Pixar's Theoretical Alpha

My latest must-read blog is The Box Office Junkie, which is dedicated to discussing Hollywood box office numbers. All that talk about fat tails, randomness, kurtosis, power-laws, etc. apply nicely to box office receipts. The phrase "Nobody knows anything" is all about box office data.

Over the past year or so, there have been several articles explaining how the "conventional wisdom" that some stars guarantee box office success isn't so accurate. But that's not really a new observation at all. It's one of the key points made in this book, for example.

A recent post at The Box Office Junkie mentioned this about Pixar (PIXR):

The masterful storytellers over at Pixar recently released a trailer for their latest film, Wall-E! In my book, a new Pixar movie is always an occasion worthy of excitement, for the studio has never released a film that wasn't exceptionally entertaining (Cars haters, back off...). Without exception, every Pixar film has been lauded by critics and gone on to great box office receipts, and I see no reason why Wall-E won't continue that trend. It opens on June 27th.

If Pixar were a fund manger, it would seem to have some serious Alpha. But then again, it's only made 8 feature films, according to this table on Wikipedia. In the film business, is that enough? I really have no idea, though I think it's probably an interesting question.

Not only does its strategy seem to work, but it seems to be hard to replicate. Certainly others have tried: A Shark Tale comes to mind. I'd guess that creating a successful film development crew is just as tricky as creating a film. Perhaps Pixar shouldn't be compared to Bill Miller, but to say, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.