Faculty Sponsor: Lisa Dombrowski
Stella Zhang
Stella Zhang is a rising senior (’24) majoring in East Asian Studies and Economics at Wesleyan. She is from Tianjin, China, and studied at La Jolla Country Day School in California before coming to Wesleyan. During her spare time, she enjoys listening to music, playing instruments, and dancing, and she is involved in the Wesleyan K-pop Dance Crew on campus. She plans on going to law school in the future.
Abstract: This project focuses on visualizing potential trends in Hong Kong movie screenings in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. The project specifically examines four Chinese language theaters (Garfield, Sing Lee, Sun Sing, Music Palace) in LA and NYC, and presents the final product in an interactive dashboard using Looker Studio. The main objective of this project is to identify the differences in film genres being screened at different theaters, as well as the release window for each film. The results indicate that, with the exception of the Sing Lee theater in LA which had slightly more action film screenings, all other theaters primarily screened comedies alongside other genres. This disparity in genres raises questions regarding potential differences in audience taste and/or demographic composition between these theaters. Furthermore, the analysis of the window between the Hong Kong release date and the first screening date in the United States reveals an interesting trend. The LA market shows an increasing release window, indicating a larger gap of time between the film’s initial release date in Hong Kong and its screening date in the United States over time. Conversely, the NYC theaters exhibit the opposite trend. The findings from this research could be valuable to the study of Chinese-language theaters in North America and contribute to further studies in Asian American history.
Interactive Dashboard: https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/bc8178d8-2b79-4836-ba7f-8acc1000d1a5
Stella-Zhang-poster