Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Big Picture
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.benfritz.net/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2004035841
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2004035841
HEADING: Fritz, Ben
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670 __ |a Fritz, Ben. All the president’s spin, 2004: |b CIP t.p. (Ben Fritz) galley (reporter for entertainment trade paper Variety; edits Dateline Hollywood website; grad. of Swarthmore College; served in AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps; res. in Los Angeles)
670 __ |a The big picture, 2018: |b ECIP title page (Ben Fritz)
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PERSONAL
Born c. 1978; son of Bruce Fritz and Elise Godfrey; married Alicia Kirk (a television producer and writer); children: Hudson.
EDUCATION:Swarthmore College, B.A., 1999.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist. AmeriCorps, Charleston, SC, helped building homes with Habitat for Humanity, mentoring underprivileged children, and fixing equipment in parks, 1999-2000; Digital Coast Reporter, Southern California, began as reporter, became managing editor, 2000-2003; Spinsanity, political rhetoric blog , cofounder, writer, editor, 2001-04; Variety, Hollywood, CA, staff writer on film business, box office, corporate earnings, digital media, and video games, 2004-09; Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, CA, staff writer, lead film industry reporter, 2009-13; Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles bureau, covers film industry, 2013–. DatelineHollywood.com, former editor.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to numerous periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
American writer and journalist Ben Fritz covers the movie business for the Wall Street Journal. He has also done the same for Variety and the Los Angeles Times. Fritz is the coauthor of the 2004 book, All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth, and the author of the 2018 work, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of the Movies.
Graduating from Swarthmore College in political science and economics, Fritz volunteered for AmeriCorps in Charleston, South Carolina, helping to build homes with Habitat for Humanity, mentoring underprivileged children, and fixing equipment in parks. Thereafter, he moved to California, working as a reporter on the Digital Coast Reporter, and ultimately becoming its managing editor. He was also the cofounder, writer, editor of Spinsanity, a political rhetoric blog , which led to the writing of his first book.
In 2004 came his first big break in journalism, hired by Variety as staff writer on film business, box office, corporate earnings, digital media, and video games. Five years later Fritz moved to the Los Angeles Times as staff writer and lead film industry reporter, and in 2013 he joined the Wall Street Journal in its Los Angeles bureau as lead business film reporter. “I love my job,” Fritz told Dan Woog in Connecticut’s Westport News Online. “I go to premieres, talk to interesting people, and explain it all to readers.”
All the President's Spin
Fritz’s first book, All the President’s Spin, written with Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan, is a critique of President George W. Bush’s use of emotional language, slanted statistics, and ambiguous statements which–according to the authors–were purposely meant to mislead the public. Fritz and his coauthors provide numerous examples, especially to do with the Iraq War, with Bush implying a link between the attacks of 9/11 and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The authors termed Bush’s use of rhetoric an “assault on honesty.”
A Publishers Weekly reviewer termed All the President’s Spin a “lucid critique,” which also criticizes the media “for letting statements like this go unchecked and for being so overly concerned about objectivity that they’ve become a mere outlet for politicians’ ‘talking points’.” The reviewer concluded: “Well organized and heavily referenced, this passionate indictment will pique readers’ awareness of political spin.” Marie D. Jones, writing in Curled Up with a Good Book website, also had praise, noting that while the authors show that other politicians of both parties have used spin, “it is Bush who has raised that art to a level of dangerous perfection that is misleading our citizenry to the point of rendering public power and accountability moot.” Jones added: “I felt very angry reading this book, and my anger is directed at all politicians who lie to the public. … Once we all stop believing everything we see and hear on television and radio and the newspapers, and do our own research and truth-seeking, we the people just might win the game of spin.”
The Big Picture
In The Big Picture, Fritz employs his years as a media insider to examine the state of American movies with mid-budget, adult dramas and comedies all but driven out of the multiplexes, replaced by superhero movies and franchise films. Writing in SlashFilm.com, Chris Evangelista termed The Big Picture a “highly entertaining book about Hollywood in the 21st century,” further commenting: “In a slightly-gossipy yet never exploitative style, Fritz combs through the data of the last decade, picking apart both behind-the-scenes shenanigans and emails gleaned from the infamous Sony hack. Fritz examines the fall of Sony as a major box office player; the rise of Marvel studios; the death of mid-budget films; the growth of Netflix original programming and much, much more.” In this study, Fritz shows that over the past decade both stars and directors have lost power while writers and producers take inspiration from television, comic books, and the toy industry. Corporate brands including Amazon, Netflix, Marvel, and Lego are all taking a much more active role in the movie business and the huge Chinese market is also influencing American production, as Fritz demonstrates. Employing interviews with major players at Disney, Marvel, Netflix, Amazon, and Imax, Fritz shows how this transformation came about and concludes that it may eventually prove to be a new beginning for film in America with creative mavericks given voice outside the usual studio system.
