Academic literature on the topic 'Film economics'

There are two things that most people know about the ‘video nasties.’ The first is that prior to 1984 the video industry was completely unregulated and the absence of any regulation allowed a space for immoral and disreputable elements of the businesses to thrive. The second is that a series of public complaints about the advertising used to promote the ‘video nasties’ triggered a moral panic that led to introduction of the Video Recordings Act in 1984. Neither of these statements is entirely true, but both have allowed a popular history to persist that continues to hold the independent distributor directly accountable for the events that led to a scheme of government sanctioned censorship that continues to this day. Through exploring the marketing and distribution of the ‘video nasties’, this thesis will challenge this established history and will contextualise the ‘video nasties’ within the emerging landscape of the wider home video industry. Moving beyond the explicitly social readings that have dominated these histories and that have positioned them as an explicitly British concern, this study offers a reading that considers the ‘video nasties’ as part of, and not separate from, a broader global film industry and wider industrial practice. This will be accomplished over three sections. In the first section I will detail the established social history before reconsidering the accuracy of this narrative when it is considered alongside a previously neglected economic and technological history. This context will provide the foundation for the rest of the thesis, providing a basis that reconceptualises the ‘video nasties’ both historically and as part of wider film markets. In the second section I will return to the claims made against the promotional strategies of the early distributors and historicise this type of promotion, tracing a lineage to the ballyhoo of William Castle and the early promotions of P.T Barnum. This will provide context for a study that considers the marketing and branding of both the films and the companies that produced them, following the market through Video, DVD and Blu-ray. The final section documents the evolution of both the product and the marketplace, considering how theoretical constructs arising from film studies can help us understand the marketplace of the ‘video nasties’. The thesis is a revisionist history that reconsiders the birth of the independent video industry in the United Kingdom through the films and distributors that were marginalised and castigated.

<p> This dissertation seeks to create a theory of narrative balance based upon the connection between economics and literary narrative, and to apply that theory to postmodern texts, which confront issues of space, economics, and narrative. I use sources in both postmodern economic and cultural theory, as well as the more modern influences of cognitive science, narratology, and evolutionary psychology. My work will build on the work of several cognitive and evolutionary scholars, including David Herman, Lisa Zunshine, Blakey Vermeule, Nancy Easterlin, and Merlin Donald, but the concept of &ldquo;space&rdquo; creates a gap through which I blend theories of the postmodern with cognitive psychology. I argue that narrative fictions have an &ldquo;economic&rdquo; quality to them and that causality becomes increasingly conflated with what some would call &ldquo;meaning,&rdquo; others, &ldquo;literariness.&rdquo; </p>

<p>Sammanfattning</p><p>Att investera i långfilmprojekt är riskfyllt. Därför är det mycket sällsynt att en långfilm i Sverige produceras utan ekonomiskt stöd från det Svenska Filminstitutet, SFI. Branschen har hamnat i en beroendeställning vilket gjort att makten koncentrerats hos Institutet. För att höja totala publiktillströmningen och filmkvalitén bestämde SFI år 2006 att öka storleken på stöden, men att detta skulle ske på bekostnad av ett mindre antal produktioner. Utvecklingen innebär att färre bolag i framtiden kommer ha en ekonomisk möjlighet att producera långfilm, att färre anställda behövs och att filmernas mångfald försämras - alla dessa är händelseförlopp som SFI en gång grundades för att motverka. Men är det verkligen så enkelt att det räcker med större budgetar för att höja den totala publiktillströmningen och kvalitén? Är detta verkligen den rätta metoden? För produktionsbolagen är det här en viktig fråga, det är en fråga om existens, för andra är det en fråga om vilken riktning utvecklingen av filmkonsten kommer att ta.</p><p>De frågeställningar som uppsatsen har för avsikt att besvara är:</p><p>Har budgetstorleken någon effekt på avkastningen?</p><p>Har budgetstorleken någon effekt på kvalitén?</p><p>Bör SFI kvarhålla sin strategi för att nå de uppsatta målen om högre total publiktillströmning och höjd kvalité?</p><p>Avkastningen är i denna uppsats en kvot som visar billjettintäkter per investerad krona. Kvalitén mäts efter filmpublikens egna preferenser. Undersökningens data kommer från SFI: s hemsida, www.sfi.se, och filmdatabasen The Internet Movie Database, IMDb.com. Med hjälp av regressionsmodeller har följande resultat framkommit:</p><p>En större budget genererar en lägre avkastning än vad en mindre budget gör. Effekten visar att varje investerad miljon sänker marginalintäkten med 52 600 kronor.</p><p>Budgetstorleken har ingen effekt på kvalitén.</p><p>SFI borde satsa på fler filmer med lägre budgetstöd i syfte att öka den totala publiktillströmningen. Möjligen kan också kvalitén höjas av detta genom en ökad konkurrens och mångfald, men också genom att de yrkesutövande tillåts arbeta frekventare och på så sätt kan utvecklas. Vidare forskning behövs dock för att utreda vad som påverkar kvalité.</p>

