Figure 4

Application of the model to real data. Left plot: Attendance to the movie The Dark Knight (2008). The initial attendance is q(0) = $238,615,211/$7.18, where $7.18 is the average ticket price across the U.S. in 2008, evidencing an exponential decay nature of q(t) in this system. Right panel: Negative feedback avalanche examples. Actual (dots) and calculated (squares and thick line) number of theaters vs. time for four different movies. The corresponding insets illustrate the time evolution of the avalanche magnitudes (or activity) ΔN. The parameters used are fixed for all movies (μ = 400, σ = 0.45 μ), while the average ticket prices employed are $5.66, $6.88 and $7.18 for the years 2001, 2006 and 2007 respectively. T _c is the time in weeks since the maximum attendance was registered, which does not necessarily coincide with the opening week. All data was obtained from www.boxofficemojo.com. See ref.¹³ for details.