As Hollywood relies heavily on global markets, it is particularly important for studios to understand how their decisions, including on casts, may affect their movies’ box-office in foreign markets. Anecdotal evidence shows that casting actors with similar facial features may be problematic in foreign markets, often disorienting international audiences.

Forecasting of box office performance after a film release is very important, from the viewpoint of increase profitability by reducing the production cost and the marketing cost. Analysis of psychological factors such as word-of-mouth and expert assessment is essential, but hard to perform due to the difficulties of data collection. Information technology such as web crawling and text mining can help to overcome this situation. For effective text mining, categorization of objects is required. In this perspective, the objective of this study is to provide a framework for classifying films according to their characteristics. Data including psychological factors are collected from Web sites using the web crawling. A clustering analysis is conducted to classify films and a series of one-way ANOVA analysis are conducted to statistically verify the differences of characteristics among groups. The result of the cluster analysis based on the review and revenues shows that the films can be categorized into four distinct groups and the differences of characteristics are statistically significant. The first group is high sales of the box office and the number of clicks on reviews is higher than other groups. The characteristic of the second group is similar with the 1st group, while the length of review is longer and the box office sales are not good. The third group's audiences prefer to documentaries and animations and the number of comments and interests are significantly lower than other groups. The last group prefer to criminal, thriller and suspense genre. Correspondence analysis is also conducted to match the groups and intrinsic characteristics of films such as genre, movie rating and nation.