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This article summarises standard film financing practices for the production and distribution of new content over the past 30 years using a mixed-methods approach. It takes the U.S. movie industry as a case in point to study how excess risk and uncertainty in the financing of new projects are processed and managed by private-sector, entities as well as what market-based solutions have been developed to prevent market failure. The research has wide-ranging implications for other creative industries and their use of intangible assets in creative content finance. In particular, it discusses the prominent role of intellectual property rights in financial transactions in the U.S. audiovisual sector and the ability of the industry to leverage funds through the strategic use of its IP assets. The research findings are based on a series of semi-structured interviews, commissioned expert memoranda, and a dedicated panel of selected industry experts. In addition, using novel data from Uniform Commercial Code filings and official IP registers, we conduct exploratory analysis and provide descriptive evidence on the use of credit and intangible collateral as well as the industry diffusion of such practices. In light of the digital transformation of the industry, this research also documents industry trends and recent changes in U.S. film financing and provides an alternative explanation for the surge in new titles. Finally, we outline generic policy options for improving the financing environment for new films in the United States. The results could help to inform the larger debate on IP-backed finance and the strategic use of intangible assets in content industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of X‐reality (XR) technologies is reshaping the business landscape and redefining the film production process and the role of the audience in films. This study presents a bibliometric and content analysis of 131 academic articles to explore the development and research trends of XR in the film industry. We identify five core themes within the topic: (1) technical considerations, (2) narrative considerations, (3) presence, (4) audience responses and (5) ethical considerations. Based on the identified themes, we provide insights into the intellectual structure of this developing and interdisciplinary topic and propose the framework called the XR Film Innovation Circle (XR‐FIC). The study concludes by identifying the current research gaps and suggesting future directions, further emphasizing the rationales behind the suggested directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the global dominance of American movies, they play a significant role in presenting U.S. ideology and culture to the world, thus raising concern of undermining domestic culture. This paper investigates whether trade shapes culture by studying the impact of imported American movies on Chinese cultural values measured by Hofstede Index. The results show that demand for American movies has a positive and statistically significant effect on individualism, power distance, long-term orientation and indulgence. While many studies show evidence that cultural similarity stimulates trade, there is almost no empirical evidence on how international trade affects culture. This study contributes to the literatures related to the relationship between culture and trade by filling this void. The findings of this study also have strong policy implications by bringing empirical evidence to the debate on free trade of cultural products.

Firms often engage in manipulating online reviews as a promotional activity to influence consumers' evaluation on their products. With the prevalence of the promotional activities, consumers may notice and discount the reviews generated by the promotional activities. Discounting the firm-generating reviews may cause systematic measurement errors in the valence variable and lead to a negative bias when estimating the effect of consumers' organic reviews on demand. To correct the bias, this study proposes including product-specific bias-correction terms representing the proportion of extreme reviews in analysis. For illustration, the proposed method is applied to a demand model for data of movies released in South Korea. The results confirm a negative bias in the estimate of the valence sensitivity of demand. The negative bias potentially leads to an underestimation of the magnitude of the contagion effect through social interactions, a key component of evaluating the value of a satisfied consumer.

