There is a 'positive spoiler effect' in movie spoiler reviews

Some people are worried that if you talk about the development of the movie to the end, so-called 'spoilers,' no one will bother to pay to see it. A paper by researchers at the University of Western and the University of Houston investigating whether this is true has been published in the Journal of Marketing.

Do Spoilers Really Spoil? Using Topic Modeling to Measure the Effect of Spoiler Reviews on Box Office Revenue --Jun Hyun (Joseph) Ryoo, Xin (Shane) Wang, Shijie Lu, 2020

Press Release from the Journal of Marketing: Do Spoilers Harm Movie Box-Office Revenue?
https://www.ama.org/2020/09/23/press-release-from-the-journal-of-marketing-do-spoilers-harm-movie-box-office-revenue/

The research team surveyed movies released in the United States from January 2013 to December 2017, and reviews were posted on the movie review platform IMDb . We devised a method to measure how much the story was spoiled in the review, and measured it with a correlation topic model.

The survey found that there was a positive and significant relationship between the degree of spoilers and box office revenue. This indicates that 'movies where spoiler reviews supplement the unknown parts of the story tended to have higher box office revenues.'

Jun Hyun Roo, a member of the research team, said, 'Behind the positive spoiler effect is'reducing uncertainty',' said fans who are potentially interested in watching the movie. When I wasn't sure, I explained that a spoiler review made up for the uncertainties.

The study also found that these 'positive spoiler effects' had a greater impact on movies with moderate ratings and pros and cons than on extremely high-rated and low-rated films.

We also found that less advertising development makes it easier to obtain a 'positive spoiler effect' because less information can be obtained in advance.

In addition to this, research team Xin Wang said that the 'positive spoiler effect' has an effect because the uncertainty gradually decreases as time passes after the movie is released (the part that you do not understand is told and decreased). It explains that it will decrease.

From these results, the research team concludes that the reviews that mention the story help to supplement the obscure parts of the movie's story, and as a result, go to the cinema.