The collapse of the video window is disrupting the economic framework between exhibitors and distributors in the film industry. This study analyzes the collapse from several angles and provides a detailed description as to why the collapse has, and will continue to be, disruptive. I first examine the impact various technologies have had on the collapse of the video window – the time between a motion picture’s theatrical release and video release – during 1997 – 2012. The average video window has declined from 5 months 22days in 1997 to 3 months 29 days in 2012. Differences of means tests were used to inspect the average video window at the time of each technology’s introduction. Then in order to reveal how the length of the video window affects box office profit, I use an ordinary least squares regression to examine the determinants of gross domestic box office profit for a sample of 294 top earning U.S. films during 1999-2012.

Each year well over one billion movie tickets are sold to an audience who knows very little about what they are getting themselves into. Why is it that despite the uncertainty, people return to the theaters to see what Hollywood has in store for them? In efforts to provide answers regarding the driving forces behind Hollywood’s blockbuster hits, this study takes into account the integration levels of the studios. Specifically, does a movie produced in-house at a large studio have a better chance of being a blockbuster hit than one which is outsourced to an independent production company? Further, I discuss the motivation behind the studios’ decision. While considering the embedded integration within the motion picture industry, this study aims to provide insight regarding the extent of internal studio productions and the effects of these films on the box-office.

Numerous U.S. studio executives claim that the lack of on-screen racial diversity is a result of producers responding to discriminatory racial preferences of international audiences. To test these claims, this paper augments prior film financial success models by introducing measures of cast diversity to quantify the impact that actor race has on film revenue in the domestic and international market. Using OLS regressions, I examine and compare this effect within the domestic and aggregate movie market to investigate the underlying motivations for producers to not cast nonwhite actors. The findings support the claims made by studio heads that, on the whole, films with greater levels of diversity significantly underperform in the international box office, yet are not a strong determinant for domestic consumption. Although producers may be making assumptions about foreign demand when investing in films, the revenue regressions seem to support their assumptions. However, the results are ultimately difficult to interpret. Holding budget and other key film characteristics constant, more diverse films perform poorly relative to less diverse films in foreign markets, so the demographic disparities in films could be mostly driven by rational, profit-maximizing behavior from studios and producers.

<p>This essay is about the market of traditional rental movie stores, which today are on a mature stage of the marketing cycle. The technique is constantly accelerating and contributes to evaluation of new ways to watch movie. New competitors are such as bigger chain of stores that can offer, in addition to their wide range of other goods, rental movies as a secondary selling. The substitute is of most part Internet based services from where you can watch movie online or download film legally as well as illegally.</p><p>These different sorts of new competitors or substitutes become a big threat on the traditional rental movie stores as these substitutes can offer the same prices or even lower.</p><p>With these new ways of watching film this will on turn change the behaviours of the customers that likes to watch movies. The problem for the traditional rental movie stores is trying to keep their existing customers and try keeping them loyal to their store, so that they won’t loose them to the competitors and substitutes. In this essay we have chosen some strategies of marketing that are relevant for the study, the theories we have used in this essay are: Involvement Theory, Product Life Cycle, and Theory of five competitive forces, Service Profit Chain, Total Communication, and the theory of leverage effect.</p><p>These theories are put together into a model showing, from the essay writers opinions, that rental movie stores should create loyalty to their customers compared to its contradiction of transaction marketing management.</p><p>The data that has been collected from the owners of the rental movie stores and their customers was collected from our four cases: Filmkedjan Farsta, Top 100, Dancho Film and Fruängens Video. The data was based on four interviews with the owners of the rental movie stores and 100 questionnaires to their customers. These two methods gave us our empirical data that together gave us the basis of analyzing it. The analyzing has been the base to the result and the result has been the base to the conclusion represented in the end of the essay.</p><p>One of the main conclusions of this essay is that traditional rental movie stores cannot compete with price, and therefore it is important for them to use loyalty as marketing strategy for a continuing survival on this changeable market.</p>