The rise of the digital economy threatens the very bedrock of both the publishing and the movie industries – the blockbuster.
Forty years after Jaws set box-office records, high-grossing, event-style blockbusters have cemented their place as the essential success strategy for movie studios. In today’s crowded entertainment market, film producers must rise above the noise to win. Pursuing safer movie bets is a recipe for lifting sagging profits.
These are the conclusions of Harvard academic Anita Elberse’s book, Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. The dynamics of blockbusters hold true not just for movies, she writes, but for publishing, recording labels, sports franchises and television networks.
Yet the ever-growing sea of entertainment choices – much of it distributed online, much of it cheaper, if not free – raises the question of ”whether digital technology will spell the end of blockbusters” and with it the dominance of the strategy. So far, the biggest victims of the new technology have been the middle rungs of the entertainment business, leaving a ”winner-take-all” market littered with thousands of ”also-rans” in film, acting, books and music.
Tom Cruise reportedly earned $US70 ($77.5 million) from the first Mission: Impossible, while two-thirds of American actors make less than $US1000 a year. Of the 8 million unique tracks sold on Apple’s iTunes in 2011, 102 tracks sold more than 1 million units each, but 94 per cent sold fewer than 100 units. Nearly one-third sold only one unit each.
Now, tech-fuelled change threatens the industry’s very structure. Promotions for Lady Gaga’s 2011 Born This Way album, for example, employed a complex web of deals among companies as diverse as Amazon, Belvedere Vodka and Starbucks. The demise of retail music-store chains has made reaching a wide audience of potential fans more difficult.
Online retailers such as Amazon and Book Depository offer a millions-strong catalogue of books at prices few corner bookshops can compete with. As those outlets collapse, many of the practices of promotion and marketing in the book business have struggled too. ”The blockbuster strategy is becoming more necessary than ever, but also harder to pull off,” Elberse writes.
Films require bigger launches to break ”through the clutter” of entertainment and attract people to theatres, as attendance continues to fall.
While studios and publishers struggle, the big names can also enjoy new powers: British band Radiohead offered its album In Rainbows directly to fans at whatever price they thought fair, without a record company’s help. Comedian Louis C. K. has done a similar direct-to-fan sale of a performance.
Less well-known bands routinely give away music online to build audiences who will pay for concerts – the opposite of the old model, when bands toured to sell more albums. That would seem to be a significant change in the business, and it matches the broader shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy in places such as the US and Australia. It is a shame Elberse does not note credible studies showing revenue from concerts rising, even as recording sales sink.
Elberse does acknowledge the cultural downside of the blockbuster strategy. ”Nine of the top-selling movies in 2011 were sequels to major franchises, and the 10th, Thor, was based on a comic-book character.”
In publishing, the focus on bestsellers has spelt the ”death of the mid-list”, the market for books selling moderately well, which once provided a living for many authors, she says.
Elberse quotes a music label manager saying: ”The great artists and the bad artists are easy – it is the good artists that can kill you,” because with good artists, it is not clear when to stop backing them.
Before the emergence of the blockbuster strategy in the 1970s, audiences had grown bored with movie offerings and distracted by TV. Hollywood was looking for a new success model and the video cassette recorder further dampened movie attendance.
Blockbusters such as Jaws and Star Wars gave the movie industry a new life, as studios sold stories as a special event to draw audiences back to the cinema.
Today, technology is changing viewers’ tastes and, once again, reshaping the expectations of the public. This book offers a snapshot of a four-decade-old strategy that may be in its twilight. What emerges next, no one can say.
Chris Zappone – SMH – March 22, 2014