Forecasting Movie Sales at the Iranian Box-office with a System Dynamics Approach

In order to obtain financial success, the risk of investment is very high, especially in short-life products like a movie. In the previous studies, linear and static models have been used to analyze the dynamics of this industry but because of their linearity, these models were not capable of analyzing the realities of the complexities and dynamics in the movie industry. Due to the tremendous importance of movie income for their investors, this research used a system dynamics model to forecast and evaluate the financial success of movies in the Iranian media market. By scrutinizing of the previous researches, as well as through in-depth interviews with six cinematic experts, this study extracts all the factors that may affect the sale of movies and evaluates the relationships between them. Results indicated that the most critical factor affecting the sale of a movie is the recognition of the target audience and to increase the success of a movie at the box-office, it is not necessary to spend much money for the presence of expensive stars. However, other factors, such as film marketing, holidays, critics and users' review and genre, have a significant impact on the success of selling these media products in movie theaters. Taken together, the theoretical and practical implications of this research in the field of cinema industry are discussed.