Diversity on Screen: Unraveling the Impact of Minority Representation in Film on Consumer Attitudes and Industry Practices

This project explores the impact of the leading cast's diversity on Hollywood movie box office performance, aiming to replicate the findings of Xing Fan's (2021) master's thesis and conducting additional analyses.

Introduction

Research consistently shows that minorities, including racial and ethnic groups, women, and disabled groups, are underrepresented in the film industry (Iasiello, 2017; Eschholz, 2002; Karniouchina, 2023). This underrepresentation is evident in both leading roles and directorial positions, where employers often attribute the root of bias to consumer attitudes rather than organisational practices, explained by individual preference for racial and ethnic similarity within networks, as well as systemic issues such as lack of opportunities and outcomes for women and racial/ethnic minorities (Iasiello, 2017; Iasiello, 2020; Erigha, 2015).

This underrepresentation carries substantial social and economic implications, potentially perpetuating discrimination and harmful stereotypes. It restricts the range of narratives available to society about diverse groups, thereby shaping perceptions over time.The empirical challenge of testing the influence and scope of consumer racial attitudes on purchasing decisions has constrained prior efforts to disentangle managerial bias from consumer bias. (Kuppaswamy, 2018.)

In this study, we expand upon research regarding consumer reactions to workforce diversity in the film industry, utilizing an intersectional data analysis approach. We replicate and build upon Xi Fang's 2021 study from The University of Guelph, which evaluated U.S. film performance in relation to race and gender diversity of casts (Fang, 2021). Our work further investigates the impact of diversity on viewing hours on Netflix. Moreover, we explore consumer discrimination nuances by examining the variability of responses to main cast diversity across different movie genres, using mixed effects modeling. This approach broadens our understanding of the social contexts in which consumer discrimination operates.

Hypotheses

Specifically, this project investigates:

• H2: The movie market performance is negatively related to the ratio of White actors in the movie leading cast.
• H4: The movie market performance is negatively related to the ratio of female actors in the movie leading cast.
• H5: The interaction of the ratio of actors from different ethnicities and the ratio of women has a significant impact on movie market performance.

Process

• First page is Replication_Cleaning, then Replication_Results, then Further_Analysis
• Replication of paper then further analysis

Installation instructions for contributors

• Find a link to the Fan, X., 2021 study here: Fan, X., 2021
• Download the dataset from kaggle here: IMDB 5000 Movie Dataset

Suggestions for contributors and future analyses

The points below are suggestions for contributors to enhance this research:

• Analyze audience preferences by genre to identify key attendance drivers.
• Investigate how historical and cultural contexts within genres affect audience engagement.
• Assess the impact of genre-specific marketing on the success of movies with diverse casts.
• Study genre receptivity to diverse casts to find potential for broader storytelling.
• Improve the quality of the sample size from the top 10 highest budgeting movies per year to the highest 30 budgeting movies per year
• Incorporate further control variables such as release season (cite), movie duration, and IMDB movie score
• Investigate ethnicity as the independent variable as a more nuance substitute for race
• Investigate sexuality as an independent variable

List of known issues

• The sample size used is one third of the sample used by Xing Fan, leading to the inability to replicate exact results

References

Eschholz, Sarah et al. “SYMBOLIC REALITY BITES: WOMEN AND RACIAL/ETHNIC MINORITIES IN MODERN FILM.” Sociological Spectrum 22 (2002): 299 - 334.

Fan, X., (2021). The Influence of Movie Main Cast’s Diversity on Attendance (Doctoral dissertation, University of Guelph). Available at: https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/6c82a2c1-57ba-4963-b09e-3942e3410421/content (Accessed: 27/12/2023)

Harris, A. (2016). Industry Folks Are Really Trying to Make the “Diversity Doesn’t Sell Overseas” Mantra Happen. [online] Available at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/03/30/the_hollywood_reporter_on_empire_s_global_ratings_is_the_latest_attempt.html (Accessed: 27/12/2023)

Iasiello, Carmen. “Underrepresentation of minorities in hollywood films: An agent based modeling approach to explanations.” 2017 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) (2017): 4582-4583.

Karniouchina, Ekaterina V. et al. “Women and Minority Film Directors in Hollywood: Performance Implications of Product Development and Distribution Biases.” Journal of Marketing Research 60 (2023): 25 - 51.

Moore, E. E., & Coleman, C. (2015). Starving for diversity: Ideological implications of race representations in The Hunger Games. The Journal of Popular Culture, 48(5), 948. Available at: https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1785&context=ias_pub (Accessed: 27/12/2023)

Roxborough, S. (2016). America’s TV Exports Too Diverse for Overseas. [online] Available at: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/americas-tv-exports-diverse-overseas-879109 (Accessed: 27/12/2023)

Scott, Nicholas A., and Janet Siltanen. "Intersectionality and quantitative methods: Assessing regression from a feminist perspective." International Journal of Social Research Methodology 20.4 (2017): 373-385.