Class Project - Movie Theater Ticket Regression Analysis

[MatthewHogan]

Hi All,

 

I am in grad school at Marquette and looking for some help. For my economics class, we have been tasked to do a regression analysis on a product or industry and my group has selected movie theater tickets. We have most of the information we need but could use help in three areas that we either cannot find information or can only find partial information. All data we are looking for is annual dating back at least 30 years, but preferably to 1980. First, we are looking for movie theater screens. Second, it is our belief that ad spend has drastically affected the movie industry. The more detail on this the better (for example, digital vs. television spend). Third, any information on the number or % of releases that are franchises (sequels, remakes or the like) or based off of existing materials (including books and movies based on true stories). Also, piracy statistics and how the introduction of the internet to the masses has changed how the theater has affected how the general public has viewed spending money on movies.

 

The final piece of information is fairly vague, but has to do with production budgets. If we can get annual production budgets or % of movies with different technologies (CGI, 3D) and the % of budget spent on special effects, we believe we could show how people spend money on movies that spend money on themselves. Even if it just average (production budget/movie), we think this will have the highest correlation.

 

If you have any of this information, or know where I could get it please post below shoot me an email at matthew.hogan@marquette.edu.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[Dementeleus]

Hi Matt, you're not going to easily find much of the stuff you're looking for. My suggestion for the ad spend is see what you can find through Ad Week, Hollywood Reporter, and Variety. I'd suggest the same periodicals for the piracy stuff: maybe add some others like Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, or the Economist. Do some old-fashioned Google searching and you should be able to find a few articles. For franchises/reboots/sequels and adaptations, you could probably build a quick spreadsheet fairly quickly using data from BoxOfficeMojo and IMDB (to save some time, you could limit it to the top 30 grosses per year or something).

Budgets: budget details are almost never published. Even the "official" numbers for budgets are typically not accurate. There are a few budget breakdowns that have leaked on the internet: Google "Edward Jay Epstein" for some articles and the budgets themselves (T3, Robin Hood, The Village).

[BadAtGender]

For the number of Theaters, you could try to contact the National Organization of Theater owners. They may have archives of that information on file.

 

Box Office Mojo has a listed number of total screens from 1980 to 2002 here: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/

And the final weekend where they had a screen estimate without some large data chunks missing is here: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/?view=screens&yr=2014&wknd=45&p=.htm

So you can assume that there's in the range of 48k screens available in the US right now.