, for example, received positive pre-release reviews but generated dismal opening box office results. On a seemingly unrelated research topic, Anderson et al. demonstrated the existence of certain customers in the retail industry, called harbingers of failure, whose early adoption of a new product is a strong predictor that the product will fail in the market.
To address this question, we use pre-release movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes in combination with other movie-related data collected from different data sources. Our empirical findings document the existence of harbingers of failure in the motion picture industry. We identify these harbingers and show that they systematically misclassify flop movies as successful.
To further gain insights into the personality traits of harbinger film critics, we use text analytics to analyze their writing style and compare it with that of non-harbinger critics. We find that harbinger critics employ a formal and analytical style of writing and have a lower rate of self-reference pronouns compared to non-harbingers.
To sum up, the main contributions of this work are as follows. First, we document the harbinger effect in the motion picture industry. This documentation sheds new light on the influencer-predictor hypothesis . We find that, in a pre-release setting, a distinction should be made among film critics. In particular, there exist harbinger critics who do not influence the outcome of a movie but rather mispredict it.