Kurt Vonnegut, the American writer, was one of the first to graph the emotional arc of stories.
In this lecture, he laments, “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers; they are beautiful shapes.”
Andrew J. Reagan, et al, did just that in 2016 using the Project Gutenberg fiction collection and concluded there are six main emotional trajectories:
- Rags to Riches (rise)
- Tragedy/Riches to Rags (fall)
- Man in a Hole (fall-rise)
- Icarus (rise-fall)
- Cinderella (rise-fall-rise)
- Oedipus (fall-rise-fall)
Does this hold for movies too?
Marco Del Vecchio, Alexander Kharlamov, Glenn Parry, and Ganna Pogrebna harnessed big data to see. They agree, and conclude:
“One of these trajectories — Man in a Hole — tends to be generally more financially successful than other emotional arcs. Furthermore, this relative success is apparent irrespective of the movie genre and does not dependent on the movie production budget. If we assume that IMDb rating can be used as a proxy of viewer satisfaction, we can also conclude that the Man in a Hole emotional arc tends to succeed not because it generates movies which are most desired by the public (i.e., achieve the highest ratings on IMDb), but because movies with this emotional arc tend to be most unusual and spark debate. In other words, the Man in a Hole emotional arc tends to generate most “talked about” movies and not necessarily “most liked” movies and thereby achieve higher revenues than movies in other categories.”
In addition to the story curve, they also explore budget:
“Man in a Hole is the only emotional trajectory which produces statistically significant results showing that it is more financially successful than any other emotional arc.”
And genre:
“When emotional arcs are combined with different genres and produced in different budget categories any of the 6 emotional arcs may produce financially successful films. Therefore, a careful selection of the script-budget-genre combination will lead to financial success.”
My take: I find this fascinating! See the last page that graphs genres with emotional arcs with success and the second last page that graphs budgets with emotional arcs with success (green is better.) It seems to tell me success is possible with budgets of less than $1 million in these genres: war, drama, mystery, crime and film noir, and using a rise-fall emotional arc.
