Investigating the Effect of eWOM in Movie Box Office Success Through an Aspect-Based Approach

This study examines the influence of Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) on the box office revenue generation of movies in the U.S domestic market using the technique of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) and aspect identification. The analysis was conducted on the sentiment score and frequency of five movie aspects from the user reviews collected from high grossing 2014 movies. This study revealed a significant dependence on the aspect-based sentiment frequency of the movie's Story aspect. Surprisingly, the data also showed a strong dependence of movie success on the negative sentiment frequency on the Casting aspect. The findings of the study suggest that the eWOM present in online movie reviews can be used to predict the performance of a movie at the box office by monitoring the aspect's frequency of sentiment, which can be referred to as a metric of the online “buzz” of the movie.