Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Weekly looks at the biggest news in entertainment.
This felt like a light week on the big stories. In entertainment at least; in politics, well good luck keeping up. My eye was drawn, then, to the Disney news of Tuesday that they’ve re-organized to focus on streaming. Meanwhile, another Netflix executive left the original side of the house.
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 my head has been deep in the data of the streaming wars for my latest article for Decider. I reviewed multiple different data sources to sort through the content of the last two months. Go read that article if you haven’t yet to know who won September! Overall,
Last week was a big one for me as I tore through a lot of Mulan data to produce my soon-to-be-biggest article of all time, “1.2 million Folks Bought Mulan on Disney+”. (It looks like it will dethrone the previous champion, “Netflix is a Broadcast Channel”.) It’s been four weeks
Whenever a big tech company sneezes, the entire techno-entertainment industrial complex catches a case of “they’re taking over the world”. Such is my read of the latest announcement that Apple is launching a multimedia bundle called Apple One. For months, CWSMF (Celebrity Wall Street Media Futurists) had speculated and salivated
Reed Hastings is famous for declaring his competitors to be anyone that isn’t a fellow streamer. Famously, he said a couple of years back that Fortnite is bigger competition than other streamers. (He’s previously mentioned sleep.) If you think about competition using Porter’s Five Forces, then Hastings is obviously right,
I’ve been too positive about the entertainment industry recently. Especially the traditional players. I think theaters by the end of 2021 will be fine. I think the traditional entertainment streamers can compete with Netflix (and Amazon). And I even think Disney will see a thriving theme park business sooner rather
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
The biggest story of the last two week’s is “Apple v Fortnite”. Yet, for the second week it hasn’t made this list. Like the AT&T-Warner Bros. merger or the Disney-Fox merger, this is a seismic event we can tell will change things in the moment. However, that “moment” will last
The theme of the week is “antitrust”. It didn’t start out that way, as Friday night’s leadership change at AT&T would have been the story of the week most weeks. (Though, I consider it less of a big deal than most, and that’s why it’s at the bottom of this