Online consumer reviews have been shown to have a significant impact on the market performance of products. Yet little is known about the role of competing products' online reviews in a dynamic competitive environment. Using field data, we investigate the impacts of online reviews of contemporaneous competing movies on the box office and attendance of a focal movie. The empirical results suggest that the competitor's review rating, which displayed on the same ticketing page with a focal movie, has a negative impact on the economic performance of the focal movie. Interestingly, the competitor's review volume has a negative impact only if its review rating is high. We further examine the heterogeneous effect in focal movies (sequels vs. non-sequels), and find the impacts of competitors' reviews are stronger for non-sequels. Our research can help movie stakeholders optimize their market entry strategies, and provides theoretical implications for the research on online reviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new product diffusion is based on the innovation diffusion theory assuming a new product is a type of innovation. New product diffusion patterns can inform various market characteristics. Thus, managers would benefit from studying the history of patterns to forecast how consumers react when a new product is introduced. This study focuses on capturing chronological changes in new product diffusion pattern for the case of Korean movie box office data, and applying the Bass model. We found that the level of innovation effect increases gradually for 15 years, which suggests that moviegoers have become more individualistic in recent years. However, the level of imitation effect increases only for domestic movies, which might be caused by the uncertainty avoidance tendency due to the lack of sequels or franchise products of domestic movies. This study enhances our understanding of historical changes of product diffusion patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-release forecasting of the opening box office revenue allows a studio to prepare a more effective marketing campaign and budget allocation. The purpose of this study is to forecast the opening box office revenue using attitudinal tracking measures. The proposed model aims to establish a relationship between the opening box office and the tracking data of the hierarchy-of-effects (HOE) constructs, which managers can use as the target of marketing planning. To test the causal relationships between the HOE constructs and opening box office revenue, we estimate a serial mediation model that incorporates direct and indirect effects of advertising to the HOE constructs with the covariates including marketing efforts, movie characteristics, and viewer demographics. Based on the posterior predictive distributions of the model parameters, we obtain the forecasts of opening box office revenue as new data become available. The validation results show highly encouraging predictive accuracy, indicating the benefit of utilizing attitudinal tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has resulted in an environment in which foreign markets constitute a large portion of new product sales. This is particularly the case in the movie industry. The movie industry is also pressured to increase the representation of ethnic minorities, especially in casting choices. We investigate how Black (1) male and (2) female actors affect the country-level international box-office of 788 US movies released in 2012–2019. The results show that Black male (female) actors increase (decrease) a movie's box-office in a given country. Extending developments in the literature on intergroup contact, we examine how these effects are moderated by (a) actors' star power, (b) the number of releases prior to release in the country, (c) the time-lag between worldwide release and release in the country, and (d) whether the country is emerging (vs. developed). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reward‐based crowdfunding (CF) has emerged as a method to solicit funds for innovative projects. Yet, little is still known about the ability of reward‐based CF to act as a signal in the eyes of future consumers, and thus boost the future market performance of new products that innovators intend to commercialize using the campaign funds. In addition, scant research has clarified the boundary conditions that can magnify or weaken the efficacy of this CF signal. Given the relevance of reward‐based CF for supporting innovation, understanding when the CF campaign performance works as an effective signal is of great interest, especially in business settings characterized by high product quality uncertainty. By using the movie industry as a setting, we contribute to fill this gap. Specifically, we argue that the positive effect of the reward‐based CF performance is moderated by two important factors influencing consumers' purchase decisions: the degree of product innovativeness and the expert judgment about the product. Elaborating on the effects of product innovativeness, we posit that this product feature should moderate the positive relationship between CF and subsequent market performances in an inverted U‐shaped fashion. Favorable expert recommendations, on the other hand, should weaken the efficacy of the CF performance as a signal. Results from a sample of 1059 new movies (of which 152 released in theaters) confirm these predictions and offer several remarkable implications for innovators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the