The impact of eWOM on a movie’s box office performance

Abstract

Usually, film practitioners will advertise their movies both on a movie ticketing website and social media. A few not only familiar but also practical methods to help their movie’s electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) were applied to advertise their movies, including promoting movie-related hashtags on social media or letting starring roles attend various talk shows for their new movies and play a few clips on social media, et cetera. However, will these methods affect the movie’s online word of mouth and eventually affect the movie’s box office performance? To understand this question, we want to figure out the impact of online word of mouth on the movies’ box office performance. The study builds on a few existed papers’ understands and models of the relationship between the eWOM and the box-office performance. Previous studies usually focus on e-commerce word of mouth or social media word of mouth. That is why we could not find much information about the adoption rate of the eWOM nor the relationship between eWOM and the eWOM adoption process. With the help of the cognitive theory, this paper could explain the adoption process about how moviegoers follow suggestions from movie ticketing websites and their social media.