Time Is Money: Running Time and Efficient Strategies in the Movie Industry

Despite the importance of running time, the economic literature focusing on the determinants of box-office revenues has almost neglected its role as a strategic variable. This note fills in this lack of literature by focusing on the role of running time on box-office revenues. To this aim, using an original dataset composed of worldwide top 20 titles from 2010 to 2019, we perform a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), in which scale efficiency is defined as the capability to plan running time in order to maximize box-office revenues. Results show that running time is a crucial strategic variable to design revenue performance, whose role significantly differs across genres.