decentralized adoption of a technology standard when network effects are present. If the new standard is incompatible with the current installed base, adoption may be inefficiently delayed. I quantify the magnitude of "excess inertia" in the switch of the movie distribution and exhibition industries from 35 mm film to digital. I specify and estimate a dynamic game of digital hardware adoption by theatres and digital movies supply by distributors. Counterfactual simulations establish that excess inertia reduces surplus by |$16\%$| relative to the first-best adoption path; network externalities explain |$41\%$| of the surplus loss. Targeted adoption subsidies or a mandate on digital distribution help bridge this welfare gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Prior research has studied whether digitization shifts demand away from mass‐appeal blockbusters toward a "long tail" of existing products. We extend this work by studying whether digitization influences the products created. Using unique data on movies, we examine whether the reduced costs of production and new digital distribution channels spur producers to create products aimed at smaller audiences. We employ a flexible, transparent, and largely graphical empirical approach to document changes unfolding with digitization. We find growth in both intended blockbuster and long tail products, but also, the rise of a "middle tail," movies distributed via digital channels, with budgets suggesting commercial intent but well below the averages for theatrical distribution. The new middle tail is largely due to newcomers rather than major incumbents. Managerial Summary: Digitization has reduced the costs to create movies, while also enabling new distribution channels that avoid the high costs of theatrical distribution. With lower costs, movies no longer need to be "blockbusters" at the box office to be financially successful. In this article, we study whether digitization has spurred an increase in lower‐budget movies that are not aimed for release in theaters. We find that digitization has unleashed a large number of very low budget movies that attract little commercial attention (i.e., the "long tail"). However, we also find an increase in a new category of movies with budgets between $100,000 and $10 million, aimed at smaller audiences via new digital distribution channels. We show growth in this "middle tail" following digitization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of running time, the economic literature focusing on the determinants of box-office revenues has almost neglected its role as a strategic variable. This note fills in this lack of literature by focusing on the role of running time on box-office revenues. To this aim, using an original dataset composed of worldwide top 20 titles from 2010 to 2019, we perform a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), in which scale efficiency is defined as the capability to plan running time in order to maximize box-office revenues. Results show that running time is a crucial strategic variable to design revenue performance, whose role significantly differs across genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of expert reviews on consumer choice, focusing on the movie industry. Specifically, we estimate the impact of a popular movie review aggregator – Rotten Tomatoes (RT) – on box office revenue, using a sample of 1,239 movies widely-released in the U.S. between 1999 and 2019. RT's rating system allows us to use regression discontinuity, thus avoiding problems associated with omitted unobservable characteristics of movies (such as quality and commercial appeal). We do not find evidence that RT ratings affect box office performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates thhe effect of international co-production on trade. Co-production, which allows a foreign producer to partner with domestic firms, has emerged as a way of promoting trade. Using the data on the Chinese movies, we find that international co production has a positive effect on both the extensive and intensive margins. We also show that the co-production effect is mainly explained by improvement in quality. Our research investigates international co production, a less explored topic in the literatures of international economics, which mainly focus on export and FDI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity is the driving force of the global economy. Competitors will arguably outcompete companies that cannot accelerate creativity in terms of technology and innovation. Highly reliant on creativity, the movie industry exhibits tensions and dilemmatic situations from time to time. On the one hand, creativity is needed to produce high-quality cultural products. On the other hand, commercial success and market acceptance are crucial for survivability. This research explores the Indonesian movie industry in terms of creativity and commerciality and its relationship with the creativity paradox that is relatively understudied before. The research was conducted in 2015-2017 using the grounded method. We conducted several interviews with moviemakers and audiences and organized focused group discussions with experts (film-culture critics). The results show that filmmakers need to recognize this paradoxical situation and manage their creativity better. Besides cinematography and story-telling skills, a better understanding of consumer behavior, marketing strategies, innovation, and financing strategies are important factors in managing creativity in the movie industry.

