Conquering the box office: Factors influencing success of international movies in Russia

Sophia Gänßle, Oliver Budzinski and Daria Astakhova

No 131, Ilmenau Economics Discussion Papers from Ilmenau University of Technology, Institute of Economics

Abstract: This paper empirically examines factors influencing box office success of international movies in Russia between 2012 and 2016. It adds to existing research on national movie markets, by highlighting the relevance of differences in culture, institutions, language, and consumption habits for movie success. Three groups of success factors are distinguished: distribution related (e.g. budget, franchise), brand and star effects (e.g. top actors or directors), and evaluation sources (e.g. critics and audience rating). We add novel region-specific variables like seasonality, time span between the world and local release, attendance of international stars at Russian movie premieres, and title adaptation to Russian culture. The results indicate that budget, franchise, employment of popular actors and directors, electronic word of mouth and audience ratings exert a significantly positive influence on Russian box office success. However, we find significantly negative effects for international critics and, interestingly, the adaption of movie titles. The main contributions of our study are (i) success factors vary between countries with different cultures, (ii) region-specific factors matter, and consequently (iii) results from one market (e.g. the US) cannot easily be generalised.

Keywords: motion picture economics; movies; entertainment; box office success; Russia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L10 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019, Revised 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis and nep-cul
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/204841/1/1678649589.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Conquering the Box Office: Factors Influencing Success of International Movies in Russia (2018)
Working Paper: Conquering the box office: Factors influencing success of international movies in Russia (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:tuiedp:131

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ilmenau Economics Discussion Papers from Ilmenau University of Technology, Institute of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().