Global box office consumption of Hollywood films : explaining inter-country similarities in movie selection

• Main Author: Achikannoo Govindaraju
• Other Authors: Fu Wei-Jen, Wayne
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Mass media::Broadcasting::Motion pictures and films
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/18862
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This study examines the cross-country homogeneity of aggregate audience tastes in theatrical consumption of Hollywood films. Drawing on the critical, economic and globalization literatures of the international media trade flow, we hypothesize that world cinematic audiences’ tastes in terms of choosing among a specific set of imported Hollywood theatrical films, are becoming increasing similar over time. The study devises an empirical scheme to measure and explain similarities among separate and independent national cinema markets in film-specific box office popularity of a common set of Hollywood movies, using annual 2002-2007 panel data of box office sales receipts in countries worldwide. The results show that Countries that are more culturally akin to the US tend to have viewer preferences resembling more closely those of American audiences for the same Hollywood titles than countries that are not. Moreover, tastes in individual countries have converged with those of American audiences over the years. The similarity in movie taste is also positively related to a consuming country’s audience size. Finally, the correlational statistics calculated from the country-by-film cross-tabulations uncover the trend that national audiences worldwide are coming to have more uniform tastes among themselves.