Domestic Demand for Spanish Cinema: The popularuty of star film directors as determinant for theatre attendance

Demand for the cinema is extremely uncertain and uncertainty also applies to the Spanish film industry. The year 2008 showed a worrying dropped in the number of cinema spectators in Spain. Traditionally, studies of demand for the Spanish cinema have explained attendance fluctuations by means of standard household consumption variables. However, quality factors influencing demand have not been considered for analysis. The current study focuses on such quality factors, mainly on the role of stars as determinant for theatre attendance. Rosen’s theory of stardom is used to explain whether Spanish star film directors have enough power so as to increase local theatre attendance rates. The analysis is carried out over a data set of the hundred best seen Spanish movies between 2004 and 2008 in Spain. The model built for the demand function combines standard demand variables for household consumption, like ticket price and consumer income together with quality factors having to do with cinema consumption, like directors’ popularity, cast’s popularity and genre. Popularity is measured in terms of visibility on the internet, that is, the variable for popularity is built with the number of hits in a Google search per every director and actor. Some other variables, like price of substitutes, digital piracy and film budget are initially investigated but ultimately left out of the final model due to lack of information or methodological obstacles. The methods used are both correlation analyses and multivariate regression analysis of several linear and non linear models. Results of descriptive statistics of the demand variables show that success is linked to extreme events, which makes it difficult to forecast the impact of a movie on the audience. Simple correlation analyses point in the direction of a positive connection between attendance rates and cast popularity together with genre thriller, as well as a significant negative correlation between attendance and comedy genre. Results of the multivariate regressions with attendance as dependent variable confirm that cast popularity is the only variable with a significant impact on attendance, whilst director’s popularity yields no significant results. Finally, the best fitting multivariate regression model is a non linear one which includes an independent variable representing the synergic interaction of director’s popularity with cast popularity. It is only through this interaction when results for the variable director’s popularity show a positive sign. Consequently, the results for the analyzed data reject the hypothesis that Spanish star directors are significant determinants for theatre attendance and turn instead to actors as the ones for whom theory of stardom applies.