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During the second half of the 1940s and into the 1950s, attendance at French films at the French box office was at its peak. The genre spectrum of the leaders of the “golden ten” of the French film distribution was diverse, but in general it was based on films of entertainment genres, which starred the favorites of the French public. Beginning in the mid-1960s, attendance at French films began to gradually decline (largely due to competition from television and Hollywood productions). An even greater decline in cinema attendance in France began to be felt in the 1980s. This was affected not only by strong competition from Hollywood products and television, but mainly by the massive distribution of household video equipment, which riveted millions of French people to their home screens, who previously preferred to watch films in cinemas. In the second half of the 1940s, there were very few French films in Soviet film distribution. This was largely due to the fact that it was during this period that so-called trophy films (mainly American and German) were shown on USSR screens. Due to the fact that by the mid-1950s the screening of so-called trophy films (mainly American and German) in the USSR was completed, in the second half of the 1950s more new European films, including French ones, began to be released in Soviet cinemas. The “thaw” that came to the USSR brought significant changes to procurement policy. For example, of the top ten leaders in French film distribution in 1958, exactly half were shown on USSR cinema screens. The work of the Soviet film purchasing commission in the 1960s was quite liberal, which (especially after the start of the “Prague Spring” of 1968) could not escape the conservative wing of the “ideological front”: a number of articles were published in the Soviet press with sharp criticism of the distribution policy regarding Western film products, “promoting the bourgeois way of life.” Among the reasons why French films were not included in Soviet film distribution are the following: – Taboos on erotica, accentuated religious and Jewish themes; – The fear that Soviet viewers might somehow misunderstand shocking plot twists from the point of view of official Soviet morality, which were often found even in artistically significant films; – Exclusion from candidates for the purchase of films with an interpretation of Russian and Soviet themes (and accordingly, Russian and Soviet characters) that is unacceptable for Soviet ideology; – The struggle of Soviet censorship with incorrectly (from its point of view) ideological accents on military topics; – Undesirability for Soviet censorship of films “promoting the bourgeois way of life”; – The undesirability of images of charming criminals appearing on Soviet screens; – The unacceptability of purchasing new films with the participation of famous actors who publicly criticized the policies of the USSR; – Too high prices offered by copyright holders; True, in the Soviet film distribution in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, French films began to increasingly appear, one way or another violating former censorship taboos. This was due to the fact that with the advent of perestroika, the work of the purchasing commission of the USSR State Cinema Committee became more liberal and in many ways began to focus on the purchase of highly artistic foreign films, and the former strict ideological and moral prohibitions ceased to apply.... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotion artificial intelligence, the algorithm that recognizes and interprets various human emotions beyond valence (positive and negative polarity), is still in its infancy but has attracted attention from industry and academia. Based on discrete emotion theory and statistical language modeling, this work proposes an algorithm to enable automatic domain-adaptive emotion lexicon construction and multidimensional emotion detection in texts. Using a large-scale dataset of China’s movie market from 2012 to 2018, we constructed and validated a domain-specific emotion lexicon and demonstrated the predictive power of eight discrete emotions (i.e., surprise, joy, anticipation, love, anxiety, sadness, anger, and disgust) in online reviews on box office sales. We found that representing overall emotions through discrete emotions yields higher prediction accuracy than valence or latent emotion variables generated by topic modeling. To understand the source of the predictive power from a theoretical perspective and to test the cross-culture generalizability of our prediction study, we further conducted an experiment in the U.S. movie market based on theories on emotion, judgment, and decision-making. We found that discrete emotions, mediated by perceived processing fluency, significantly affect the perceived review helpfulness, which further influences purchase intention. Our work shows the economic value of emotions in online reviews, generates insight into the mechanism of their effects, and has managerial implications for online review platform design, movie marketing, and cinema operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Al-Bahith Al-Aalami is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although numerous studies have been conducted to validate the influences of reviews and ratings on the box office, there are still some important unsettled concerns. On one hand, the evaluation of reviews should take into account different aspects of the product. On the other hand, certain movies often cause fierce debates in word-of-mouth marketing, implying that involving variance will provide a deeper perspective on sales, and there is scant research on variance compared to the volume and valence of reviews. In this study, we mainly consider two aspects in the reviews: cast and plot. The cast mainly refers to the actors and directors, which means the buyer already has an inherent bias and subjective impressions, while the plot refers to the content and storyline of the movie itself, which have lower perception and experience before consumption. We further study the influence of the variance of these two aspects on the box office as well as their changing trends. In addition, we also discuss the moderating effect of these two variances on the review valence and sales. We find that (1) the variance of both attributes has a positive impact on the box office; (2) The impact of cast on the box office gradually decreases over time, while that of plot exhibits an opposite trend; (3) The final box office is affected by the valence and variance of the cast attribute, and the variance has a negative moderating effect between the valence and sales over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Korean film market has been rapidly growing, and the importance of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in the film industry is also increasing. In this highly competitive market, where producing a movie incurs substantial costs, it is crucial for film industry professionals to