How do your rivals’ releasing dates affect your box office?

Abstract

In this paper, we study to what extent a movie's box office receipts are affected by the temporal distribution of rival films. We propose a theoretical model that analyses the effects of past, present and future releases on a film's results. Using this model we can analyse how rivals' release dates impact on others' box office revenues. This theoretical model also allows us to carry out some comparative statics by changing some relevant parameters such as time depreciation, film quality or the timeline of exhibition. We have tested the empirical implications of this model using information on the films released in five countries: the USA, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Spain. In order to maintain a degree of homogeneity, we have constructed an unbalanced panel consisting of films that were released in at least three of these countries. The geographical dimension of our data set allows us to use panel data techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity among the films released. This allows us to control for one of the most relevant features of the movie market, namely the presence of highly differentiated products.

Strategic attractiveness and release decisions for cultural goods

“…Among these determinants, the simultaneous release of similar movies (same genre or same targeted audience) is shown to have a negative effect (see Ainslie, Dreze, & Zufryden, 2005;Basuroy, Desai, & Talukdar, 2006;and Calantone, Yeniyurt, Townsend, & Schmidt, 2010). Gutierrez-Navratil, Fernandez-Blanco, Orea, and Prieto-Rodriguez (2014) study to what extent box-office revenues are affected by the temporal distribution of rival films. Using data on movies released in five countries (United States, UK, France, Germany, and Spain), they show that the effect of contemporary rivals is always larger than that of previously released movies or future rivals.…”

Do Movie Majors Really Collude? Indirect Evidence from Release Schedules

“…However, not all of the possible combina tions are equally relevant. Because most of a film's revenues are generated during its first three weeks on the market, closer release dates have greater negative effects on the box office revenues of each pair of films (see Gutiérrez-Navratil et al, 2014). Furthermore, if we com bine all of the films, we will be implicitly assuming that each film is a potential competitor of every other film, regardless of the distance between their releases.…”

“…In a previous studio, Gutiérrez-Navratil et al (2014) analyzed the role of temporal com petition and how rivals' release decisions impact on box-office revenues. Using information on films released in United States and the four largest European motion pictures markets, they measured to what extent movies' box office receipts are affected by the temporal distri bution of rival films.…”

Theatre allocation as a distributor’s strategic variable over movie runs

“…Hence, with such withdrawal rates, the attrition bias could be very important if more 12 Stars, awards, sequels, and budget are signals (Basuroy et al 2006;Deuchert et al 2005;De Vany and Walls 1999;Ginsburgh 2003) and ways of extending established brand names to new products (Ravid 1999). 13 The timing of entry is among the most important factors of success for short life-cycle products (Calentone et al 2010;Elberse and Eliashberg 2003;Gutierrez-Navratil et al 2014). Alternative factors may be the decision between nationwide or platform releases (Chen et al 2013) or product differentiation across local competitors (Collins et al 2009).…”