Twitter Sentiment Analysis Part II: Thor Ragnarok and Justice League

Hello Dear Reader!  It's been a few months since last we updated the blog.  This week Josh and I are presenting at Visual Studio Live 360 in Orlando.  This week we presented sessions on Polybase, Logic Apps, Power BI, Azure SQL DW, and R.  This was a lot of fun and we prepared some content that we wanted to share with you.

Previously we discussed the fun I had capturing Twitter sentiment for Spider-man: Homecoming.  We even blogged a step by step process for how to re-create this experiment, see How to Measure Twitter Sentiment with Azure Logic Apps, SQL Database, and Power BI.  The movie has progressed and the next movie in the Marvel line has arrived, Thor: Ragnarok.  We saw the movie opening night and before we went we asked ourselves a question.  What would the social media sentiment be for Thor and how would it compare to Spider-man?  Would sentiment indicate a trend for opening weekend gross, the amount of money the movie made on it's opening weekend?

So we re-created our experiment.  Let's look at the results below:

Thor had a very successful opening weekend.  Looking at the matchup between the two movies reveals an interesting trend.

Thor beat Spider-man in sentiment analysis by 7.61%.  Thor also beat Spider-man in opening with an opening day Domestic gross of $122.74 million, winning by $5.17 million.  If we measure this by sentiment that would mean that for every extra point of positive sentiment Thor gained an additional $750,000.

In the session we reviewed how we stored, and scored the data.  As an experiment with the class we then sought to develop a hypothesis: Could we measure the Twitter sentiment of a movie before it opens that is in the same type of demographic/genera and use that to estimate the Domestic gross for the box office?

Well the long awaited Justice League movie comes out today, and we took this opportunity to use Logic Apps to stream data into our database.  We did this for the duration of Monday.  The Justice League sentiment, for that specific window, was 56.9% positive.  Not as much as Thor.  If we use Spider-man as a baseline and estimate $750,000 * 2(the percentage difference) then that means Justice League would have an opening weekend of $118.5 million dollars.

This also raises the question, is the sentiment before a movie equal to the sentiment of the opening weekend?  We didn't track that with Thor or Spider-man.

This was some of the fun that we had in our pre-con to show how you can utilize modern data sources like social media data to try to spot and anticipate trends.  Alright Dear Reader, now go see the movie and we'll find out how close we are!  As always Thank you for reading!

Thanks,

Brad