Editing Never Split Tens (movie prospectus) (section)

===Effect of Star Casting===

Although one might at first glance feel that the association of stars with a motion picture would significantly increase net revenues, the situation is a bit complex.   A star is an actor, director, screenplay writer, or producer so listed on various Hollywood lists.  About 20 to 40 feature-length motion pictures are released annually featuring one or more stars.   

A scholarly study analyzing 2000 motion pictures (Ref. 13) concludes that the presence of most stars do not have a statistically significant association with a motion picture becoming a hit and earning large gross revenues.  Less than twenty stars were found to have such an association.  

Any association results from several factors.  First, stars attract, and are attracted to, better scripts, with the consequent better chance for good reviews.  Similarly, stars are attracted to motion pictures with large production budgets.   Exhibitors, both domestic and foreign, may be more willing to show motion pictures with stars, with the promise of significant box-office receipts.   Box-office receipts increase greater than proportionally to the number of opening screens.  As noted, this might result from the presence of stars leading to this willingness of exhibitors to show such motion pictures.

On the other hand, salary demands of stars, as large as many millions of dollars, add significantly to the production budget.  As a result, gross returns rather than revenues are of interest and analyzing those results show that motion pictures with stars are not  statistically more successful than motion pictures without stars (Ref. 13).   Others reach the same conclusion (Ref. 15).

In any case, casting of one or more of the high-salaried stars whose presence is strongly statistically related to significant revenue increases is not anticipated for the Motion Picture.