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The widespread commercial videocassette market has opened to the world and to libraries a grab bag of viewing choices. Library response to the feast has varied throughout the country, resulting in different emphases from collection to collection. One is the educational or cultural collection, intended not for recreational viewing but for specific training or general self‐development. Another is the esoteric collection of tapes generally produced for mass‐market consumption but not readily available through commercial outlets. This type of collection emhasizes film classics, classic television series, and how‐to‐do‐its. A third is the entertainment collection, composed primarily of mass‐marketed features and shorts. Each approach has its special problems in following the videocassette industry and finding reviews.

Interest in motion picture studies has grown rapidly over the past dozen years. A logical consequence of this interest has been the development of several retrospective and current indexes devoted to various aspects of film whether as an art form or as a business. Some of these sources have filled gaps in the field, while others, claiming to do so, have not. The computer also deserves some recognition fo: its role in the development of some of these publications. The 1970s have been a particularly active period in the publication of film studies indexes.

This paper aims to examine whether a film’s search volume causes its ticket sales in different stages of its lifecycle.

This study tests the causality between searches and sales by using an instrumental variable approach. This study exploits the ideas that consumers’ perception of a product’s consumption risk is correlated with their search efforts and consumers use multiple information sources to infer a product’s consumption risk. As an instrument for a focal film’s search volume, this paper uses review disagreement for past movies related to the focal film. This paper incorporates the ideas in a model of weekly online search volume and revenues and apply it to a movie data set.

Films’ search volume influences their revenues only until the opening week. A 10% increase in opening-week search volume generates a 7.4% increase in opening-week revenue, while the same increase in pre-launch search volume generates a 4.1% increase. Although searches are not an influencer of sales from the second week on, the random forest models and cross-validation studies find that weekly search volume is a strong predictor of weekly revenues in this period.

Testing the findings in other product categories is important for generalizing the findings.

This study suggests different usage values for online searches, depending on a film’s lifecycle stages. Furthermore, given that review disagreement has a positive influence on opening-week revenue through searches, managers should encourage diverse opinions about their films until the opening week to increase sales through searches.

Regarding the role of online search, previous studies have maintained the perspective that online search is a predictor of sales. This is the first study that finds causality between searches and sales for films.

A picture is worth a thousand words; a motion picture is probably worth even more. The black experience in America is reflected both in movies with black themes and in white or general commercial films in which black actors and actresses perform. These films continue to reflect and influence white as well as black racial attitudes and self‐images. The various cinematic genres have vividly frozen in time the perceptions and stereotypes of each period. Studied over time, they compose a kaleidoscope of changing images and themes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate two questions. First, are movie-based online community evaluations (CE) on par with film expert evaluations of new movies? Second, which group makes more reliable and accurate predictions of movie box office revenues: film reviewers or an online community?

Data were collected from a movie-based online community Fandango for a 16-month period and included all movies released during this time (373 movies). The authors compared film reviewers’ evaluations with the online CE during the first eight weeks of the movie’s release.

The study finds that community members evaluate movies differently than film reviewers. The results also reveal that CE have more predictive power than film reviewers’ evaluations, especially during the opening week of a movie.

The investigated online community is based in the USA, hence the findings are limited to this geographic context.

The main implication is that film studios and movie-goers can rely more on CE than film reviewers’ evaluation for decision making. Online CE can help film studios in negotiating with distributors, theatre owners for the number of screens. Also, community reviews rather than film reviewers’ reviews are looked upon by future movie-goers for movie choice decisions.

The study makes an original contribution to the motion picture performance research as well as to the growing research on online consumer communities by demonstrating the predictive potential of online communities with regards to evaluations of new movies.

The emphasis of this survey is on motion picture reference material that has been published since 1982. This update does not, for the most part, include titles covered in a prior RSR article (1:4; 1983), written by myself, or in an even earlier article by Leslie Kane (7:1; 1979). In those few instances where titles that have appeared in the earlier RSR film surveys are discussed, it is because they now have a new subject emphasis.

“Since films attract an audience of millions, the need and appetite for information about them is enormous.” So said Harold Leonard in his introduction to The Film Index published in 1941. The 1970's has produced more than enough — too much — food to satisfy that appetite. In the past five years the number of reference books, in this context defined as encyclopedias, handbooks, directories, dictionaries, indexes and bibliographies, and the astounding number of volumes on individual directors, complete histories, genre history and analysis, published screenplays, critics' anthologies, biographies of actors and actresses, film theory, film technique and production and nostalgia, that have been published is overwhelming. The problem in film scholarship is not too little material but the senseless duplication of materials that already exist and the embarrassing output of items that are poorly or haphazardly researched, or perhaps should not have been written at all.

The purpose of this paper is to apply social theory to the creation of a mass-media communications intervention designed to encourage earthquake-resistant construction in Nepal.

A three-step process was employed in this study: first, a narrative literature review was completed regarding the motivation of protective action. Second, key informant elicitation interviews with 15 community members at five public schools who supported making their buildings earthquake-resistant informed the script for a documentary film. Finally, the film was reviewed with stakeholders, plus 16 community members associated with a school in need of seismic work. Sociograms were used to determine relative closeness of the study participants to the film role models.

Motivating factors identified in the literature synthesis were included in the film, which focussed on effective actions taken by role models, and avoided the use of fear-based appeals. Key informant interviews yielded role-modeling details for the film script, including triggers and obstacles faced by the community members, and outcomes of their actions. Sociogram outcomes guided film editing and increased relative screen time for those community members with whom the study participants felt greater closeness. A pretest-posttest cluster randomized trial (details reported elsewhere) showed greater gains in knowledge, perceived outcome effectiveness, and intended behaviors among intervention film viewers than control participants.

This three-step process yielded the information required by a practitioner to develop a theory-based, culturally appropriate mass-media intervention designed to motivate reduction of disaster risk.

The mass media are cultural pipelines through which flow hours of entertainment and information. They represent a part of our culture which critics decry and media specialists praise. They are difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. Television (free, cable, or pay) is the subject of attention of three‐year‐olds and Ph.D. candidates alike. Newspapers are perused daily by all classes and conditions of people and their content, ownership patterns, and circulation statistics are studied in journalism classes, high schools, and by worried editors and publishers. Films entertained children in Nickelodeons, raised the spirits of millions during World War II, and now are the subject of so much analysis that words like ‘pan,’ ‘take,’ and ‘track’ have taken on new meaning in the vocabulary of most ordinary citizens.

This paper aims to identify the effects of social learning and network externalities by conditioning on product quality and early sales momentum. This approach is demonstrated using film sales data.

This study used econometric modeling approach.

It was found that both social learning and network externalities have significant and comparable impacts on film choice. We show that the relative effects of network externalities and social learning in the film market are robust to different momentum and quality definitions and to alternative estimation methods.

Scholars have long argued that social learning plays a key role in new product diffusion. In some product categories, consumer choice may also be influenced by network externalities, meaning that purchasing popular products may provide the consumer utility above and beyond that derived from product usage directly. We propose a novel identification approach to help quantify the relative magnitude of these two effects on new product sales.