Leveraging analytics to produce compelling and profitable film content

Producing compelling film content profitably is a top priority to the long-term prosperity of the film industry. Advances in digital technologies, increasing availabilities of granular big data, rapid diffusion of analytic techniques, and intensified competition from user generated content and original content produced by Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) platforms have created unparalleled needs and opportunities for film producers to leverage analytics in content production. Built upon the theories of value creation and film production, this article proposes a conceptual framework of key analytic techniques that film producers may engage throughout the production process, such as script analytics, talent analytics, and audience analytics. The article further synthesizes the state-of-the-art research on and applications of these analytics, discuss the prospect of leveraging analytics in film production, and suggest fruitful avenues for future research with important managerial implications

What is entertainment? The value of industry definitions

This chapter starts with a seemingly basic definitional question: what is entertainment? There is no doubt that something called entertainment exists: there are sections of newspapers dedicated to it, television shows about it, and professional associations for it. Entertainment is not an obscure term for a niche genre. It is a multi-billion dollar global industry with whose products a significant portion of the world’s population engages deeply and regularly. As such, it requires substantial analysis, investigation, and explanation. This analysis is the task of the Palgrave Entertainment Industries series, of which this book and this chapter are a part. Despite the size and cultural penetration of entertainment, to date, the depth and volume of academic investigations of entertainment remain surprisingly insubstantial. Academic analyses of entertainment exist, but they are scattered among disciplines, lumped into the much broader categories of ‘media studies’ or ‘popular culture’, or focussed on a single subsector such as television or music. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of entertainment as a complex cultural system. This effort involves investigating how entertainment works as an industry, how its products circulate, and how it is understood

It's not the economy, stupid! External effects on the supply and demand of cinema entertainment

The paper addresses whether the state of the economy impacts the supply of and demand for cinema entertainment. A literature review on the drivers of cinema supply and demand is provided, and two competing hypotheses are extracted. Economic downturns could either lead to a sober mood and drive the interest in serious genres or drive the need for distraction leading to an increased interest in feel-good or action movies. However, characteristics of the movie industry suggest that economic key factors have only limited effects on supply and demand. A time series analysis of supply and demand in three major European markets indicate that demand is unrelated to the state of the economy. In aggregate, the demand does not instruct supply. Fluctuations in individual movie quality superpose potential effects of the economic context on the aggregated demand. Simultaneously, a focus on film as art superposes potential effects of the economic context on the supply