Explaining the Business of Entertainment
Weekly looks at the biggest news in entertainment.
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
We’ve ended the “Asterisk Extraordinaire Earnings Season”. Giant tech companies did well; lots of other folks did poorly; what happens in the future is up in the air. One company that did particularly poorly was The Walt Disney Company, which wasn’t much of a surprise, given that all their theme
Let’s zig while everyone else is zagging, shall we? Sure, PVOD is officially a thing for one theater chain and one studio. But we knew a compromise was coming eventually. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the power brokers of entertainment for my story of the week. Most Important Story of the
The initial draft of this weekly column went very long in the “data of the week” section. So long it’s going to be its own article next week. (It isn’t that time sensitive.) Meanwhile, the biggest story is one of omission… Most Important Story of the Week – The Incredible