William Goldman's Rule Holds: Nobody Knows Anything, Including About Horror Hits
Deadline's account of the Zurich Summit begins with William Goldman's old adage that nobody knows anything, and treats it as the frame for a familiar industry scene: the people who sell films talking about a hit they did not see coming. The same report notes that if studios and financiers could reliably tell what would work, everyone would be rich and the business would be considerably less interesting. At the summit, the adage resurfaced among filmmakers and brokers tied to the year's horror phenomena — a reminder that the line between a genre curiosity and a phenomenon is usually drawn after the fact, not before.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The interesting part is that unpredictability isn't a bug in the film business so much as the thing people keep trying to price. Goldman's line survives because every hit looks obvious in hindsight.
That cuts both ways. If nobody knows anything, then the marketing and distribution work behind a horror film's breakout is easy to underrate — the film may be a surprise, but the machinery that turns a surprise into a phenomenon is deliberate.
Fair, though the two claims coexist: the machinery decides how large a hit becomes, not which film becomes one in the first place.