Explaining the Business of Entertainment
With the Oscars airing on Sunday, it seems appropriate to join the crowd asking, “What will happen to the mid-budget theatrical film?” This seems to always come up this time of year as folks–usually critics–bemoan that Hollywood doesn’t “make these types of movies any more”. But what types of moveis?
If I didn’t have a little Padawan join my family in November, one of my goals was to update my massive “How Much Money did Disney Make on the Lucasfilm Acquisition?” series. That delay actually helped because I wouldn’t have been able to get that article up before Rise of
Hopefully everyone enjoyed the annual football spectacular known as the Super Bowl. Instead of parsing which ads did the best–we don’t have a data driven way to do that–or reviewing the half-time show–that’s what critics are for, I guess–we need to look for business lessons. Since we don’t have the
Is content is king? After this week, how could anyone doubt it? Disney+ showed what having the biggest movies of the last few decades can do for a streaming launch. But that’s not all! Apple landed one of the biggest free agent producers in former HBO chief Richard Plepler, for
What happens when one week has so much news and the next has very little? Well, you roll one topic over. So the “most important story” this week is last week’s runner-up. The Most Important Story of the Week – Game of Thrones and Star Wars Franchise Lessons Last week
Basketball, in my opinion, is a great testing ground for theories on strategy, valuing assets and data analysis. That’s why I developed my own “Value Over Replacement Executive” theory last fall. Or why I used the NBA to explain the misleading statistics here. Or compared overall deals to NBA trades
My weekly column this week was initially about Disney+ library content. And surely, you saw how that turned into 5,000+ words of speculation. As a result, I’m going to go a bit quicker of an update this week. I kept returning to one article that inspired several ideas, so let’s
One of the goals of my website is to try to hold myself to a process. A process means I let the data guide my opinions, not fit new data or anecdotes into preconceived narratives. A good example of this comes from last weekend’s D23 Expo. This picture circulated widely
If the streaming wars were a medieval war, original content are the mounted knights. Especially the pricey TV series. Like knights of the medieval ages, these extremely expensive weapons will likely win the war for one side or the other. This would make the siege engines the tech stack and
Last week, I tried to solve the mystery of who killed Game of Thrones. Well, throw on the trenchcoat and Fedora because I have another mystery. This time a missing person, er, library. The Most Important Story of the Week – Apple’s Non-Existent Library My theory of the case is