Media and Entertainment

A new study played song and movie clips both recent and from their adolescence for subjects and asked if they had memories associated with them. Results showed people had more memories associated with older material and also appreciated media that had associated memories more. A look at the psychological processes associated with 'media-induced reminiscence' can tell us more about why people enjoy lighthearted entertainment like pop music or superhero movies, the authors argue.

'Feel-good films' are usually dismissed by film critics as being sentimental and without intellectual merit. But their popularity with audiences, who seek them out precisely because of their 'feel-good' qualities, tells a more favorable story. Now, for the first time, this popular movie genre has been examined scientifically.

A new study was able to predict the success of movies, commercials, books and restaurants by relying on the 'emotionality' of reviews instead of the star rating.

An automated computer analysis method designed by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists makes it possible to track social biases across decades of Bollywood and Hollywood movies.

Researchers, armed with artificial intelligence tools, can rate a movie's content in a matter of seconds, based on the movie script and before a single scene is shot.

How much you enjoy the new Star Wars movie will depend a lot on your expectations going in, a new study suggests. Researchers surveyed 441 people before and after they saw the last episode in the popular franchise, Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi, released in 2017. They wanted to see how audiences' expectations affected their actual enjoyment of the movie.

Country music songwriters must perform a careful dance when they work with famous singers who may be less talented at writing songs but bring the needed star power to attract fans -- and, importantly, to get the song recorded in the first place, research suggests. A study of 39 successful country-music songwriters found that they use two strategies to navigate creative collaboration with more famous artists.

More than half of the top-grossing movies in Ontario in the past 16 years featured smoking, according to researchers with the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit -- and most of these films were rated as acceptable for youth.

The Wizard of Oz, followed by Star Wars and Psycho, is identified as the most influential film of all time in a new study.

Researchers have developed a method to effectively compress the plot of a feature-length film in just a few, sometimes, silent seconds.

Parents are more willing to let their children see PG-13 movies with intense gun violence when the violence appears to be 'justified' than when it has no socially redeeming purpose, a study finds. But even when the violence in PG-13 movies appears justified, parents think it is more appropriate for teens at least 15 years old, two years older than the PG-13 rating suggests.

Our taste in movies is notably idiosyncratic, and not linked to the demographic traits that studios target, finds new study on film preferences. The work also shows that moviegoers’ ratings are not necessarily in line with those of critics.

Alcohol brand placements in popular movies of all ratings nearly doubled during the past two decades, new research shows, but particularly in child-rated movies. Researchers found the alcohol brands on the movie set are often those young people report drinking the most.

The amount of gun violence in top-grossing PG-13 movies has continued to exceed the gun violence in the biggest box-office R-rated films, an analysis shows. What increasingly differentiates the gun violence in PG-13 movies from those rated R is not just frequency but these films' 'erasure of the consequences' such as blood and suffering and the involvement of comic book-inspired heroes and antiheroes.

Two new studies have investigated product placements in two Hollywood movies. Volunteers watched the Hollywood movies as either a 2D, a 3D, or a 4D version (the 3D movie with added scent). Researchers subsequently recorded the extent to which the volunteers were able to recall and recognize the brands placed in the movies. In doing so, they distinguished between products placed in a prominent and those placed in a subtle manner.  

James Bond's nemesis in the most recent film likely failed neuroanatomy, says a real-life neurosurgeon and scientist. Blofeld didn't quite know his brain anatomy and would've probably hit Daniel Craig's vertebral artery and likely killed his character instead, says the expert.

Can watching a violent movie make you more likely to lie, cheat or steal? What about reading a violent book? While that may seem like a stretch, a new research study shows it may be the case. The study finds that exposure to human violence is strongly linked to an increase in cheating for monetary gain.

Sound and music in films do more than merely enhance our experience of a film's narrative. They can also affect the ways in which we perceive ourselves and how we act.

Don't rely on the Academy Awards next month if you are seeking to know whether the movies deemed great today will survive the test of time. According to a new study, the best predictor of a movie's significance is how often a movie is referenced by other movies. In other words, a movie's significance is decided by today's and tomorrow's film directors -- not the critics. This objective method of movie citations is best at predicting greatness, researchers say.

Researchers have examined the occurrence of science in mainstream pop music and asks whether the media of popular culture are suitable for scientific communication.

Action movies may drive box office revenues, but dramas and deeper, more serious movies earn audience acclaim and appreciation, according to a team of researchers.

Since the 1920s, scholars and politicians have blamed violence in movies and other media as a contributing factor to rising violence in society. Recently the responses to mass shootings in Aurora, CO and at Sandy Hook Elementary followed this theme as media consumption came into the equation. But can consumption of violent media really be a factor in real-world violence? A recent study found that there were no associations between media violence consumption in society and societal violence.

