Research on the Movie Reviews Regarded as Unsuccessful in Box Office Outcomes in Korea: Based on Big Data Posted on Naver Movie Portal

Purpose - Based on literature studies of movie reviews and movie ratings, this study raised two research questions on the contents of online word of mouth and the number of movie screens as mediator variables. Research question 1 wanted to figure out which topics of word groups had a positive or negative impact on movie ratings. Research question 2 tried to identify the role of the number of movie screens between movie ratings and box office outcomes. Design/methodology/approach - Through R program, this study collected about 82,000 movie reviews and movie ratings posted on Naver s movie website to examine the role of online word of mouths and movie screen counts in 10 movies that were considered commercially unsuccessful with fewer than 2 million viewers despite securing about 1,000 movie screens. To confirm research question 1, topic modeling, a text mining technique, was conducted on movie reviews. In addition, this study linked the movie ratings posted on Naver with information of KOBIS by date, to identify the research question 2. Findings - Through topic modeling, 5 topics were identified. Topics found in this study were largely organized into two groups, the content of the movie (topic 1, 2, 3) and the evaluation of the movie (topics 4, 5). When analyzing the relationship between movie reviews and movie ratings with 5 mediators identified in topic modeling to probe research question 1, the topic word groups related to topic 2, 3 and 5 appeared having a negative effect on the netizen’s movie ratings. In addition, by connecting two secondary data by date, analysis for research question 2 was implemented. The outcomes showed that the causal relationship between movie ratings and audience numbers was mediated by the number of movie screens. Research implications or Originality - The results suggested that the information presented in text format was harder to quantify than the information provided in scores, but if content information could be digitalized through text mining techniques, it could become variable and be analyzed to identify causality with other variables. The outcomes in research question 2 showed that movie ratings had a direct impact on the number of viewers, but also had indirect effects through changes in the number of movie screens. An interesting point is that the direct effect of movie ratings on the number of viewers is found in most American films released in Korea.