Title: An ever-transforming landscape and audience The reflection of production culture on the motivations of cinema attendance in The Netherlands
Abstract: The cinema industry has known many hardships in its history with multiple fierce
competitors forcing it to evolve regularly. In recent years, the cinema industry has once
again been disrupted, this time by Video-On-Demand (VOD) platforms that have altered
various aspects of the industry’s production culture. By providing audience members with
unlimited quality movies in their own homes, VOD platforms have become the main source
for watching movies. Naturally, that is worrisome for the traditional sequential cinema
distribution, which needs to adapt and innovate in order to retain consumers within the
theatres. Therefore, it is essential to identify consumers’ motivation factors to enhance them
further. This study aims at answering the question ‘How is the transforming film production
culture in The Netherlands reflected in consumers’ motivations for going to the movies?’.
In this research, an original framework was conceptualised to understand the notion
of production culture. It divided the concept of production culture into five dimensions:
financial/state aid, regulations/government policies, cinema landscape, production and
distribution landscape, and history and culture of films. This framework proved to be
necessary to gather a complete understanding the Dutch film sector and its reflection on
consumers’ motivations. A qualitative thematic document analysis and thematic analyses of
consumer interviews tailor made for this study were conducted. From the data, eight
motivations for going to the cinema theatres emerged: experience, the content of the movie,
technological appeal, movie genre, people involved, budget, theatre provider, culture in a
movie. It also became apparent that some dimensions of production culture are more
reflected in consumers motivations than others: cultural history, production and distribution
landscape, and cinema landscape were most influential, while financing/state aid was
scarcely reflected, and regulations/government policies was hardly echoed. These results
suggest that by focusing on the three most important dimensions when innovating, the
Dutch cinema industry remains competitive and relevant in the entertainment sector. There
is still an added value to going to the cinema theatres, which has a clear potential to remain.
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-06-29
Language: en
Type: article
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