Movie Industry Demand and Theater Availability

Consumers can only choose to see a movie if it is available in theaters. Explicitly taking into account movie theater availability, we estimate a structural model of movie demand with the use of U.S. movie data from 1995 to 2017. Estimation results indicate that the impact of theater availability on movie demand is both statistically and economically significant. We also find that movie budget predictions based on the model that incorporates theater availability is more consistent with the data, while the model that ignores theater availability on average over-predict production budgets.