Audience taste divergence over time: An analysis of U.S. movies' box office in Hong Kong, 1989-2004

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 83, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 883-900

  Lee, Francis L F ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG   (Hong Kong)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL INFLUENCE; DIVERGENCE; MEDIA ROLE; QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST; HONG KONG;

EID: 34047257368     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900608300410     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. James Curran, Media and Power (London: Routledge, 1999), 170;
2. Oliver Boyd-Barrett, "Approaches to 'New Audience Research,'" in Approaches to Media: A Reader, ed. Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Chris Newbold (New York: Arnold, 1997), 498-504;
3. David Morley, Home Territories (London: Routledge, 2000).
4. David Morley, The "Nationwide" Audience (London: British Film Institute, 1980);
5. David Morley, "Active Audience Theory: Pendulum and Pitfalls," Journal of Communication 43 (December 1993): 13-19.
6. Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
7. Ien Ang, Watching Dallas (London: Methuen, 1985);
8. Vicki Mayer, "Living Telenovelas/Telenovelizing Life: Mexican American Girls' Identities and Transnational Telenovelas," Journal of Communication 53 (September 2003): 479-95;
9. Stuart Cunningham and Elizabeth Jacka, "Neighborly Relations: Cross-cultural Reception Analysis and Australian Soaps in Britain," Cultural Studies 8 (July 1994): 509-26;
10. Radhika Parameswaran, "Western Romance Fiction as English-language Media in Postcolonial India," Journal of Communication 49 (summer 1999): 84-105;
11. Dong-Hoo Lee, "Cultural Contact with Japanese TV Dramas: Modes of Reception and Narrative Transparency," in Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas, ed. Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2002), 251-74.
12. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
13. John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
14. Marwan M. Kraidy, "Hybridity in Cultural Globalization," Communication Theory 12 (August 2002): 316-39;
15. Marwan M. Kraidy, "The Global, the Local, and the Hybrid: A Native Ethnography of Glocalization," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 16 (December 1999): 456-76;
16. Larry Strelitz, "Against Cultural Essentialism: Media Reception among South African Youth," Media Culture & Society 26 (November 2004): 625-41.
17. Anandam P. Kavoori, "Discursive Texts, Reflexive Audiences: Global Trends in Television News Texts and Audience Reception," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 43 (surruner 1999): 386-98.
18. Koichi Iwabuchi, "Introduction: Cultural Globalization and Asian Media Connections," in Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Con-sumption of Japanese TV Dramas, ed. Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2002), 5.
19. For discussions of the distinction between and relative merits of cultural and media imperialism, see John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (London: Pinter, 1991).
20. Oliver Boyd-Barreft, "Media Imperialism Reformulated," in Electronic Empires: Global Media and Local Resistance, ed. Daya Kishan Thussu (London: Arnold, 1998), 157-76.
21. Sonia Livingstone, "Relationships Between Media and Audiences: Prospects for Audience Reception Studies," in Media, Ritual and Identity, ed. Tamar Liebes and James Curran (London: Routledge, 1998), 248.
22. Daniel Hallin, "Broadcasting in the Third World: From National Development to Civil Society" in Media, Ritual and Identity, ed. Tamar Liebes and James Curran (London: Routledge, 1998), 164.
23. Curran, Media and Power.
24. John Corner, "Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts, Methods," in Mass Media and Society, ed. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Arnold, 1996), 299.
25. Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus, "Reasons for U.S. Dominance of the International Trade in Television Programmes," Media, Culture & Society 10 (October 1988), 499-515.
26. Hoskins and Mirus, "Reasons for U.S. Dominance";
27. Colin Hoskins, Adam Finn, and Stuart McFayden, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
28. Steve S. Wildman and Stephen E. Siwek, International Trade in Films and Television Programs (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1988);
29. Steve S. Wildman, "Trade Liberalization and Policy for Media Industries: A Theoretical Examination of Media Flows," Canadian Journal of Communication 20 (summer 1995): 367-88.
30. Francis L. F. Lee, "Cultural Discount and Cross-culture Predictability: Examining Box Office Performance of American Movies in Hong Kong," Journal of Media Economics 19 (winter 2006): 259-78. It should be noted that cross-culture predictability may or may not involve one culture influencing another. People may take foreign media products' performance in the original domestic market as an indicator of the quality of the products. In this case we can say the perception of domestic performance of media products is likely to influence their performance in foreign markets. But even when causal influence is not involved, cross-culture predictability will still exist to the extent that the audiences in different markets share similar taste and aesthetic judgments.
31. Unlike Lee's earlier study, this current study does not examine cultural discount over time because the concept is less important to the present theoretical concern. See Lee, "Cultural Discount and Cross-culture Predictability."
32. Joseph Man Chan, "Disneyfying and Globalizing the Chinese Legend Mulan: A Study of Transculturation," in In Search of Boundaries: Communication, Nation-States, and Cultural Identities, ed. Joseph Man Chan and Bryce T. McIntyre (Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing, 2002), 225-48;
33. Ana M. Lopez, "Our Welcomed Guests: Telenovelas in Latin America," in To Be Continued: Soap Operas Around the World, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1995), 256-75;
34. Sharon Waxman, "Hollywood Tailors its Movies to Sell in Foreign Markets: Studios Say 'Ethnic' Films are not Popular Overseas," the Washington Post, October 26, 1998, sec. A, p. 1.
