Entertainment Science as an alternative, and more
timely, paradigm. Entertainment Science builds on the assumption that in
the era of almost unlimited data and computer power, the combination of
smart analytics and powerful theories can provide valuable insights to those
who have room for them in their decision making. Our aim to retire the
Goldman mantra must not be confused with any desire to retire creativity
and intuition—Entertainment Science considers data analytics and theory as
complementary resources to these basic skills, not as their substitutes.
Entertainment Science (the book) offers a systematic investigation of the
knowledge that has been accumulated by scholars in various fields such as
marketing and economics regarding the factors that make entertainment
products successful—or let them flop. This knowledge has gone unnoticed
by many who manage entertainment products and determine the industry’s
course. But the knowledge has also suffered from a lack of integration,
with most studies being relatively isolated scholarly endeavors of particular
aspects of the entertainment business. | en_US |
