Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) asks, How big would the movie industry be if there were more screens?:
One of the examples I use in the book to illustrate the distorting effect of limited “shelf space” in traditional markets is Hollywood box office revenues. The American megaplex theater network has only has enough screens to show about 120 films per year. Meanwhile, there are about 13,000 films shown in film festivals each year. So only a tiny fraction of the movies made get enough theatrical distribution to register any sort of significant box office revenues.How much bigger would the movie industry be if it didn’t have this distribution bottleneck suppressing measured demand for niche film? I get that question all the time, for various markets, and usually I can only guess at the answer. But now Kalevi Kilkki, Principal Scientist at Nokia Siemens Networks, has actually done the math. Building on the work in his earlier paper on this subject, he finds that for movies, the “latent demand” for films that don’t get adequate distribution is 60%-70% as big as the existing industry.