Say we take a film like Transformers 2. The film, like most other films, has a lot going on, in its content and the circumstances under which it was released: grand spectacle, a link to something that is established in a target audience's cultural memory, an extensive marketing campaign, the fact that its a sequel, Shia LeBeouf, its director, its screenwriter, its late-June release not opposite of other big action blockbusters, etc. Which of these elements is most responsible for the film's success? Let's throw in another element of the film: Skids and Mudflap, two robots who (quoting the NYTimes piece) "talk in jive and are portrayed as illiterate; one has a gold tooth." The depictions have been called racist by many. Are these depictions reasons why the film is more successful, or is the film successful in spite of those depictions?
The questions are essentially unanswerable, but its not because film is Art and one cannot theorize about why some people like art and others don't, or why some art is profitabe and other art is not. It is so hard to predict why films, as opposed to other art forms, are successful or not b/c there are so few comparable films made and the circumstances of release (marketing, timing) play such a significant role in their success/failure. In order to determine what aspects of a product are responsible for its success, we need to make comparisons, but there are so few comparisons to be able to make that its harder to predict what will succeed. If you wanted to find out what elements of motion picture content made a certain text successful (e.g. certain choices in pacing, plotting, certain bigoted depictions, certain actors, lighting, etc), then you would look away from film and towards online video. There are simply more comparable texts, and the circumstances under which each video is watched are so varied that the uniqueness of each viewing can be considered to be random error and cancels out. What you're left with is a more pure comparison and better insight as to how motion pictures work on audiences than one you would try to do looking at a successful box office film like Transformers 2 and making generalizations about what aspects of the film resonated with the public. And yet film and cultural theorists have been doing just this, and continue to do just this: identifying certain characteristics of a film that possesses many charateristics, noting that the film was successfull, and then making claims about a culture's preferences.
Its interesting to consider recent advances in two untraditional predictions markets, both linked to the work of Nate Silver: presidential politics and baseball. Frankly, I don't know much about Silver's prediction models, but I'd guess he just takes discrete characteristics of each event (a race for office, a baseball game), takes a data set comprised of past events, and sees which characteristics, when all other characteristics are controlled for, exert the most influence on the outcome. You take those influences, assess the observable characteristics of the upcoming game/election, and make predictions of the outcome. With presidential elections, you have very few comparable events to use, while in baseball, you have many. In the former, I would think that you would have to start incorporating patterns in opinion polls (which fluctuate systematically based on various characteristics of world events and their coverage).
The trouble with film is that there aren't the equivalent of polls. Yes, there's test screenings, but those samples are so small and they're just used for minor recuts, not learning about why certain people like certain characteristics of films under certain circumstances. There's too little comparable data to work with. Perhaps the prevalence of remakes, reboots, adaptations is an attempt by producers to use the "data" of those other properties being successful with their suite of characteristics, and making a bet based on that. Its not very systematic, but in a way, I trust it more than I trust anyone who guesses that a film resonated or failed to resonate with the public b/c it was/wasn't successful at the box office and possessed a certain characteristic. That's just guesswork on their parts.
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