The Impact of Female Characters on a Movie’s Return on Investment
Authors: Raghav Lakhotia, Sameer Ganu, Anshul Goel, Abhishek Kumar
Abstract:
In the age and times where women’s empowerment is a significant topic of discussion, we aim to analyze the potential gender diversity influence on box office revenues. The following research is carried out by collecting data from 400 Hollywood movies between the years 2014-2017 and performing regression analysis to find a correlation between the presence of female characters in movies and their return on investment (ROI). The paper finds that there is a positive relationship between the performance of the movies (its ROI) and the gender diversity i.e. the more the number of female characters, the higher the revenue generated. Another factor such as Number of Votes also has a direct impact on the revenue of the movie. The research not only takes into consideration the mere presence of women on screen but also the exchange of at least one dialogue among themselves, which is presented by the Bechdel Score of the movie.
Keywords: Bechdel, diversity, Hollywood, return on investment.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1474636
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 702References:
[1] Statista – The Statistics Portal, Statistics and Studies from more than 22,500 Sources, Article: Film and Movie Industry – Statistics and Facts, https://www.statista.com/topics/964/film/.
[2] Dr Smith, L.S, Choueiti, M, Dr Pieper, K. (2017). Inequality in 900 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT, and Disability from 2007-2016.
[3] Forbes Article – World’s Highest-Paid Actors and Actresses 2017.
[4] Protasovs, I. (2015). Board Diversity and Firm’s Financial Performance: Evidence from South-East Asia, 5th IBA Bachelor Thesis Conference, Netherlands.
[5] Lee-Kuen, Y.I, Sok-Gee, C, Zainudin, R. (2017). Gender Diversity and Firm’s Financial Performance in Malaysia, Asian Academy of Management Journal of Accounting and Finance, Vol.13, No.1, 41-62.
[6] Sanan, K.N. (2016). Board Gender Diversity, Financial and Social Performance of Indian Firms, The Journal of Business Perspective, Vol 20, Issue 4, pp. 361-367.
[7] Internet Movie Database for Movies, TV and Celebrities - Information courtesy of IMDb – www.imdb.com.
[8] Bechdel Score and Test - www.bechdeltest.com.
[9] Trochim, W. M., & Donnelly, J. P. (2006). The research methods knowledge base (3rd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Atomic Dog.
[10] Gravetter, F., & Wallnau, L. (2014). Essentials of statistics for the behavioural sciences (8th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
[11] Field, A. (2000). Discovering statistics using SPSS for windows. London-Thousand Oaks-New Delhi: Sage publications.
[12] Field, A. (2009). Discovering statistics using SPSS. London: SAGE.
[13] Studenmund, A.H. (2014). Using Econometrics, A Practical Guide. Sixth Edition, Harlow:Person Education Limited.
[14] Bewick, V, Cheek, L and Ball, J. (2003). Statistics review 7: Correlation and regression. Crit Care 7(6):451-459.
[15] Ramos, M, Calvao A M, Anteneodo C. (2015). Statistical Pattern in Movie Rating Behavior: Plos One Journal.
[16] Ullah R, Zeb A, Kim W. (2015). The impact of Emotions on the Helpfulness of Movie Reviews: Journal of Applied Research and Technology.