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Cultural discount of cinematic achievement: the academy awards and U.S. movies’ East Asian box office

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Abstract

This study uses the Academy Awards as a window to look into how cultural differences influence the reception of U.S. movies in East Asia. Following the recent research on the concept of cultural discount and the argument that the Academy Awards are indicators of cinematic qualities and achievement, the research questions focus on whether different types of cinematic qualities and achievement would be discounted by cultural differences to different extents. More specifically, a distinction between drama and non-drama awards is made, and it is argued that the cinematic qualities and achievement indicated by the drama awards are likely to be relatively more culturally specific and hence more likely to be discounted by cultural differences. The empirical analysis examines the box office performance of 585 U.S. movies from 2002 to 2007 in nine East Asian markets. It shows that non-drama awards relate positively to box office receipts, but drama awards relate negatively to box office receipts. Moreover, the negative relationship between drama awards and box office receipts is stronger in countries more culturally distant from the U.S. The findings are therefore highly supportive to the conceptual arguments. Other implications of the findings are also discussed.

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Notes

  1. This argument is also related to Straubhaar’s (1991) concept of cultural proximity.

  2. There are exceptions. For example, Prag and Casavant (1994) find that the positive impact of award on movie rentals in their sample of movies would become insignificant when advertising cost of the movies was controlled. Also, see Litman and Kohl (1989).

  3. This distinction between awards as signals and as measures is analogous to the distinction, made by Eliashberg and Shugan (1997), between the role of movie reviewers as influencers and as predictors. For Eliashberg and Shugan (1997), critics are influencers when potential audiences treat reviews as informational cues or signals to determine whether a movie is worth watching or not. However, critics can also simply be predictors—it is possible that critics’ opinions can predict box office simply because their opinions are indeed a good measure of the audience appeal a movie has. Certainly, critics can be both in reality, and a number of studies have attempted to identify the relative importance of the two roles (e.g., Basuroy et al. 2003; Boatwright et al. 2007; Reinstein and Snyder 2005).

  4. Certainly, the Academy Awards embody the judgments of the members of the Academy. It would be naive to assume that the quality judgments of the Academy members would always correspond to the audience’s own judgments regarding whether a movie is enjoyable or not (see Levy 2003). Yet the argument here is not that the content elements indicated by the Academy Awards always have audience appeal. The point is that if the content elements indicated by the Academy Awards are appealing to the audience, then a positive relationship between awards and box office can be expected.

  5. Country of origin of the movies was recorded from the Internet Movie Database, the other online source utilized in this study.

  6. In the current dataset, with the exception of Japan (average release time lag = 113 days), the average release time lag for the other markets ranges from only about 38 days in Malaysia to about 66 days in South Korea. These figures are substantially smaller than those reported by Elberse and Eliashberg (2003) regarding the release time lag of 164 U.S. movies in the year 1999 in four European countries, which ranged from 112 days in UK to 140 days in Germany. The difference probably illustrates both regional variations (local movie industries may be generally weaker in East Asian markets, and therefore, U.S. distributors may be more capable of getting their preferred release time slots) and historical change (the shortening of release time lag over the years).

  7. Zero and 180 were set as the lower and upper limits of the release time lag variable to avoid the results from being heavily influenced by outlying values on the variable.

  8. Admittedly, this operationalization means that the non-drama awards would include a number of awards which may not belong to the technical, visual, or musical clusters identified by Simonton (2002, 2005). Presumably, we can create variables representing each single cluster, while using an “other” category to capture the remaining awards. However, this obviously would over-complicate the analysis and also create problems of multicollinearity in the regression analysis. As far as the arguments in this study are concerned, the distinction between drama and non-drama awards is the most important. Hence, the current operationalization should provide the most reasonable basis for analysis.

  9. A more precise splitting of the sample is possible if we have the ending dates of the movies’ theatrical releases. Unfortunately, no such information is available.

  10. Logged U.S. box office was added into this probit model such that the inverse Mills ratios derived from the analysis would not be heavily correlated with the other major independent variables in the original regression model.

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  1. School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, N. T., Hong Kong

    Francis L. F. Lee

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Lee, F.L.F. Cultural discount of cinematic achievement: the academy awards and U.S. movies’ East Asian box office. J Cult Econ 33, 239–263 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-009-9101-7

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