Cultural Discount and Cross-Culture Predictability: Examining the Box Office Performance of American Movies in Hong Kong

Media studies have suggested that a media product traveling across cultures would be received in locally specific ways. This study argues that cultural discount and cross-culture predictability of financial performance are 2 quantitative manifestations of local reception. The loss of value and performance predictability constitutes a problem for media producers, whereas universalizing the media product is a possibly useful strategy to handle such problems. This article analyzes box office figures from 1989 to 2004 to examine whether Hollywood movies of different genres are more or less subject to cultural discount and lack of predictability when they travel to Hong Kong. The results show that comedies are highly particularistic and that science fiction is apparently the most universal. Mixed results are obtained for other movie genres.