Existing studies on the motion picture industry tend to explore demand for cinema films
focusing only on a single country, aiming to assess the probability of a movie's success. This
means that the determinants of consumer demand, from a cross-country perspective, are
relatively unexplored. The international film industry may be seen as offering two
heterogeneous products falling into two experiential ranges, according to their artistic content
('art house' films), and to the intensity of their special effects ('mainstream' films). This
research examines the extent to which the cross country demand for the two given types of
films ('art house' and 'mainstream'), are associated with individual factors, industrial factors,
and cultural-social-structural factors. Estimation results, based on logistic regressions on a
sample of OCED countries, indicate that: 1) cinema tastes diverge into different patterns
across countries; 2) larger marketing investments emerge as a key determinant for the
consumption of art house films, and 3) technological level/sophistication plays a significant
role in creating stratified consumption for art house films.