The motion picture industry

The motion picture industry provides a fruitful research domain for scholars in marketing and other disciplines, The industry has a high economic importance and is appealing to researchers because it offers both rich data that cover the entire product lifecycle for a large number of new products and because it provides many unsolved 'puzzles.' Despite the fact that the amount of scholarly research in this area is rapidly growing, its impact on practice has not been as significant as in other industries (e.g., consumer packaged goods). In this article, we discuss critical practical issues for the motion picture industry, review existing knowledge on those issues, and outline promising research directions. Our review is organized around the three key stages in the value chain for theatrical motion pictures: production, distribution, and exhibition. We discuss various conjectures, framed as research challenges or specific research hypotheses, related to each stage in the value chain, followed by a set of specific research avenues for each of those stages. We focus on what we believe are critical managerial issues.