Reciprocal Relationship between Movies and the Movie-Themed Mobile Games

Recently, the studios in Hollywood introduce mobile games based on the storyline of movies for promotional purposes. Among the movie-themed mobile games, not a few games have made a financial success as the box office scores of the original movie increases. Thus, managers should deal with the promotional mobile app and the target product simultaneously on the belief of reciprocal beneficial relationships between them. The current research aims to discover the mutual causation between the performance of movies and mobile games by applying a simultaneous equations model and a panel vector autoregressive model. From the results, we confirmed that an increase of mobile game ranking produces additional sales of movies while securement of distribution channels and daily seasonality are considered. Concurrently, an increase of movie revenues incurs supplementary escalation in the rank of movie-themed mobile games. If a promotional mobile game performs as an independent game, film distributor could expect additional revenue streams as well as increased awareness of movies.