In show business, awards are conferred to persons and films to provide incentives to performers’ future career development through periodic film festivals and events. In this work, we focused on exploring the growth and dynamics of the film award system, the structure of the award network, and the relationships between historical performance, collaborations, and future career success of performers in the movie industry. We collected data from IMDb, which covers more than 3.5K movie events for 520K individuals with their award-winning and career records for over 90 years. By using network analysis and regression models, we find several novel results. At first, we found the exponential proliferation of awards across all genres of films and all professions of individuals and the uneven distribution of the number of awards in careers across time. More than 30% of the performers have won multiple awards. Second, we built an award network to reveal the interlocks between awards based on multiple award-winning phenomena. We found that for prestigious awards, 47% of the linkages were over-representative than the expectations from the null model. Furthermore, the performers’ collaboration network was highly clustered, exhibiting a high propensity of linkages between awarded performers. Lastly, our regression models revealed that multiple factors were related to performers’ early career success and award winning. Specifically, we showed that along with the performers’ historical achievements, their collaborators serve an important role in award winning after being nominated, with the scope and depth of the impact differing in the awards’ prestige. This work has strong implications for the harmonious dynamics of the movie industry and the career development of performers.

The people of democratic India were given only four hours' notice before lockdown measures took effect on 24 March 2020. Despite the fact that the decision was made by the [...]

INTRODUCTION Those who program films for public and/or college audiences know that among the most dependable events, in terms of attracting audiences and delivering both pleasure and education, are screenings [...]

The movie industry is typically characterized by high production risk and unpredictable returns. Innovating in this kind of environment is very risky and calls for smart strategies of risk diversification. Hollywood is a recognized content innovation leader in the global movie industry, but the recent tendency for major production companies in the industry is to reduce risk by imitating previously successful productions rather than maintaining an innovation drive. We analyse here an alternative possible strategy based on risk diversification, and show how such strategy is viable for the Hollywood system whereas it is less viable for alternative, less market oriented movie production systems. We study cost/return data for 909 films from the US movie market 1988–99 by the five major US studios, and 118 films from the Italian market 1995–2003 by the three major Italian producers. Three different strategies of portfolio composition are tested, in a comparative perspective, in the US and Italy production and market environments. We find that portfolio diversification strategies are always successful in reducing operating risk in the US, but only partially so in Italy due to major differences in market size and players' characteristics, and ultimately to differences in entrepreneurial culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effect of international coproduction on the performance of cultural products in the global markets. As a result of institutional barriers and cultural distances, coproduction, which allows a foreign producer to partner with the local firms, has emerged as a way of increasing cultural product performance in the global markets. Using the data on the Chinese movie market from 2012 to 2018, the authors find that international coproduction can promote movie performance and that the coproduction effect is mainly explained by the institutional variables. They further examine the heterogeneous effects and find that coproduction effect is stronger for culturally sensitive movies, and that the magnitude of the coproduction effect increases with the level of cooperation. They also confirm that the results are robust to different measurements of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When does market success indicate superior merit? We show that when consumer choices between products with equal prices depend on quality but also on past popularity, more popular products are not necessarily of higher quality. Rather, a medium level of popularity may be associated with lower quality than lower levels of popularity. Using a formal model, we show that this kind of nonmonotonic association occurs when reinforcing processes are strong. More generally, a dip can occur when outcomes depend on both quality and resources and the latter are allocated bimodally, with some being given a lot of resources and most receiving little. Empirically, we illustrate that such a dip occurs in the association between movie theater sales and ratings. The presence of a dip in the outcome-quality association complicates learning from market outcomes and evaluation of individuals and new ventures, challenges the legitimacy of stratification systems, and creates opportunities for sophisticated evaluators who understand the dip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the study is to develop a parsimonious model to predict the box office success of a Bollywood (Hindi) movie before its release. A movie is considered successful if the revenue generated is greater than its budget, in other words, a Revenue to Budget Ratio (RBR) greater than 1. An original data set of 1698 Hindi movies released across a period of 13 years is used to identify the success factors of a movie in the Indian context. Predictive models are developed using traditional methodologies like multiple regression and logistic regression, as well as, contemporary approaches like regression trees and classification trees. The results highlight a unique mix of elements that a producer should consider to ensure the success of a movie in the highly competitive Indian movie market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper researches the potential additional explanations for the concentration of motion pictures (movie) sales in small numbers by analyzing how incomplete information may effect or skew sales patterns. It analyzes word-of-mouth advertising and information spillover from pay-cable broadcasts as mechanisms of movie discovery, and estimated loss of sales due to incomplete information. The data suggest movie broadcasting via pay-cable channels as a source of exogenous shock to information availability, and suggests that the research contributes to the literature on how information channels may effect the assortment of products demanded in another channel.

