Hit? Miss?

Film "That formula, the theory goes, can then be applied to new scripts. If you were developing a $75-million buddy picture for Bruce Willis and Colin Farrell, Epagogix says, it can tell you, based on past experience, what that script's particular combination of narrative elements can be expected to make at the box office. If the formula says it's a $50-million script, you pull the plug. 'We shoot turkeys,' Meaney said. He had seen Mr. Bootstraps and the neural network in action: 'It can sometimes go on for hours. If you look at the computer, you see lots of flashing numbers in a gigantic grid. It's like 'The Matrix.' There are a lot of computations. The guy is there, the whole time, looking at it. It eventually stops flashing, and it tells us what it thinks the American box-office will be. A number comes out.' " -- Malcolm Gladwell on the men who think they know the formula for how a film works.

This impressive article is worth reading simply for its breakdown of how films can create a different reaction in a range of spectators. My issue is whether the formulas that are being postulated aren't common sense. It's very easy to look at something unrelated to the article like The Blair Witch Project and say -- actually, yes, that was always going to be a runaway success, but even before that really hyped I suspected something was going to happen -- simply because it was providing some fairly formulaic material wrapped in a cloak of something new -- cleverly it let the audience think they were being eclectic when in fact they weren't doing any such thing.

Similarly, even before its release, The Interpretor looked like something with pretensions of being a blockbuster that will probably be something of a failure. It has a story without a clear through line, two stars who tend to do well appearing in interesting films but never really catch fire in blockbusters (depending on the definition) and a director that in this day and age does not have the name recognition that he once did. Even if this had the best script in the world and a killer twist I don't think it would bring in some core sections of the market. But what do I know? I thought The Peacemaker had HIT written all over it.