Intl. Conference on Economics, Finance & Business, Paris

FOREIGNNESS AND THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF CULTURAL GOODS: DEEP LEARNING-BASED SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF HOLLYWOOD MOVIES IN CHINA

YANQING WANG

Abstract:

Globalization of cultural goods has gained substantive growth momentum in the past decade. Rooted in historical, social, legal, and political characteristics, cultural goods are inherently “foreign” when traded in a host country, presenting both opportunities and challenges for their international performance. Using the empirical context of 304 Hollywood movies in China from 2011 to 2018, we seek to understand whether and how foreignness affects the market performance of cultural goods in a host country. Given the sensory nature of Hollywood movies, we focus on semiotic foreignness — the differences in semiotic content of movie synopsis and posters between Hollywood and Chinese movies. Based on the state-of-the-art Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) in deep learning and the image processing approaches, we transformed textual data from movie synopsis and image data from movie posters into numerical representations of foreignness. The analysis results show an inverted-U shaped relation between poster foreignness and Hollywood movie’s box office sales, such that optimal sales exist at the moderate level of poster foreignness. Interestingly, Hollywood movies’ box sales in China are insensitive to the level of synopsis foreignness. Our study has important theoretical and methodological implications for research in the IB and cultural industry literature.

Keywords: Deep Learning, Foreignness, Movie, Poster, Synopsis