Explaining the Business of Entertainment
I’m a sports fan. Usually, come July, this is a bummer. Because nothing’s on. It’s a barren wasteland with only some baseball to occupy my time. This year, though, what a wonderland of competition. The delayed NBA Finals filled the sports itch in early July and now I’m binging the
Seeing this Sonny Bunch tweet over last weekend was probably the most disappointing news I’ve seen in a while: Is this the final nail in the theatrical coffin for 2020? Probably. So let’s once again check in with theaters. (As always, if you want the Entertainment Strategy Guy in your
This week started off slow, but man what a finish. Kevin Mayer left TikTok? That’s buzzy. The NBA players boycotted their games? Wow, that’s a big deal. But neither are the most important story of the week. That honor belongs to the theaters slowly returning to business. This is a
On Wednesday sports in America made their triumphant return! “The MLS Is Back” tournament declared that, well, the MLS is back. This follows the June return for most of European soccer, starting with the Bundesliga and continuing to the English Premier League, the most popular global sports league. Yet not
Tis the season for subscriber numbers. DAZN has 8 million subscribers! Hallmark Movies Now has 750K! And CuriosityStream has 10 million! Wait, what’s CuriosityStream? How can something I’d never heard off pass 10 million subscribers? Well, that mystery, and the rising importance of subscribers for evaluating success or failure combine
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
(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
In the heyday of Grantland, they featured a piece from the good people at Men in Blazers to develop an “NBA to English Premiere League” translator. It helped novices to soccer pick a team in the most popular sports league in the world. It worked so well, I adopted Chelsea
Basketball is back! And the town of glitz and glamour, the home of showtime—Hollywood—is back! The stars aligned this off-season and the Lakers lured the biggest star in basketball, possibly the world (if you’re an American and ignore soccer), to the greatest franchise in sports history, the Los Angeles Lakers!