What Movies Do You Watch During Bad & Good Economic Times: The Impact of Movie Genre on Attendance over Business Cycles

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to identify and understand the effects of economic conditions, movie genre and the interaction effect of both on the movie attendance. This paper will further discuss and investigate how each genre behaves under different economic conditions (recession v.s. expansion). The economic condition in this paper is proxied by the Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI), and the movie performance is measured as weekly attendance. Movie attendance has been found to be negatively related with CSI. However, there is no systematic research that tests how genre would affect movie attendance. The overall result implies that consumers tend to watch more drama movie during the time of recessions relative to all other movies. This finding of this paper would help the movie industry to make better decisions on movie production in approach to achieve higher revenue and profit, even during the time of depression.