The Fault in Our Stars

A Quantitative Study on the Effect of Cast Member Celebrity on Film Success

Abstract

Trust among Hollywood film executives in the ability of influential celebrity actors to boost a film’s success, financially and artistically, can be seen in the extra ordinate sums of money actors are paid today by studios. However, the exact efficacy of this idea which so many studios have put their faith in has yet to be comprehensively tested. To this end, the following paper seeks to determine how the celebrity status of an actor correlates with film success, as defined by commercial success and critical acclaim, of the post-2015 films they star in, through a quantitative correlational analysis. Through a cross-sectional regression model, celebrity status, defined through the IMDB StarMETER, will be compared against both commercial success, as defined by box office revenue, and critical acclaim, broken down as artistic merit and public perception, to be represented by the Metacritic Score and IMDB Rating respectively. Based on the p-values for each model, it was determined that the collective celebrity status of a film's cast has a statistically significant, positive correlation with a film's commercial success and public perception, but not on a film's artistic merit. For film studios, these findings validate their financially burdensome philosophy of spending millions on celebrity actors, as it results in more profitable films. Additionally, these findings suggest that the likability of a film can be increased with a stronger cast celebrity status. However, these findings indicate that film studios attempting to create artistically successful films cannot do so solely through the addition of famous actors.