Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Entertainment topics simple and complex explored in-depth.
Records have nearly been smashed! After decades in the doldrums, in this year’s Oscar’s telecast—for achievement in the year 2018—popular movies made a comeback. Here’s Todd VanDerWerff explaining for Vox: For the first time since 2012, the total domestic box office of the eight films nominated for Best Picture topped
Netflix moves the PR needle. Even I jumped into the Twitter maelstrom to generate clicks based on their two announcements last week, especially the decision to increase prices on US customers. The problem, for me, is that Twitter, as a medium, is really bad at digging into numbers. It isn’t
(To read my vision of a super-mega-conglomerated future—where six companies control all media, entertainment, technology and communications, click here.) Maybe I spent too much time on Wednesday’s essay. While I haven’t been working on it non-stop, I’ve been dabbling with it since December. Planning the next 12 years of mergers
It’s been two weeks into the new year, but M&A is back! Well, not officially. As I wrote about in December, despite the first six months of movement (with all its tricky ways to calculate), the last six months were relatively quiet in M&A in media and entertainment. (The biggest
(If you missed yesterday’s post, click here.) Let’s continue with where we left off yesterday. The risk for eliminating theaters and associated early windows (home entertainment and pay-per-view) is in the hundreds of millions of dollar range. So can Disney make that up by releasing new Star Wars films directly and exclusively on Disney
Last week, Bob Iger said in an interview with Barron’s that Disney had no plans to start releasing new Star Wars films—by which he means the ones that will come after Episode 9, releasing later this year—on Disney Plus, their soon-to-be streaming service. I agreed with this move. Some didn’t.
A few months ago I briefly tried to explain the distinction between “customers” and “views” to help explain why Twitch is often over-hyped. Since I’ve spent a lot of the last two weeks banging my head against the Twitter wall insisting that we stop letting Netflix use misleading data, it
Let me paint a nightmare scenario: “Evil corporations realize they have extremely valuable intellectual property. Famous characters like Superman, Batman, and most of all, Mickey Mouse. These corporations employ armies of lawyers and lobbyists and they get to work on Congress. They extend the copyright on all works indefinitely. This
(Read Part I and Part II here and here. The only downside of my NBA-to-Entertainment translator was that I only had 30 NBA teams to unleash my snark. In entertainment, we have many more companies that just couldn’t make the cut. So I had to expand the world of the
(This is Part VII of a multi-part series answering the question: “How Much Money Did Disney Make on the Lucasfilm deal?” Previous sections are here: Part I: Introduction & “The Time Value of Money Explained” Appendix: Feature Film Finances Explained! Part II: Star Wars Movie Revenue So Far Part III: