The inaugural symposium of the recently formed Screen Economics Research Group (SERG) was held at the University of Sydney on June 12 2009. It brought together participants from industry and academia to discuss the economics of the film business. There were a variety of perspectives brought to bear on the topic, spanning marketing, economics and media studies. CSB will be making available video recordings of the symposium presentations in three instalments.
In this third installment, focused on investment and return in the film business, David Walls (University of Calgary) updates and extends his well-known work on box office unpredictability by looking at the variance of film returns in relation to a number of factors including the involvement of marquee cast:
Simon Molloy (SKC Consulting/ AFTRS) demonstrates that Australian DVD revenues are, even more than cinema revenues, distributed according to a ‘winner takes all’ model, in which the leading titles claim the lion’s share of the returns:
Finally, David Court (AFTRS) looks at the poor returns on Australian films between 1988 and 2002, and asks what incentives are left for copyright holders when the risks so radically outweigh the rewards.
For a full summary of the day’s discussions, click here.
