Blockbusters, Bombs and Sleepers: The Income Distribution of Movies

Abstract

The distribution of gross earnings of movies released each year show a distribution having a power-law tail with Pareto exponent $\alpha \simeq 2$. While this offers interesting parallels with income distributions of individuals, it is also clear that it cannot be explained by simple asset exchange models, as movies do not interact with each other directly. In fact, movies (because of the large quantity of data available on their earnings) provide the best entry-point for studying the dynamics of how ``a hit is born'' and the resulting distribution of popularity (of products or ideas). In this paper, we show evidence of Pareto law for movie income, as well as, an analysis of the time-evolution of income.