Modeling heavy tails and skewness in film returns

by Walls, W. D.

The average of box-office revenue is dominated by extreme outcomes, with most films earning little and most revenues flowing to a few blockbusters. In this paper the skewness and heavy tails of film returns are formally modelled using skew-Normal and skew-t distributions. Logarithmic skew-Normal and skew-t models of the distribution of box-office revenue are fitted conditional on star actors and directors, budget, release pattern, genre, rating, and year of release. The estimates show significantly more skewness and heavier tails than the log-Normal distribution. It is also found that a wide theatrical release has a much smaller impact on box-office revenue when heavy tails and skewness are explicitly modelled.

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