Why Peter Jackson should direct "The Hobbit"

Thank to Bill Ives for pointing me to this New York Times article about Peter Jackson leveraging his fans using the Web in his negotiations with New Line Cinema. Because New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson could not agree on Jackson’s share on “Lord of the Ring” revenues, New Line Cinema intends to dump Peter Jackson as director of LOTR prequel “The Hobbit”. Peter Jackson’s letter on his fan web site theonering.net led to an uproar and letter writing campaign of his fans to New Line Cinema.

The article got me to run a coolhunting query about the strength of Peter Jackson’s position in his negotiations with New Line Cinema as reflected on the Web. The picture below shows what I got.



The first thing we notice is the strong position of theonering.net as the leading player and king maker among LOTR fans. The second is how strong the association between Peter Jackson and “The Hobbit” is, the combined query having by far the highest betweenness, much higher that the single queries for "Peter Jackson film" and "Hobbit movie" alone. Conclusion is that New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson would be well advised to come to agreement in producing “The Hobbit” together. Their upfront marketing capital in form of Web buzz is just immense – Peter Jackson and “The Hobbit” would be unbeatable at the box office together!!!

The picture also tells us (without having asked) that the other hits of New Line Cinema are “Austin Powers” and of Peter Jackson “King Kong”, but they pale in comparison with LOTR and The Hobbit!

A second picture looking at the contents of the most between Web sites about the hobbit reiterates the point: "hobbit" and "jackson" are the most central and connected terms talked about mostly together!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Predicting Stock Market Indicators Through Twitter “I hope it is not as bad as I fear”

Image
We have been working on trying to predict market indicators for quite some time by analyzing Web Buzz , predicting who will win an Oscar, or how well movies do at the box office . Among other things we have correlated posts about a stock on Yahoo Finance and Motley’s Fool with the actual stock price, predicting the closing price of the stock on the next day based on what people say today on Yahoo Finance, on the Web and Blogs about a stock title. The rising popularity of twitter gives us a new great way of capturing the collective mind up to the last minute. In our current project we analyze the positive and negative mood of the masses on twitter, comparing it with broad stock market indices such as Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ. We collected the twitter feeds from one whitelisted IP for six months from March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009, ranging from 5680 to 42820 tweets per day. According to twitter this corresponds to a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volum...
Read more

My life in Alternative Realities - fatherlanders and nerds don’t go well together

Image
We are all living in different alternative realities, people with different personalities see reality from very different perspectives, potentially leading to a lot of friction and misunderstandings. “Nerds” are open to change, they believe in the progress of technology and innovation. “Fatherlanders” abhor change, they like tradition and authority, valuing the fatherland above all, and would like to reestablish the good old times. “Spiritualists” believe into supernatural forces, they are religious, meditate and hope that the forces of nature will heal their ailing. “Treehuggers” believe into sustainability and global warming, they want to save nature by restricting technical progress. I experience  this friction frequently in my daily life. As a computer and technology nerd with spiritualist and treehugger inclinations, my communication with members from other tribes sometimes does not end well.  My interactions with officers of the US Department of Homeland Security and the...
Read more

How Blind Trust in Generative AI Undermines Creative Work

Image
This summer, we experienced firsthand the damage caused by blind faith in the "superhuman" capabilities of generative AI, even among otherwise intelligent individuals. Here's what happened. We submitted a research paper to an academic conference, and after it was accepted, I paid the registration fee, booked flights, and arranged accommodations. A week later, we received an abrupt email from the organizers stating that our paper had been rejected. The reason? Their AI-based plagiarism and ChatGPT-detection tool flagged it as containing both plagiarized content and text generated by ChatGPT. This accusation was entirely unfounded. Our paper presented highly original work by our team, proposing novel AI algorithms to predict animal emotions—a concept never explored before. We detailed the development of an AI model to validate this approach, something completely unique to our research. By its very nature, it was impossible for our work to be plagiarized or generated by Chat...
Read more