Review of: "An integrative model of new product evaluation: A systematic investigation of perceived novelty and product evaluation in the movie industry"
James E. Cutting · 2022
Potential competing interests: The author(s) declared that no potential competing interests exist.Luan and Kim (2022) present a compelling analysis of the curvilinear relationship between objective and subjective measures of a movie's novelty.Their proxy for an objective measure was coarse, but straightforward and effective.It was determined by the genre combination of a given movie compared against the frequency of that combination in the past.That is, the more frequently an "action, adventure, comedy" movie appeared in the past, for example, the less novel a new "action, adventure, comedy" movie would be scored.Their proxy for a subjective measure was a modified content analysis of reviews of each movie, scored for the proportion of words in the review that seemed to reflect novelty-"fresh," "original," "different," etc.Strikingly, Luan and Kim found that a moderate amount of objective novelty garnered the highest measure of subjective novelty.That is, not only would a new "comedy, romance" (a romcom) likely not be regarded as novel, but a highly unusual genre combination, like "family, horror, romance" would not be regarded as novel either.This seems odd, but of course such a movie would likely never be made and, if it were, it would not likely do well at the box office.Moreover, Luan and Kim found a subtle interaction in their data as well.Movies by more-celebrated directors had peak subjective novelty scores that were objectively less novel than those of less-celebrated directors.This means that celebrated filmmakers could make movies that were objectively more novel but weren't perceived as being more novel.Thus, Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan could make almost any kind of movie and it would be regarded as less novel than if it were an indie made by an unheralded filmmaker.One might have qualms with Luan and Kim's assessment of objective novelty.Spielberg, for example, made The Color Purple (1985), a "drama" (the most common genre category of all time, see Cutting, 2022) that was regarded as a "turning point in his career, as it was a departure from the summer blockbusters for which he had become known" (Wikipedia).It would score low on Luan and Kim's objective novelty.But it was highly novel on at least two other grounds: the genre flip from Spielberg's usual forte, and its dealing with rape and incest in the US Black south.Nonetheless, anecdotes about single movies do not carry the weight of data, and I believe Luan and Kim's data.However, let me recast what they have found in a somewhat different terms.