The Motion Picture Industry: Critical Issues in Practice, Current Research, and New Research Directions

TLDR

The motion‑picture industry is a rich, economically significant research domain offering comprehensive lifecycle data and unresolved puzzles, yet its scholarly output has had limited practical impact compared to other sectors. This article identifies critical managerial problems, reviews current knowledge, and proposes future research challenges and hypotheses for the industry. The review is structured around the production, distribution, and exhibition stages, proposing conjectures for each to guide future empirical work.

Abstract

The motion picture industry has provided a fruitful research domain for scholars in marketing and other disciplines. The industry has high economic importance and is appealing to researchers because it offers both rich data that cover the entire product lifecycle for many new products and because it provides many unsolved “puzzles.” Although the amount of scholarly research in this area is rapidly growing, its impact on practice has not been as significant as in other industries (e.g., consumer packaged goods). In this article, we discuss critical practical issues for the motion picture industry, review existing knowledge on those issues, and outline promising research directions. Our review is organized around the three key stages in the value chain for theatrical motion pictures: production, distribution, and exhibition. Focusing on what we believe are critical managerial issues, we propose various conjectures—framed either as research challenges or specific research hypotheses—related to each stage in the value chain and often involved in understanding consumer movie-going behavior.