Feeling like I’d burned through my standard sources for movie recommendations, I recently decided to turn to box office failures. I was seeking out an automated way to explore the world of such movies and find “overlooked” films that are actually very good, but were ignored in theaters and dismissed by critics.

Using Nathan Rabin’s popular “My Year of Flops” series on The AV Club and follow-up book as a starting point, I designed an algorithm to predict whether a box office failure is actually a film worth seeing. The algorithm examines multiple aspects of a movie’s cultural response to make its prediction – such as applying sentiment analysis to capture the tone of reviews, and understanding whether critics and audiences responded differently to a movie. The output is a list of 100+ movies released over the past decade with high likelihood of being quality, “overlooked” films.

Here’s how it works…

THE POWER OF “OVERLOOKED” FILMS.

In 1994, Forrest Gump made over $300M at the domestic box office, won six Oscars, and spawned a murderer’s row of pop culture references.

The Shawshank Redemption also came out that year. It had a confusing name, won exactly zero Oscars, and made only $16M in its initial run – an amount outdistanced by House Party 3, Kid ‘n Play’s capstone installment in their “living-situation-oriented festival” trilogy.

Yet flip on TNT on a random Saturday night, and you’re more likely to be greeted by Andy and Red than by Forrest and Jenny.

Because it flopped in theaters, people had to discover Shawshank organically on video. And not only did its reputation grow, but fans felt a sense of personal ownership and evangelism. Nearly everyone I know who’s seen the movie first watched it because of a recommendation, and fiercely loyal IMDb users have even rated it the best movie of all time.

One of the earliest Amazon.com customer reviews for The Shawshank Redemption.

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