How does a studio assemble a multi-functional team that maximizes a film’s box office potential?
To a film’s success, it is crucial to identify and build a team of high potential cast and crew members. Thus, when a producer is gathering a development team, they must understand the methods in which different team members contribute to the film’s box office. In the paper, “The Role of Network Embeddedness in Film Success” by Grant Packard, Anocha Aribarg, Jehoshua Eliashberg, and Natasha Z. Foutz, the authors explore the conceptual framework of network embeddedness that plays a functional role in the film industry. The two aspects are positional embeddedness (PE)—how a person is associated with well-connected others—and junctional embeddedness (JE)—to what degree a person connects sub-communities within the industry.
The social network analysis of a film’s development team examines the interdependence of persons in the industry. The authors did extensive research on the collaborative networks of individuals working together towards a common goal, connected through collaborative activity and a chain of common collaborators. Along with the number of ties a person has, an individual’s embeddedness is also affected by who they collaborate with as well as the functional role they play in their collaborations.
The notion of positional embeddedness introduced in this paper is similar to the concept of strong ties. Stronger ties are correlated with closer friendships and greater frequency of interaction. Such connections will produce several benefits to a film, including more public opportunities. A major factor contributing to a film’s box office success is the attention garnered by the actors and actresses from media and the general public. Those with high PE, or stronger ties, will have more visibility and media coverage, greater audience appeal, and more effective advertisement for the film.
On the other hand, the crew benefits more with high junctional embeddedness.This concept is closely related to the idea of local bridges. Those with high JE bridge weakly linked clusters or sub-components of a network. The argument of local bridges or social ties is that they connect us to new sources of information and new opportunities and how their span in the network is directly related to their weakness of social ties. High JE professionals will benefit from the greater diversity of information and resources emerging from the collaboration network. Furthermore, a crew with higher JE, more social ties, will be exposed to a greater variety of concepts and styles that offer them more capacity to explore unconventional and captivating ideas.
The “small-world” phenomenon is also examined through the combination of short path lengths and high clustering coefficients between individuals and potential collaborators within the film industry. For example, in table 2, six networks are analyzed, with each network containing nearly 3000 movies and over 9000 individuals, which forms a giant component with 85% of all potential collaborators in the industry. Hollywood is at the core of this component while most international productions and a few independent U.S. film teams operate outside this dominant cluster. Individuals wishing to reach a potential collaborator only need on average four other interactions, making the mean path length 4. Moreover, the clustering coefficient is reported to be 21%, which is higher than other randomly generated networks of the same size.
Conceptually and empirically, this research proves that cast members should seek to collaborate with well-connected others, while crew members should focus on searching for diverse collaborations. Furthermore, it explores the connectivity within the film industry and its small world network, which is highly advantageous for social transmission of resources and influence.
Source:
https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/The-Role-of-Network-Embeddeness-in-Film-Success_6.pdf