Matthew Prince Quotations

If you only have one or two producers on a film, you're statistically likely to have a stinker. That's the opposite of the idea that too many cooks spoil the brew.

The argument that this law is somehow infringing on the free speech rights of legitimate e-mail marketers is absurd. This is a reasonable effort to protect minors from materials society has always deemed harmful to kids. The senders are not barred from sending their e-mails to adults -- just those addresses registered as accessible to children.

We're going to do this again this year. We feel at least an early sense of being on to something.

It?s clear that at the heart of the Utah lawsuit is an unwillingness on the part of the adult entertainment industry to take reasonable measures to keep pornographic e-mails from reaching children. We feel confident the court will agree.

We took all these data points and fed them into a database. Then we looked at how successful the films were, based on a variety of indicators, including the number of awards it received, how much money it made at the box office and how many people had voted for a particular film on the Internet Movie Database .

While the predictions are all in fun, there is extremely sophisticated math behind them. Of course, we wouldn't advise any studio execs to make decisions based only on our predictions. If a studio does buy one of the films we've predicted to be a hit, our engineers have told me they'd be happy to attend any acquisition parties to provide the irrefutable statistical data to backup the studio's decision.

For a lot of these people, it's not good business to be sending out this material to people who don't want to receive it. For legitimate companies out there, they want to keep this material out of the hands of young people. This provides a mechanism whereby they can do that.

One study found that 80 percent of minors using e-mail regularly receive inappropriate e-mails. Another survey found that between 20 and 30 percent of visitors to pornographic websites are under the age of 18.

One of the porn industry?s major marketing tools for making that enormous profit is e-mail. And many of the e-mails they send are hitting the in-boxes of children and teens.

While you might not expect it, predicting whether a movie is good or bad is a lot like determining whether an email message is spam or not.