Structural characteristics of collaboration networks among Chinese online film production companies—a comparison with theatrical films

This study examines online films ranked 1–40 in the annual revenue-sharing box-office rankings for 2020–2025 recorded by Maoyan Pro, with the 2025 Youku ranking collected through rank 38, and theatrical films ranked 101–200 in the annual box office rankings over the same period. After data cleaning and deduplication, 488 online films and 564 theatrical films were retained. Collaboration networks were constructed based on shared production credits. The results show that, when isolated nodes are retained, the online film sample has a higher average degree and a larger proportion of nodes in the largest connected component. After isolated nodes are removed, however, the ranking of the two networks by network density is reversed. Both samples contain many entities involved in only one sampled film, with a higher proportion observed in the theatrical film sample. In both networks, the maximum k-core consists of entities credited on a single film and therefore cannot be taken as evidence of an industry core. The number of communities is affected by isolated nodes, while modularity varies with the weighting scheme. The weighted betweenness centrality rankings of entities appearing in both samples reflect only their positions within their respective networks. These differences are confined to the structures of the sampled networks and cannot be attributed to distribution channels or used to infer capital control or cross-market channels.