Marketing and technology sophistication as hidden weapons for fostering the demand for 'art house' cinema films: a cross country analysis

Abstract

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.