35. Lee, "Cultural Discount and Cross-culture Predictability."
36. Julian Stringer, "Introduction," in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1-14.
37. Steve Neale, "Hollywood Blockbusters: Historical Dimensions," in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (New York: Routledge, 2003), 47-60.
38. Thomas Schatz, "The New Hollywood," in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Stringer, 15-44;
39. Jon Lewis, "Following the Money in America's Sunniest Company Town: Some Notes on the Political Economy of the Hollywood, Blockbusters," in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Stringer, 61-71.
40. Douglas Gomery, "The Economics of Hollywood: Money and Media," in Media Economics: Theory and Practice, ed. Alison Alexander, James Owers, Rod Carveth, C. Ann Hollifield, and Albert N. Greco (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 193-206;
41. David Croteau and William Hoynes, The Business of Media (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2001).
42. Stringer, "Introduction."
43. Hong Kong movies were also popular among the Chinese diasporas in Europe and North America. See Ching Wai Chan, The Structure and Marketing Analysis of Hong Kong Film Industry (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Movie Biweekly, 2000, in Chinese).
44. The top 100 box office list was produced by a local film magazine in year 2000. It has taken into account over time changes in ticket prices. Chan Ching Wai, "The century's 100 most popular movies in Hong Kong," City Entertainment, November 11-14, 1999, 50-53.
45. Sociologist Janet Salaff, in a much broader analysis of young working class women in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, did mention how foreign movies provided part of the resources with which young factory girls constructed their identities and self-understanding as working women. See Janet W. Salaff, Working Daughters in Hong Kong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
46. Vivian W. W. Tam, on the other hand, focused on how Hong Kong movie star Chow Yun Fat's Hollywood career was articulated in local mainstream discourse into a neo-liberal ideology of individual self-reliance and self-improvement. Her study showed that Hong Kong people of different social classes reacted very differently to the Chow Yun Fat re-imported from Hollywood. Vivian Wai-wan Tam, Domestication of the Cultural Icon Chow Yun-fat: From Subversion to Domination (M.Phil. diss., Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002).
47. The lists were originally available at http://www.mpia.org.hk. The Web site is no longer in operation. But raw records of movie box office are kept at the Hong Kong Film Archive.
48. Year of showing in Hong Kong refers to the year of the opening day of cinema showing.
49. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, Gianfranco J. Walsh, and Matthias Bode, "Exporting Media Products: Understanding the Success and Failure of Hollywood Movies in Germany," Advances in Consumer Research 31 (2004): 633-38.
50. Since the mid-1990s the Hong Kong movie industry has suffered from a significant decline. Strong competition from the quickly developing movie industries in other Asian countries, such as China, Taiwan, and South Korea, has affected the income sources for Hong Kong productions. Together with other social changes such as the rise of alternative forms of entertainment (e.g., karaoke), new movie consumption practices (e.g., DVD and VCD), the problem of piracy, and so on, both the number and box office of local productions have declined sharply.
51. NOW Broadband television, for example, carries Cinemax, Hallmark Channel, Turner Classic, MGM movie channel, and five channels bearing the brand name of HBO: HBO hits, HBO family, HBO signature, HBO signature plus 1, HBO.
52. This phenomenon is dubbed the "Korean wave" in popular discourse. It has attracted much academic attention to the success story of the Korean cultural industries and regional reception of Korean popular culture. For examples, see Dal Yong Jin, "Cultural Politics in Korea's Contemporary Films under Neoliberal Globalization," Media, Culture & Society 28 (January 2006): 5-23;
53. Doobo Shim, "Hybridity and the Rise of Korean Popular Culture in Asia," Media, Culture & Society 28 (January 2006): 25-44.
54. Construction of the interaction term follows the centering method to minimize multicollinearity. See Leona S. Aiken and Stephen G. West, Multiple Regression Analysis (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991).
55. Lee, "Cultural Discount and Cross-culture Predictability."
56. It should be noted that there is limited correlation between the genre variables and year of showing. When put into a multiple regression with year of showing as the dependent variable and the nine genre variables as the independent variables, only the genre of horror shows a weak, though significant, relationship with year of showing (beta = .09, p <.05). Therefore, not controlling for the genre variables should not lead to misleading results and conclusions.
57. This also raises the question of whether holiday showing itself affects how cross-culture predictability changes over time. Further analysis, however, shows that the answer is no.
58. Further analysis shows that other cut-off points around US$150 million would generate the same patterns of findings.
59. Fred S. Zufryden, "New Film Website Promotion and Box-office Performance," Journal of Advertising Research 40 (January/April 2000): 55-64;
60. Dean Keith Simonton, "Cinematic Creativity and Production Budgets: Does Money Make the Movie?" Journal of Creative Behavior 39 (First Quarter 2005): 1-15.
61. Michael Allen, "Talking about a Revolution: The Blockbuster as Industrial Advertisement," in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Stringer, 101-13.
62. Kavoori, "Discursive Texts, Reflexive Audiences."
63. Corner, "Reappraising Reception."
64. Boyd-Barrett, "Media Imperialism Reformulated."
65. For an example, see Karin Hake, "Five-year-olds' Fascination for Television: A Comparative Study," Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research 8 (November 2001): 423-41.