Predicting financial success of motion pictures: The '80s experience

Cinematic success criteria and their predictors: The art and business of the film industry

“…Only occasionally will a study examine receipts outside North America (e.g., Hand, 2001) or include world-wide performance statistics (e.g., Litman & Ahn, 1998). This emphasis on the domestic market is important insofar as some film genres, such as comedies, do not transport well across linguistic and culture boundaries (see, e.g., Lee, 2006).…”

“…This would seem to represent the most important criterion from a pure business sense. Yet very few empirical investigations actually examine this criterion (see, e.g., Litman & Ahn, 1998). The reason for this relative neglect is that profit cannot be determined without knowing a film's cost of production, or budget.…”

“…In the first place, the sampled films will often span non-equivalent and even non-overlapping periods of film history. Because of historical trends in the structure of the film industry, studies can obtain contradictory results even when the investigations are conducted by the same researcher using the same methods (e.g., Litman, 1983;Litman & Ahn, 1998;Litman & Kohl, 1989; see also Smith & Smith, 1986). Furthermore, the samples will differ on whether they include non-English-language films, documentaries, and animations-cinematic products that may have dissimilar success determinants (Simonton, 2007b).…”

Determinants of UK Box Office Success: The Impact of Quality Signals

“…Studies have typically focussed on average or total critic scores with less attention to dispersion of opinions (Chang and Ki, 2005;Elberse and Eliashberg, 2003;Litman and Kohl, 1989). A relevant question is whether a consensus of reviews, with a narrower range, influence box office returns positively or negatively.…”

Tackling the "Galacticos" effect: team familiarity and the performance of star-studded projects

“…We thus created the variable Opening Theatres measuring the logarithm of the number of theatres on which each movie was initially released. Movies that are adaptations of a previous story (e.g., books, novels, comic strips, or TV shows) may be more likely to appeal to the audience than movies that rely on entirely new scripts because the public is already familiar with the story (Litman and Kohl, 1989)-though they may also prove more expensive because of the need to secure copyrights. We thus created the dummy variable Adapted Script that takes on the value 1 if a movie is based on prior material and 0 otherwise.…”