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Revenues, Profitability, and Returns: Clinical Analysis of the Market for Mobster Films

Department of Economics, University of Calgary, Canada

We analyze empirically the revenues, profitability, and financial returns of mobster-related movies using data from worldwide theatrical exhibition, television syndication, and video rentals and sales. We quantify the revenues across each window of exhibition in relation to subsequent windows and to the production budget. A regression model is used to show the composition of worldwide revenues in relation to production value across the sequential windows of release. Project-level profitability and returns to investment are found to deviate substantially from normality. For the purpose of investment decision-making and risk management, the distribution of financial returns is fitted using the Lévy-stable distribution to account for its high peak and heavy upper tail. Gangster-film profitability prospects are computed from the fitted Lévy-stable distribution.

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