How To Score On Wall Street

Firms are not films. Yet their lifecycle shares similarities. Like a start-up, a movie idea is pitched to studios that buy it, invest in its development, and ultimately release it to the public, as in an IPO.

In the movie industry, box-office flops have sadly become increasingly frequent. These misfires are also evident among companies in the financial markets: the Renaissance Global IPO index, which simulates a portfolio of newly public companies, has persistently delivered disappointing returns.

How to score in Hollywood is arguably immediately relevant to how to score on Wall Street. In his book ‘How to Score in Hollywood’ (2025), Kevin Goetz, a movie strategist, provides recipes for success.

Goetz’s core idea is that what separates ‘hits’ from ‘bombs’ is not only quality, but also the discipline to align a product with market preferences through sophisticated data-driven testing and decision-making.

His drivers of success start with a ‘big idea’ that triggers an emotional response and confers on the movie a unique identity. This idea typically relies on something familiar told in a different way (e.g., ‘Romeo + Juliet’) or on a novel idea that resonates with cultural trends (e.g., ‘The Purge’ or ‘Get Out’).

A clash of genres often proves fatal (e.g., ‘Haunted Mansion’). As Goetz puts it, the challenge with a ‘feathery fish’ is that it can neither fly nor swim.

To size a movie budget, studios must estimate the expected revenues from the public launch. Movie producers look for ‘comparables’ to assess a big idea’s revenue potential (e.g., ‘The Maze Runner’ vs. ‘The Hunger Games’). The identification of ‘comps’ is often the subject of heated debates, considering the story, genre, cast, and director, among other variables.

Then comes audience targeting, with studios facing a binary choice: either a movie is made for everybody (e.g., ‘Avatar’), or for somebody (e.g., ‘The Hangover’). It is a matter of market segmentation.

Finally, test screenings (using advanced tools to measure an audience’s engagement and emotions) reveal confusion, boredom, misaligned expectations, and satisfaction with the ending, a critical element. In that respect, Goetz notes that genre betrayal – when a film sells itself as one thing but delivers another – is a capital offense.

The objective of market testing is to achieve perfect alignment among idea, genre, script, capital, audience targeting, and marketing. With the data available to streaming platforms, this process is increasingly supported by powerful analytics.

Like movies, firms and their IPOs live or die on a compelling strategic idea, genre purity (sector affiliation, comps), thematic clarity (equity story), audience (investor) targeting, feedback loops (pilot fishing), financial discipline (budgeting, pricing), and timing (readiness, competition with other issuers).

In both industries, success does not hinge on a single variable, but on the coherence across all of them – an objective complex to achieve. Indeed, if executing an IPO relied on a commoditized process, there would not be so many flops.

Art without commerce is fragile. So is commerce without craft.