Reputation and Strength of Ties in Predicting Commercial Success and Artistic Merit of Independents in the Italian Feature Film Industry*

TLDR

The study investigates which factors enable success in project‑based cultural industries, focusing on how relational stability and reputation influence commercial success and artistic merit, and proposes that task routineness explains the observed divergence. The authors analyze a sample of Italian films, focusing on the director’s role, to examine how relational stability and reputation affect commercial success and artistic merit, using task routineness as an explanatory framework. Commercial success is driven by a director’s strong vertical ties and economic reputation, whereas artistic merit is enhanced by weak horizontal ties and artistic reputation.

Abstract

abstract We investigate what factors are required in order to succeed in project‐based cultural industries. In particular, we focus on the effects of relational stability and reputation on two key dimensions of movies’ success: commercial success and artistic merit. We combine the two dimensions of films’ performance for a more accurate understanding of how authenticity and artistic merit are manufactured in the movie industry. We examine this question by analysing a sample of Italian films and focusing on the role of the film director. We argue that commercial success is favoured by a director's strong vertical ties (with producers and distributors) and economic reputation, while artistic merit is positively affected by a director's weak horizontal ties (with other creative partners) and artistic reputation. We propose an explanation in terms of varying degrees of task routineness and we use it to account for the divergence between our results and others in the cultural and organizational literature.