The Effect of Online Reviews on Movie Box Office Sales

Abstract

Due to the rapidly growth of social media, potential moviegoers always depend on the online reviews to make their purchase decisions. Film companies need to know what aspects of reviews will drive sales up or down. This study proposes a framework which integrates an aspect-based sentiment analysis and econometric modeling to explore the relationships between the information features in online reviews and movie ticket sales. The empirical results indicate that whereas the rating does not matter to moviegoers and does not affect movie revenues, additional textual review, both positive and negative contents, does have a positive impact on moviegoers, and further prompts the movie revenues. These findings have significant implications for movie producers as well as advertisers to target promotions at their audience accordingly.