Chronic Murmuring

Oscar Effect

What I think would be interesting is to determine the marginal effect of winning an Oscar in one of the six to seven major categories (Best Director, Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting, Screenplay) on box office rentals. Box Office Mojo has all the data. In fact, the data is fantastic. You could look at this over several years, going back to 1982 (before 1982, BOM's data gets a little more sketchy). For instance, Monster and Return of the King were both released within a week of one another. M was released on Christmas Eve, and RotK was released a couple of days earlier. But RotK was released to approximately 3700 theaters, while M was released, initially, to only 4 theaters. M added theaters slowly. It picked up a dozen in the next week, then a few more, then gradually it grew until a month and a half later, it was playing at 1000 theaters. Now, I would expect M to get more mileage for its Best Actress-Charlize Theron winning than for RotK sweeping the entire race, only because at this point, still relatively speaking, hardly anyone has seen M. Yet, RotK has been viewed extensively over the last two months, and looks read to bow out. So I'm not entirely sure how to do a study like this. I imagine it'd be something like an event study, though, similar to what finance people ("peeps") do. Maybe this is something I could bring up to my IO professor as a possible project. I kind of just want an excuse to do something with BOM's dataset. Maybe measuring the marginal effect of a Oscar win (as well as an Oscar nomination) on box office receipts would be the way to go. Mesh had mentioned elsewhere that one of the main ways the Oscar nod is a premium is actually in the secondary market - in DVD sales and rentals. That's where there's a long effect on Oscars. But, the problem is that I imagine that data is a headache to get, whereas BOM is all laid out, nice and pretty, and at least as far actually getting the data is concerned, wouldn't require me to go through all the headaches I went through last semester when I was trying to get data on clergy wages. Ugh, what a horrible experience that was. Just thinking about that topic makes me ill. The only good thing to come out of that failed study was the title of an incomplete paper - "Left Behind: Relative Wage Changes in the Market for Clergy." About a handful of people probably would've even found that funny, including myself, but boy did I laugh about that title for days. It made up for the fact that I had a theory that I never could test.