On an Optimal Solution to the Film Scheduling and Showtime Staggering Problem

In an era of data driven digital transformation, a customer driven business strategy is essential for success. In the motion picture industry, movie exhibitors must compete to win share of consumers entertainment time (and wallet) against digital entertainment alternatives offered by mammoth sized, digital focused, competitors like Netflix, Amazon and Disney [1]. Customer loyalty, point-of-sale and digital payment p latforms produce rich insights that can leveraged to inform business operations and automate the decision-making pr ocess, effectively enabling movie exhibitors to compete using analytics and artificial intelligence. This study presen ts a new, customer driven, quantitative approach to movie scheduling that can be utilized by movie exhibitors to increase attendance and market share. The role of the exhibitor is to show films that are produced by movie st udios (see [2] for more details on the roles of the stakeholders in the movie industry). Exhibitors do not have d ecision making authority over the movies that are produced by the studios.