Hollywood blockbusters and long-tailed distributions

Sitabhra Sinha and Srinivas Raghavendra ()

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 2004, vol. 42, issue 2, 293-296

Abstract: Numerical data for all movies released in theaters in the USA during the period 1997-2003 are examined for the distribution of their popularity in terms of (i) the number of weeks they spent in the Top 60 according to the weekend earnings, and (ii) the box-office gross during the opening week, as well as, the total duration for which they were shown in theaters. These distributions show long tails where the most popular movies are located. Like the study of Redner [S. Redner, Eur. Phys. J. B 4, 131 (1998)] on the distribution of citations to individual papers, our results appear to be consistent with a power-law dependence of the rank distribution of gross revenues for the most popular movies with a exponent close to -1/2. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2004

Date: 2004
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DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2004-00382-7

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