The effect of star power on movie success: evidence from the Kazakh cinema industry

Abstract

This paper studies the relationship between "star power" and movie success using the novel weekly box-office revenue data for Kazakhstan. We focus on an often overlooked problem of competition between movie casts by employing a fixed-effect model as the base model. Our main contribution consists of using a new measure for star power of competing movies and analyzing its effect under different model extensions. We also perform a robustness check of the main findings. The results show that the star power of competing casts has a statistically significant negative effect on box-office revenue of a movie. This paper contributes to existing research on star power and competition.