https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2004-00382-7
Hollywood blockbusters and long-tailed distributions
An empirical study of the popularity of movies
1
Institute of Mathematical Sciences, C.I.T. Campus,
Taramani, 600113 Chennai, India
2
Madras School of Economics,
Anna University Campus, 600025 Chennai, India
Corresponding authors: a sitabhra@imsc.res.in - b raghav@mse.ac.in
Received:
16
May
2004
Revised:
24
September
2004
Published online:
14
December
2004
Numerical data for all movies released in theaters in the USA during
the period 1997-2003
are examined for the distribution of their popularity in terms of (i) the number of weeks they spent in the Top 60 according to the weekend
earnings, and (ii) the box-office gross during the opening week, as
well as, the total duration for which they were shown in theaters.
These distributions show long tails where the most popular movies are located.
Like the study of Redner [S. Redner, Eur. Phys. J. B 4, 131 (1998)]
on the distribution of citations to individual papers,
our results
appear to be consistent with
a power-law dependence of the rank distribution of gross revenues for
the most popular movies with a exponent close to 
.
PACS: 89.75.Da – Systems obeying scaling laws / 89.65.-s – Social and economic systems / 02.50.-r – Probability theory, stochastic processes, and statistics
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2004
