Cinema Talent: Individual and Collective

An empirical investigation of director selection in movie preproduction: A two-sided matching approach

“…For producers with new movie projects, getting the right director has important implications for the movie's success financially and artistically. This is because the director is a film's creative manager; they make almost all creative decisions during production and postproduction and almost invariably have direct contact with the motley crew consisting of all the cast and crew (Hennig-Thurau & Houston, 2019;Simonton, 2009). We conceptualize this director selection problem as two-sided matching between the movie/producer side and the director side, and the factors that affect the matching outcomes 2 in turn indirectly generate farreaching monetary impact on movie box office.…”

“…The well-researched driving factors of movie performance are mostly those that become available in the much later distribution/exhibition phase (Eliashberg et al, 2006;Hadida, 2009). Also, the role of the director is also surprisingly underresearched (Simonton, 2009). In this paper, we aim to fill these gaps and focus on the producers' problem of matching their new movie projects with directors that possess the right characteristics, and examine the financial implications that director choice may have on movie box office.…”