Question

Watching movies with particular kinds of content (e.g. violence, coarse language, crime, sexual references) may affect moviegoers in negative ways that concern government policymakers across the world. Use the theories of market failure and government intervention to explain the reasons for this concern. Identify different suitable government interventions that Singapore government may consider. Critically discuss potential problems with these interventions.

Answer 1

The kinds of content that can affect the moviegoers adversely are:violence, coarse language, crime, sexual references. This is can induce crime and violence as shown in the movies, cause the teenagers to speak in a coarse language. At such an impressionable age they might use the abusive language trying to emulate their favourite actors on screen.

Now, movies have a huge impact on the audience of a country whether in a positive or negative way. Though it is meant to make the audience distinguish between good and bad, and get inspired in a positive way. For the betterment of a country the quality of movies is very important and also the entertainment industry adds to the revenue of the government. But negative content in movies is a prime source of negative externalities which causes market failure. Now, in this case taking movies as a product in the market, market failure would mean non-efficient product from a societal point of view. The part of the audience who get inspired by these kind of movies  are very much capable of harming others. This, causes the negative externality where the bystander who had nothing to do with the film gets affected adversely. Whether few individuals get affected or a substantial section of population determines the magnitude of effect on the country and hence the economy.

In cases of market failure government intervenes to get the situation under control. It happens normally in two possible ways.Either government implements policies or taxes the the owners of the product which is the cause of negative externalities.

Here also the government can implement two possible policies:

Firstly, the censor board which is a government body can delete the scenes from the movie which have a possibilty of inspiring the audience in a wrong way, and eventually issue adult(A) certification for the film. Mature audience have the ability to accept the movies in a positive manner. In few cases if the government feels that the country on an average is yet to evolve a lot, to accept a particular film in the right way, government can also think of banning it.

Secondly, if the producers plead for the scenes entirely for a creative purpose they can be made to pay for it. They have a choice: either get censorship certificate free of cost by agreeing to release the censored version or pay a fine to keep those scenes. This will raise the price of tickets automatically and filter a section of the audience. Government can also fix the threshold price i.e. the lower limit of the price of movie tickets to achieve the same.

Now, each of the policies has its own set of problems.

1. Deleting scenes can have a huge creative implication. It can very well defeat the purpose of the makers even if the intention of the film was absolutely right. From past experiences we have seen censoring changes the whole creative purpose and idea of the film.

2. Banning a film after it has been made absolutely ready for release would render the makers bankrupt which would definitely be another source of market failure.

3. Again, a fine or raise in taxes or even marking a floor price for the movie tickets will increase the cost of production enormously and even cause a fall in demand for tickets, respectively. As either of the policies would reduce their revenue and profits, definitely it would have a negative economic implication.

To conclude, a possible solution being adopted by many makers of films is to release the movie on certain web/OTT platforms where limited section of audience who are normally content driven and mature enough to react to those movies in a positive way, have the access.