A Kirkus Reviews critic noted of The Big Picture: “Although the book sometimes bogs down under the weight of so much information, for those looking for inside scoops on the hidden relationships among movie studios, movie development, and choosing actors, this book is a treasure house.” Writing in Booklist, David Pitt termed this a “quintessential look at moviemaking gone wrong,” while New York Times Online contributor Jonathan A. Knee felt that the book “holds the reader’s attention by telling the stories of senior executives whose careers were destroyed or made by the changes in the entertainment industry.” Further praise came from Globe and Mail writer Barry Hertz, who observed: “In just under 300 pages, the Wall Street Journal reporter quickly and clearly establishes a history of how Hollywood transitioned from being a star factory, dependent on celebrity to sell its product while still ostensibly interested in original voices and stories, to being a desperate assembly line designed to exploit intellectual property to the point of exhaustion.” Online Medium reviewer Zachary Houle dubbed The Big Picture a “must-read.” Likewise, Peter Broderick, writing in Filmmaker Magazine Online, commented: “Fritz gives us a brilliant and thorough analysis of how Hollywood’s major studios have changed. It is a devastating portrait of their creative decline. The Big Picture contrasts this with the new ‘golden age of television.’ Fifty-seven years ago, FCC chairman Newton Minnow proclaimed television ‘a vast wasteland.’ It is not hard to imagine him redirecting his famous phrase to studio franchise filmmaking today.” A further high assessment came from Chris Thilk in Cinematic Slant website: “The Big Picture isn’t some jargon-heavy industry white-paper … . While there is plenty of Hollywood-specific vernacular on display in the conversations pulled from some of the Sony emails, Fritz writes this in an accessible style that’s surprising given his years as a reporter covering the world of movies and the players behind the scenes. It’s loose and often funny, offering a quick read.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, David Pitt, review of The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, p. 13.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of The Big Picture.
ONLINE
Cinematic Slant, https://cinematicslant.com/ (June 6, 2018), Chris Thilk, review of The Big Picture.
Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (August 1, 2004), Marie D. Jones, review of All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth.
Filmmaker Magazine Online, https://filmmakermagazine.com/ (June 18, 2018), Peter Broderick, review of The Big Picture.
Globe and Mail Online, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ (May 8, 2018), Barry Hertz, review of The Big Picture.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (March 19, 2018), Kevin Crust, “WSJ’s Ben Fritz Weighs In on the Present and Future of Movies.”
Medium, https://medium.com/ (March 3, 2018), Zachary Houle, review of The Big Picture.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (March 6, 2018), Jonathan A. Knee, review of The Big Picture.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com (August 2, 2004), review of All the President’s Spin.
SlashFilm.com, http://www.slashfilm.com/ (March 7, 2018), Chris Evangelista, review of The Big Picture.
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (June 29, 2018), “Ben Fritz.”
Westport News Online, https://www.westport-news.com/ (March 16, 2018), Dan Woog, “Woog’s World: Westport’s Ben Fritz and the Future of Hollywood.”
Wrap, https://www.thewrap.com/ (January 10, 2013), Alexander C. Kaufman, “L.A. Times Reporter Ben Fritz to Leave for WSJ.”
Q&A
MOVIES
ENTERTAINMENT
WSJ's Ben Fritz weighs in on the present and future of movies
By KEVIN CRUST
MAR 19, 2018 | 4:40 PM
WSJ's Ben Fritz weighs in on the present and future of movies
Tobey Maguire, clockwise from top left, in the 2002 movie "Spider-Man"; Adam Sandler in the 1999 comedy "Big Daddy"; Robert Downey Jr. in the 2008 action adventure "Iron Man"; Will Smith in the 2016 movie "Bright." (Columbia Pictures; Myles Aronowitz / Columbia / TriStar; Zade Rosenthal / Marvel; Scott Garfield / Netflix)
In the 21st century, cinematic universes housing the canons of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Harry Potter and other franchises have largely replaced movie stars on the big screen.
As Netflix and Amazon Prime gobble up content for their streaming services, and cable networks such as HBO and FX attract talent who would have worked exclusively in movies at one time, some of the major studios face consolidation or even extinction.
In his new book, "The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies," Ben Fritz, who has covered the movie business for a decade for Variety, the Los Angeles Times and currently, the Wall Street Journal, explains how we got here.
