Hollywood Investments: Why Lindsay Lohan Is So Unbankable

So Lindsay would be expensive to insure, no doubt, but that's not the reason she's unbankable. The problem is that she has become unlikeable. Hollywood is like a high school popularity contest where popularity translates into dollars. The more America likes you, the better your movie will do at the box office.

Likability may seem difficult to quantify, but it's actually pretty simple. When a movie studio wants to measure a celebrity's likability, they turn to a company called Marketing Evaluations and their decades-old Q score rating, a quotient of how positively or negatively America feels about a given star.

Let's start with freckly-faced 'Mean Girls' Lohan. In 2004, Lindsay was familiar to only 20% of the American public. Her positive Q was a 19 and her negative was a 20. She had so far only been in kids and teen movies, and teen stars tend to have a lower familiarity with general audiences. For example, your dad probably doesn't know who Miley Cyrus is, but that doesn't mean she doesn't rock. But Lindsay's positive and negative Q scores in 2004 were by no means polarizing. At this point, she was still considered a good investment, if one that needed some extra attention in order to best position her brand.

By 2005, when her excessive partying and un-Disney-like behavior began to be chronicled in entertainment magazines, her name recognition skyrocketed to 53% and with it a negative Q of 33, with a positive of only 13. With each bad decision Lindsay made, the gap between her positive and negative Q scores only widened. Lindsay was systematically proving that not all press is good press and that America had little tolerance for squandered talent.

By 2006, her familiarity was 72%, well above average. Her positive Q was a 13; her negative, 37.

After her arrests and subsequent rehabilitations, Lohan's Q again fell in 2007. With 74% familiarity, she had a positive rating of 11 and a negative rating of 43. Her wishy-washy relationship with Samantha Ronson (as well as her flip-slop stance on going gay), coupled with her nude photo shoot in New York magazine (for which she was not compensated and was uniformly derided), increased her familiarity to 80% in 2008. Her positive rating remained an 11, while her negative rating shot up to a 52.

This year, 84% of Americans polled were familiar with Lindsay. Her positive rating has reached a low of 9, and her negative rating hovers at 52. Five times more people dislike Lindsay than are rooting for her.

You could argue that getting those nine Lindsay Lohan fans, out of every 100 possible moviegoers, is still better than getting zero people into a theater. The problem with Lindsay is how negatively so many people feel about her. For every nine people who will see that movie, 52 out of 100 people will be so turned off by her presence that they may choose not to see it.

The people have spoken and what they are saying is that Lindsay is a bad investment.

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