The Timing of New-Product Announcements in the Cinematic Film Industry - Relating Pre-Launch Consumer Behaviour to the Financial Success of Movies

New-Product Announcements are used extensively in the movie industry and as such this is a very interesting area to study the behaviour of both companies and consumers in terms of their interaction through new-product announcements. In this project the interest shown by consumers pre-launch and the level of financial success of the movie over its in-theatre lifetime are studied. Particularly a distinction was made in terms of the timing of consumer pre-launch interest. Using the website Wikipedia as a credible source of product information, it was found that Wikipedia use started to rise exponentially in the final two weeks before movie launch. Moreover, possible predictive correlation between movie success over its lifetime and pre-announcement interest was found to increase in the final 5 weeks before launch, from 0.5 to 0.71 two weeks before launch, whereas it stabilized in the final pre-launch weeks and did not get higher than 0.75 even 3 weeks after release. This indicates that movie success may be best predicted 2 weeks ahead of launch when using pre-announcement information search data