If the surroundings are designed to be sufficiently stimulating, even a simple computer screen is enough to generate an intense cinematic experience. After observing some 300 study subjects, researchers concluded that the angle of viewing does not play a vital role in the cinematic experience, thus disproving various hypotheses. According to the results of their study, the presence of so-called contextual visual cues plays a greater role in actually drawing viewers into a movie.

The effect of movies featuring dogs on the popularity of dog breeds can last up to 10 years and is correlated with the general success of the movies, according to new research.

Twitter provides an avenue for female sports broadcasters to break down gender barriers, yet it currently serves to express their subordinate sports media roles, researchers have concluded after conducting a study.

Teenagers interested in celebrity culture are more likely to have a well-rounded knowledge of modern life and awareness of issues relating to politics, economics and the media, a leading Media Arts academic has said. Many intelligent young people have a desire to learn about celebrities' lives, which can help them develop informed opinions on topical debates such as the role of the media and the importance of good role models, he contends.

New research suggests that purportedly entertaining films that feature global warming and climate change can affect public understanding. But films are often bound up in problematic and limiting identity politics, which commonly reiterate racial, gender and sexual stereotypes positioning as they do white men as being the decision makers and the voice of authority.

Word-of-mouth marketing is recognized as a powerful route from long-tail sales to blockbuster, whether one is talking about the latest fishy ice cream flavor or a Hollywood romantic comedy. In the age of social media and online networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, the potential for spreading the word could mean the difference between consumers seeing a product as the best thing since sliced bread or the most rotten of tomatoes.

Today women take an active part in public life. Without a doubt, they also converse with other women. In fact, they even talk to each other about other things besides men. As banal as it sounds, this is far from being the norm in Hollywood movies. The same goes for Twitter, as a new study shows.

When it comes to Oscars and some other Hollywood movie awards, who your friends are affects whether you win, according to a new study. Film awards generally fall into two categories: those, such as the Oscars, given by "peers" who are actively engaged in making movies and those given by "critics" who review movies for newspapers, magazines, or other media outlets. The research showed that awards given by peers more often go to people who are heavily embedded in the "core" of the social network. These core members have many social ties to others in the film industry.

At the most influential levels of the entertainment industry, minorities and women are represented at between one half and one twelfth the rate that would be expected given their proportion in the general population, according to a new study. The underrepresentation is especially noteworthy because the study found that diversity actually increases viewers and profits for studios and networks.

Research estimates the impact of an R rating for movie smoking, and emphasizes that an R rating for any film showing smoking could reduce smoking onset in U.S. adolescents by 18%.

What do Hollywood moguls holding their breath this week for an Oscar nomination have in common with the influence peddlers on K Street in Washington, D.C.? More than you might imagine, suggests new research by sociologists.

A researchers is looking at why some Hollywood movies are successful in the international box office.

Violent acts in James Bond films were more than twice as common in "Quantum of Solace" (2008) than in the original 1962 movie "Dr. No," researchers have found.

Top box office films last year showed more onscreen smoking than the prior year, reversing five years of steady progress in reducing tobacco imagery in movies, according to a new study.

By analyzing the soundtracks of 1940s film noir thrillers, a musicologist can track changing attitudes to women -- moving away from the classic femme fatale and love interest to the independent female sleuth and action heroine.

New research estimates, for the first time, the impact of an R rating for movie smoking. Researchers emphasize that an R rating for any film showing smoking could substantially reduce smoking onset in US adolescents -- an effect size similar to making all parents maximally authoritative in their parenting, they say.

A group of Japanese scientists have surprised themselves by being able to predict the success or failure of blockbuster movies at the box office using a set of mathematical models. The researchers used the effects of advertising and word-of-mouth communication to create a model that turned out to be successful in predicting how each movie fared once it hit the silver screen. The only data the researchers needed to put into the model were the daily advertisement costs of 25 movies that appeared in Japanese cinemas.

Two articles address the question of whether films with smoking scenes should have "adult" ratings applied to them.

Marketers have always known they must carefully choose where they place their ads, but a new study shows that even the nearby content in a publication -- its difficulty and design -- affect consumers' perception and acceptance of the ad message. They also found that the ad's relationship to the editorial material affected consumer acceptance.

Celebrities do have the ability to focus awareness on charitable and political causes, but their power to move the news machine to shape policy agendas has been oversold, according to recent research published by SAGE in the October issue of the International Journal of Press/Politics.

Today's movie industry still draws on those images to justify smoking in movies -- even as public health experts call for smoking to be eliminated from youth-rated films. Last month the National Cancer Institute concluded that on-screen smoking causes youth to start smoking.

An unusual new species of whirligig beetle from India is being named Orectochilus orbisonorum in honor of the late rock 'n' roll legend Roy Orbison and his widow Barbara.