Colin Maccabe

Want Hollywood’s conventional wisdom? Then read Blockbusters

A review of Blockbusters, by Anita Elberse. If this is what they teach you at Harvard Business School, it's no wonder the most successful CEOs didn't go there

Henry Cavill starred in last year’s American blockbuster Man of Steel, based on the DC Comic hero, Superman [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy]

You can learn a lot from this book. Latin America has a smaller economy than Europe. Big companies can spend more on advertising than small ones. Maria Sharapova is attractive. Given that the book is written in the dullest of academic prose, there may even have been a paragraph I missed about how there is a Tuesday in next week. I’ve often wondered what they taught in business schools and if this book, which has Harvard Business School plastered all over it, is a guide then the main subject is the stunningly obvious.

On 20 June 1975 Universal released Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws with a spend on television advertising and an opening in hundreds of cinemas, both of which were unprecedented at that time. Thus was the vocabulary of English enriched with the notion of a ‘platform release’ — the method — and a ‘blockbuster’: the hoped for result. One of the reasons that Universal was willing to take this huge financial risk was that the novel on which the film was based had itself been a huge hit. This has set the pattern for Hollywood ever since.

The model is a film drawing on an existing franchise which promises a ready-made audience and which then enjoys huge advertising spends and very wide releases. This trend has been accelerated in the past decade with increased competition from the new digital universe, particularly electronic games, and the ever greater importance of foreign markets, particularly China. The favoured existing franchise is not a best-selling novel but a comic-book character, and the combined effect of these developments means that Hollywood studios have stopped making movies about American life for the first time in their history.

The preceding paragraph gives you more history and context for the film industry in America than you will find in the whole of this puff piece for the current financial titans of the most conservative elements in America’s entertainment economy.

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