"Nobody Knows Anything" Proven?

Everyone knows the famous opinion of screenwriter William Goldman that, in Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything." It's often quoted to show the utter unpredictibility of the movie business, and to tear down any self-styled expert who claims to have an insight into delivering films that the public wants to see. In the LA Times West magazine last Sunday, Caltech professor and former screenwriter Leonard Mlodinow uses the mathematics of randomness to go a step farther and show that there's "no way studio executives or producers, despite all their swagger, can have a better track record at choosing projects than an ape throwing darts at a dartboard..." ...except that I don't buy it, at least when it comes to animated features. Here's his basic premise: "In science, data are not accepted as meaningful if they're the result of chance alone. People in the film industry are diligent about gathering data, but are far less skilled at understanding what the numbers mean. The fact is, financial success or failure in Hollywood is determined less by anyone's skill to pick hits, or lack thereof, than by the random nature of the universe. The typical patterns of randomness—apparent hot or cold streaks, or the bunching of data into clusters—are routinely misinterpreted and, worse, acted upon as if a new trend had been discovered or a new epiphany achieved. And so, despite a growing body of evidence that box-office revenue follows the laws of chaotic systems, meaning that it is inherently unpredictable, the superstructure of Hollywood's culture—that pervasive worship of who's hot and the shunning of who's not—continues to rest on a foundation of misconception and mirage." He goes on to give examples of producers who seemed to have hot streaks of sustained success, but then shows they all had "regressions to the mean," meaning in the long run their success was no more likely than that gorilla choosing films by randomly tossing darts. You see, a given producer only appears to be consistently having success because we misunderstand, and fail to appreciate, that it's really a random process. And in live action, the analysis is pretty convincing. But what of animation? If this is true in our industry, then in the long run we'll be able to recognize that John Lasseter will have the same success rate as Don Bluth or Ralph Bakshi. That it was a random process that DreamWorks and Katzenberg started having huge success when they gave up on serious-minded animated epics, and started doing raucous comedies. That Doogle or Hoodwinked had the same random likelihood of being smashes as Ice Age 2 or Cars or Over the Hedge. And that, of the films coming later this year, Open Season (my pick for the most successful animated film of the second half of 2006) is no more likely than Everyone's Hero or Ant Bully or Happy Feet or The Barnyard to win over audiences. Another quote from a mathematical expert in the article: "But a careful study reveals that no strategy the studios devise is going to give them any kind of advantage at all. So any studio executive getting paid more than the salary of a comparable executive at your local dairy is getting paid too much." Well, I would posit that after 100 years of animation, we do have some idea about what kinds of characters and films are more likely to appeal to audiences. And that films made to the highest standards, that ooze quality and loving craftsmanship, are more likely to succeed. And that Iger didn't waste billions buying the expertise of Lasseter and his team. Time will tell, but when it comes to animation, I'm not betting on the gorilla.