make informed decisions. To assist these professionals, we propose DRECE (short for Dimension REduction, Clustering, and classification for Explainable artificial intelligence), an XAI-powered box office classification and trend analysis model that provides valuable insights and data-driven decision-making opportunities for the Korean film industry. The DRECE framework starts with transforming multi-dimensional data into two dimensions through dimensionality reduction techniques, grouping similar data points through K-means clustering, and classifying movie clusters through machine-learning models. The XAI techniques used in the model make the decision-making process transparent, providing valuable insights for film industry professionals to improve the box office performance and maximize profits. With DRECE, the Korean film market can be understood in new and exciting ways, and decision-makers can make informed decisions to achieve success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the annual surveys of the British box office compiled by chief film reviewer R. H. ('Josh') Billings for the trade paper Kinematograph Weekly between 1936 and 1962. Billings's surveys, known as the 'Book of Form', came to be accepted as an authoritative guide to the performance of films at the British box office despite the absence of any actual revenue figures. The article considers how the 'Book of Form' was compiled and compares it to various archival sources that provide hard evidence of film revenues in Britain. It concludes that, despite some anomalies, the 'Billings verdict' provides a broadly accurate overall summary of the 'winners' at the British box office over a period of a quarter of a century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of the Broadband Society, cloud journalism, and streaming, the film industry is trying to modify traditional distribution channels. The adaptation of literary classics was one of the most widespread practices to obtain well-known, quality material for new productions. The objective of this research is to understand empirically what differences are involved in industry’s major production and distribution companies’ choice between adapting preexisting material or creating an entirely new film, as well as the benefits of adaptations. The methodology is comparative and quantitative, consisting of collecting data on films from the five major distributors (Universal, Warner Bros, Disney, Sony, and Paramount) from 2010 to 2019 and analyzing variables to detect market trends related to adaptations during that decade. We observed a higher percentage of adaptations as well as correlations between adaptations and film genre, distributor and genre, adaptations and awards, awards and genre, and genre and the film’s evaluation, as well as between distributor and average budget, adaptations and budget, adaptation and opening weekend box office takings, genre and profit, adaptations and worldwide box office revenues, ratings and worldwide box office takings, and awards and worldwide box office takings; however, this was not observed between adaptation and profit and the breakeven point. It is concluded that, despite the fact that the trend of using this practice has not increased in recent years, it provides a great advantage compared with debuting new intellectual property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Boğaziçi Journal: Review of Social, Economic & Administrative Studies is the property of Bogazici University, Faculty of Economics & Administrative Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite the importance of running time, the economic literature focusing on the determinants of box-office revenues has almost neglected its role as a strategic variable. This note fills in this lack of literature by focusing on the role of running time on box-office revenues. To this aim, using an original dataset composed of worldwide top 20 titles from 2010 to 2019, we perform a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), in which scale efficiency is defined as the capability to plan running time in order to maximize box-office revenues. Results show that running time is a crucial strategic variable to design revenue performance, whose role significantly differs across genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractTaboo is a part of language that is studied in sociolinguistics. It means all forbidden words, expressions, and actions. Compared to other taboos, sexual taboos have always been more prohibited and their use in Iranian cinema is against the culture of Iranian society. Considering that comedy movies have a significant effect on changing the discourse of any society, the purpose of the present study was to investigate sexual taboos and their correlation with movie sales. In this research, 51 best-selling Iranian comedy movies released between 2012 and 2018 were viewed in their entirety and sexual taboos were extracted and placed under different topics. The research results showed that sexual taboos were used under the topics of sexual organs, sexual acts, sexual profanity, sexual clothing, sexual market, and physiological conditions. Also, the results indicated a positive and significant correlation between these movies and box office sales.Keywords: Taboo, Sexual Taboo, Cinema, Comedy, Box Office IntroductionThe study of taboos is a part of sociolinguistics that has received a lot of attention in recent years. Taboos are words, sentences, and actions that are forbidden to be used in the society. They can be used in the forms of verbal and nonverbal taboos under various topics. Among the various topics of taboos, sexual taboos are not only considered taboos in all societies, but also the most forbidden ones. Also, since cinema in any society is the most efficient tool for representing the culture and values of that society and has a great effect on its culture and language, the study of taboos in cinema is considered an important part of sociolinguistics. Comedy movie is a genre that has the most influence on the society due to its popularity. It forms new actions and discourse structures. In this research, we intended to analyze sexual taboos in the best-selling Iranian comedy movies in a 17-year period, classify them into different topics, and investigate the correlation between their occurrence and box office sales regardless of other factors affecting the sales. Materials and MethodsIn this research, by referring to cinetmag.com and checking the box office sales, the best-selling comedy films released in Tehran between 2012 and 2018 were determined and 3 comedy movies with the highest sales in each year were selected. After carefully watching 51 movies, 1005 verbal and non-verbal sexual taboos were extracted. Verbal taboos are forbidden words and phrases and non-verbal taboos can be identified through camera angles, display of forbidden scenes, and actors’ movements. Also, after coding and classifying sexual taboos at the end of the work, the best-selling comedy movies of each year were observed by the second