An ever-transforming landscape and audience The reflection of production culture on the motivations of cinema attendance in The Netherlands

The cinema industry has known many hardships in its history with multiple fierce competitors forcing it to evolve regularly. In recent years, the cinema industry has once again been disrupted, this time by Video-On-Demand (VOD) platforms that have altered various aspects of the industry’s production culture. By providing audience members with unlimited quality movies in their own homes, VOD platforms have become the main source for watching movies. Naturally, that is worrisome for the traditional sequential cinema distribution, which needs to adapt and innovate in order to retain consumers within the theatres. Therefore, it is essential to identify consumers’ motivation factors to enhance them further. This study aims at answering the question ‘How is the transforming film production culture in The Netherlands reflected in consumers’ motivations for going to the movies?’. In this research, an original framework was conceptualised to understand the notion of production culture. It divided the concept of production culture into five dimensions: financial/state aid, regulations/government policies, cinema landscape, production and distribution landscape, and history and culture of films. This framework proved to be necessary to gather a complete understanding the Dutch film sector and its reflection on consumers’ motivations. A qualitative thematic document analysis and thematic analyses of consumer interviews tailor made for this study were conducted. From the data, eight motivations for going to the cinema theatres emerged: experience, the content of the movie, technological appeal, movie genre, people involved, budget, theatre provider, culture in a movie. It also became apparent that some dimensions of production culture are more reflected in consumers motivations than others: cultural history, production and distribution landscape, and cinema landscape were most influential, while financing/state aid was scarcely reflected, and regulations/government policies was hardly echoed. These results suggest that by focusing on the three most important dimensions when innovating, the Dutch cinema industry remains competitive and relevant in the entertainment sector. There is still an added value to going to the cinema theatres, which has a clear potential to remain.