Media Trade Beyond Country Borders: Five Types of Global Cinema Distribution

Abstract

While international cinema trade has been studied extensively, no work to date has examined global distribution beyond country borders. Instead of exploring media flows from production origins to importing markets, this paper analyses the shape of each film’s global theatrical run, combining information from 40 countries. The run is characterised by three main factors: the number of global screenings, the geographical spread, and the global duration in theatres. With the aid of cluster analysis, five types of distribution are identified based on the three proposed factors. The paper explores similarities and differences across the clusters using multiple regression analysis to model the relationship between global exposure in terms of screenings and movie, distribution, and origin characteristics. Results show notable distinctions between the segments with only the number of countries visited and documentary genre being uniform across clusters. This paper uses a dataset of 3,424 films from 124 origins that are released in at least two out of 40 countries included within the sample derived from the Kinomatics Global Showtime database. The unique contribution of this paper is in that it covers multiple areas to provide insight into cinema as a global market based on detailed screening-level observations constituting over 130 million showtimes.

Keywords: big data, film distribution, global media trade, clusters, movie industry, cinema

JEL Classification: L82, Z10