Explaining Box Office Performance from the Bottom Up: Data, Theories and Models

Abstract

Every week, there are more than 50 movies playing in theaters from which movie-goers can choose. Analyses of the relative box office success of these films shows that it is Pareto-distributed, with roughly 20% of them earning 80% of the overall revenue. Arthur De Vany studied the potential causes of this ‘winner-take-all’ distribution through equation-based analyses, and theorized that the Pareto-distributed box office revenues we observe emerge from the micro-level complex adaptive behavior of movie-goers with imperfect information.