I know, I know, I’ve talked a lot about these faux historical analyses of Zombie media popularity over time a lot lately. First with i09, then with Flowtv, now with Wired, right?

Believe it or not, Wired’s is one of the weakest, since they don’t show, or even explain, their work in any meaningful way.

Basically, Wired decided to test an idea that has been floating around about the popularity of Zombies:

But is there more to this trend than meets the gouged-out eye? Horror maestro Stephen King once theorized that zombie movies reflect mindless consumerism, making them more popular in boom economic times. Meanwhile, vampire flicks tend to rise when the markets go down like the sun. (More recently, financial columnist Bruce Watson put some meat on that idea, suggesting the US market is not bear versus bull, it’s zombie versus vamp.)

Wired did its own data analysis and that theory didn’t hold water—or blood. Zombie franchises continued to spike even when the Dow plummeted in 2008, and they’ve kept going. This can mean only one thing: a zombie bubble. Better TiVo these new shows before the zombie crash.

(io9 tested a similar concept and came to more or less the opposite conclusion, for what it’s worth)

Here, we’re not even told where this Zombie movie/tv list comes from, so we can’t check it for ourselves. But the biggest flaw that stands out for me is their metric for economic performance. The theory is that economic performance influences movie popularity. Ok, how would that work, to play devil’s advocate?

Well, movie studios make films they think will sell, so they’re at least attempting to cater to audience tastes. Thus the economic figures that matter are the ones that would hypothetically influence the collective pop culture consciousness. Wired chooses to measure this with the Dow Industrial Average, which is a figure that’s easy to chart over time. It’s also a strange one to use as a proxy here. The vast majority of Americans do not make much of their income off the stock market, and most jobs are generated by small or medium businesses, not the large concerns that are listed on the exchange. Plus the stock market has a tendency to surge or bust based on its own internal foibles or insider trickery (high frequency trading is a big problem at the moment).

At best, what the Dow tells you isn’t the state of the economy as most Americans, ie, most filmgoers perceive it – it’s how large institutional investors, mutual funds, hedge funds and the like PERCEIVE the economy performing, as it pertains to large, publicly traded companies.

In other words, it doesn’t tell you anything about how the economy might be influencing the bulk of moviegoers.

For example, over the last year the Dow average has gone up about a thousand points, while large corporations posted all time record breaking profits. However, economic life for the average American has sucked, with unemployment hovering just below 10%.

Thus, under Wired’s theory, we’re in a ‘boom’ and should expect Zombies everywhere in entertainment, even though that ‘boom’ is limited to a tiny portion of the movie-going population. Rich people and financial sector workers go to the movies, sure, but it’s not like movie theatres apply a progressive pricing scheme, so a rich butt in your seats is worth about the same as a blue collar one.

At any rate, Wired was unable to find a correlation between their list of Zombies in TV/the movies and their chart of stock market performance, so they jokingly conclude that this must mean, rather than their theory being wrong, that Zombie films are in a ‘bubble’ and destined to crash and decrease in numbers. But hey, they got a pretty graph out of it, so that’s something.

Head. Desk. etc.

Tags: Journamalism, Mainstream Media, Movies, Television

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.