The transmediation involved in recent Walt Disney Company productions including A Wrinkle in Time, Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok, Coco, and Moana engage with a process of visualizing the nonvisual in ways that have heretofore differed from past Disney offerings. These films respond to calls for increased diversity, unlocking the potential of imagined spaces on a global scale. Although it addresses postcolonial identity politics that are both salient and fraught in the current geopolitical climate, such diversity nevertheless serves Disney's corporate interests, (re)producing a colonizing progression decentralized from the nation-state but rooted in projection of culture. As Disney adapts new narratives, it also engages in a process of incorporation, absorbing these narratives into the larger framework of the overarching corporate structure of the 'magic kingdom'--intended to designate a cultural home for childhood, imagination, and reminiscence of how things were and what they might become. I contend that Disney's incorporation of new narratives extends greater access to imaginary spaces while producing a homogenizing effect on global media culture. Keywords: Disney; adaptation; transmediation; incorporation; global; borders, As the Walt Disney Company adapts and produces various narratives, it also engages in a process of incorporation, absorbing new narratives into the larger framework of the 'magic kingdom,' the [...]

From its groundbreaking 1995 debut to its brand-new fourth instalment, the Pixar franchise has often been on the cutting edge of computer-generated animation. For that reason and many others, these [...]

FRANT GWO'S LUCRATIVE FILM THE WANDERING EARTH--A FUTURE-SET SCI-FI BLOCKBUSTER OF INTERPLANETARY PROPORTIONS --IS NOTABLE NOT JUST FOR BEING ITS COUNTRY OF ORIGIN'S FIRST MAJOR FORAY INTO THE GENRE, WITH [...]

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. - [...]

The Nigerian movie industry, known as Nollywood, has attracted an impressive degree of research interest since its debut in the 1990s, resulting in a dedicated transdisciplinary research niche called Nollywood studies. Nollywood is situated as disruptive of historic and contemporary African movie culture, underscoring Nollywood's significance as a phenomenon "fundamental to Africa's self‐representation." In this study, we examine Nollywood in relation to its collaborative model of innovation, its unique form of openness and other factors implicated in its creative diffusion as a phenomenon across Africa and its diaspora. We also explore Nollywood's emergence as an unexpected creative force in the world of entertainment. The study evaluates the evolutionary interface between technology and entrepreneurship as a dynamic process in the progress and transformation of Nollywood. Complementing the issue of technology, as a factor in Nollywood's evolution, the study identifies a complex aggregation of other factors, including culture, ethnicity, marketing and entrepreneurial ingenuity, liberal art infrastructure and Nigeria's abundant social capital and how they have coalesced to put entertainment alongside oil and agriculture as one of the highest employers of labour and as a surprising dispenser of economic oxygen in Africa's most populous country and its largest economy. Our starting premise is that Nollywood owes its evolution to technological innovation and many unexplored contextual contingencies. The study also identifies and examines forms of openness in Nollywood, within and outside of existing paradigms, and how they factor into the industry's success. Nollywood operates in a fluid borderline between formal and informal frameworks. In Nollywood, a pragmatic and evolving approach to intellectual property systems and openness reflects aspects of its unique business model with contextual sensitivity and, in a way, advances its transnationalisation, albeit counter intuitively. Nollywood represents a grassroots indigenous entrepreneurial cultural initiative. Our project provides insights into the scalability potential of the Nollywood phenomenon and its cross‐sectoral ramifications for innovation and entrepreneurship on the African continent. The study applies a combination of methodological strategies aimed at eliciting, reifying and drawing substantively on industry practitioners' voices and perspectives. It taps into stakeholders' mastery, institutional history, and knowledge of Nollywood's evolution and its modus operandi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors develop and evaluate a framework for investigating and understanding ethnic product crossover, that is, when a product intended for one ethnic minority group gains significant penetration among consumers outside the referent ethnic group. In three studies, the authors investigate how a product's characteristics, the promotion and distribution decisions made for the product, and consumers' propensity for diversity influence the product's likelihood of crossing over from the intended ethnic target market to mainstream white consumers. Product characteristics interact with both other marketing decisions and consumers' diversity-seeking tendencies to influence whether consumers will be interested in ethnic products and the social context in which they are willing to consume them. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for theory and practice and provide directions for further research that include consideration of the product's ethnic embeddedness, the context in which the product will be consumed, and consumers' diversity-seeking tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]