evaluator and all the sexual taboos were noted and placed in different categories so as to increase the research reliability. Finally, a reliability coefficient of 0.773 was achieved. Discussion of Results and ConclusionThe statistical analysis of the correlation between the occurrence of the taboos and movie sales showed that sexual taboos had a significant positive correlation with the sales of the movies (0.482). Also, among the different classes of sexual taboos, the amounts of film sales had the highest correlation with sexual acts, sexual organs, sexual profanity, and sexual clothing with the intensities of 0.516, 0.373, 0.292, and 0.210, respectively. Moreover, the two groups of physiological conditions and sexual market had the negative correlations of -0.001 and -0.065, respectively. The positive correlation of movie sales and sexual taboos could be attributed to the originality of these taboos and their incompatibility with the values of the Iranian society. They were incompatible with the previous expectations of the audience, while they could have the necessary attraction for the audience due to creating a sense of surprise. Among the various topics of taboos, sexual acts and sexual organs were more surprising because they referred directly to sexual topics and had a significant positive correlation with movie sales. After these two categories, sexual profanity and sexual clothing could be considered inappropriate for the Iranian culture and society and could arouse a sense of surprise although they were indirectly related to sexual topics. Therefore, their correlation with movie sales was still positive and significant. The issue of physiological conditions that was related to menstruation and childbirth had become widespread in the society and its prohibition had thus disappeared because of culturalization. Finally, sex market, which referred to vulgar movies and prostitution, was a shameful economic activity for earning money due to the chaotic conditions of the society. Therefore, according to the authors, the negative correlation of these two issues with movie sales could be attributed to the disappearance of the ban and its bitterness for the audience, respectively.

Copyright of Journal of Communication Theory & Research / Iletisim Kuram ve Arastirma Dergisi is the property of Gazi University, Faculty of Communication and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The arrival of the digital computer demanded a new spatial logic for performing arts ticketing. As late-20th-century box offices updated equipment, managers imagined a ticketing space that was open and airy, rather than closed and secure. Interactions between agents and audiences became collaborative, and ticket sales became central to marketing efforts. This article analyzes changes in the box office by historicizing the spaces of ticketing, drawing upon Bernhard Siegert's notion of cultural techniques, reading a diagram from a 1993 ticketing guru's book, and excavating archival and published materials bearing on performance spaces in Western Europe and North America. The article shows how technological, social, and political changes in the 1970s and '80s led to a substantial shift in the interactions that inhabit paraperformative spaces. In a concluding gesture, the article shows that these changes are themselves transitory and have since been succeeded by the digital ticketing familiar to early-21st-century audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is so eventful about an event movie's arrival to the multiplex, and how does this eventfulness function as both an industry strategy and audience experience? Synthesizing an analysis of trade discourses, promotional campaigns, and manually-curated box office data, this article considers how the concept of eventfulness emerged as a discursive construction and spatiotemporal formation used by the industry to promote moviegoing as more meaningful than other forms of media experience in today's "anywhere-anytime" and "on-demand" culture. Eventfulness situates the movie theater at the center of a specific, layered structure of time – a stretched sense of promotional anticipation and cultural nostalgia which climaxes during an ephemeral moment – and space – a discursive space of cultural buzz leading up to the event, a local experience community marked by fan participation, and an imagined global audience which takes shape through the synchronization of the event as it simulates "live" broadcasting and connects audiences in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Central Asian Journal of Art Studies is the property of Central Asian Journal of Art Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The movie industry is a highly differentiated context where production studios compete in non-price product attributes, which influences the box office results of a motion picture. Because of the short life cycle and the constant entrance of new competitive products, temporal decisions play a crucial role. Time series of the number of movies on release and the sum of the box office results of the ten top motion pictures (ranked by box office result for that week) present a counterphased seasonality in the US movie market. We suggest that a possible reason is a risk sensitivity adaptation in the behaviour of the movie's distributors. This paper provides a model supporting this hypothesis. We developed an agent-based model of a movie market, and we simulated it for 15 years. A comparable global behaviour exists when producers schedule the movies according to given risk-sensitive strategies. This research improves the knowledge of the US motion picture market, analyzing a real-world scenario and providing insight into the behaviour of existing firms in a complex environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Korean film market has been rapidly growing, and the importance of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in the film industry is also increasing. In this highly competitive market, where producing a movie incurs substantial costs, it is crucial for film industry professionals to make informed decisions. To assist these professionals, we propose DRECE (short for Dimension REduction, Clustering, and classification for Explainable artificial intelligence), an XAI-powered box office classification and trend analysis model that provides valuable insights and data-driven decision-making opportunities for the Korean film industry. The DRECE framework starts with transforming multi-dimensional data into two dimensions through dimensionality reduction techniques, grouping similar data points through K-means clustering, and classifying movie clusters through machine-learning models. The XAI techniques used in the model make the decision-making process transparent, providing valuable insights for film industry professionals to improve the box office performance and maximize profits. With DRECE, the Korean film market can be understood in new and exciting ways, and decision-makers can make informed decisions to achieve success.