Do Spoilers Really Spoil? Using Topic Modeling to Measure the Effect of Spoiler Reviews on Box Office Revenue
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A sizable portion of online movie reviews contain spoilers, defined as information that prematurely resolves plot uncertainty. In this research, the authors study the consequences of spoiler reviews using data on box office revenue and online word of mouth for movies released in the United States. To capture the degree of information in spoiler review text that reduces plot uncertainty, the authors propose a spoiler intensity metric and measure it using a correlated topic model. Using a dynamic panel model with movie fixed effects and instrumental variables, the authors find a significant and positive relationship between spoiler intensity and box office revenue with an elasticity of .06. The positive effect of spoiler intensity is greater for movies with a limited release, smaller advertising spending, and moderate user ratings, and is stronger in the earlier days after the movie’s release. Using an event study and online experiments, the authors provide further evidence that spoiler reviews can help consumers reduce their uncertainty about the quality of movies, consequently encouraging theater visits. Thus, movie studios may benefit from consumers’ access to plot-intense reviews and should actively monitor the content of spoiler reviews to better forecast box office performance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it