Jumping off from emails and documents uncovered through the 2014 Sony Pictures hack and through extensive interviews, Fritz details the studio's decline after 2002's "Spider-Man" (the Tobey Maguire version) launched the modern superhero craze. In a compelling, well-reported narrative, Fritz deftly ties together some of the industry's biggest questions with some arresting twists and turns, topped with the irony that two of Sony's biggest stars of the early 2000s, Will Smith and Adam Sandler, both now make movies for Netflix.
Recently, we talked to Fritz about the book and where things are heading for the movie business.
How did the book come about?
I'd been thinking about as a reporter covering this business for a long time. People always say to me, "Why are there so many superhero movies? Why are there so many sequels?" I started digging into the hack more and realized there are answers to these questions here and it's a story.
Covering these stories on a daily basis as you do, how did you get enough perspective to connect the dots?
The best advice I got was, if you get a book leave, do all your research early on. From the time I sold the proposal in the summer of 2015 to the fall of 2016, I spent researching. I was working, and I would spend an hour or two in the evenings and on the weekends, when I could, and I would read 10 or 20 emails or some of the documents or set up an interview. I did interview about 50 people for the book.
I was trying to focus on the 30,000-foot view, to immerse myself in this material. I had to virtually shut off the news — which was weird, there was a lot going on — and live in this world of what was happening to the movie business over the past decade and see where it's going.
My job for the past decade was covering the business of movies and even I hadn't really stepped back to think about this 'big picture' trend. Marvel's the great example. We all know Marvel is really successful. Marvel has become the dominant movie company of the 21st century — how did they do that and how did it impact everybody else?
Did any of these connections surprise you?
Digging into the history of Marvel and their connection to Sony surprised me. I found out Sony had the opportunity to buy the rights to all the Marvel characters for $25 million and they were like, "Who would be interested in a Captain America movie or a Thor movie or a Black Panther movie? Nobody wants that."
I understand hindsight is 20/20, but that was a shocking moment to me. And that was not from the hack; that was from interviews I did. And the story about how Marvel got into movies basically because of their anger over how successful Sony was with "Spider-Man," which was their character. Sony was making money off their character and Sony was getting credit for their character and they wanted to get into movies in response to that. They were doing it not because they cared about movies but [because] Marvel saw movies as a way to sell toys. Even to the extent that they picked "Iron Man" because they did focus groups with kids and kids liked "Iron Man" best of all the characters.
Partly intelligently and partly by chance, [Marvel] was ahead of all the trends. That was the most interesting part to me of all my reporting.
You discuss the idea of premium video-on-demand studio movies being available shortly after their theatrical premiere. Is that the next big domino to fall in this?
At this point, I would call it an evolutionary change. It's absolutely inevitable. The biggest studios — not Disney at the moment but Universal and Warner Bros. — really want it. The only reason they're not pushing for it is that with this Disney/Fox deal happening and AT&T/Time Warner, a lot of mergers, you don't want to upset anybody when you're trying to get a big deal approved by the government. The companies want it and a lot of consumers want it. Some movie lovers may be upset, but the audience, especially younger people, understandably in the age of Netflix, are used to getting what they want when they want it. It's a cliche, but it's true.
Already, the date from a movie's theatrical release to when it is available to buy online has shrunk to 75 days. It used to be 120, then it got down to 90, now it's 75. It's not going to start with day-and-date for the bigger movies; it's going to start with three or four weeks for a higher price, and eventually it will go lower. Maybe it will start to be two weeks, and then it will be fewer and fewer movies that will qualify for the longer theatrical play. We're definitely going to a shrinking window, and you'll pay a higher price to see it sooner.
This idea that a movie has to be seen in a theater, it's not going away, it's going to be a smaller class of movies and a smaller number of audience members and filmmakers who insist on that.
How will that affect multiplexes?
We're already seeing [that] the chains are ripping out seats and putting in luxury seats. We're definitely going where the moviegoing experience is becoming more of a luxury, high-end experience. Going out of the home has to be special. It's got to be a better experience than you can have at home. That makes movies something affluent professionals can do but tougher for teenagers to do or people who don't have a lot of money.
It's a nationwide trend. I still think there will be cheap bargain theaters for movies that have been out for a month or two, but like so many things in America, the middle is what's going to fall out. The middle-class movie theater, so to speak, is going away.
What's next?
The biggest thing I'm paying attention to that I write about in the book is the push of the streaming platforms into movies. Neflix's spending on movies has risen rapidly. They've hired a bunch of executives.They're getting bigger and bigger films. They're bidding on all the biggest films in Hollywood these days. They're spending $8 billion on content this year. They have 700 pieces of content, including films, TV, comedy specials, etc. They are just eating Hollywood alive.
I think movies are the toughest area to do that, but they are pushing aggressively. How they do that and how that changes audience behavior and how the major studios figure out how to respond, I talk about that in the book. I saw it coming, but it's coming even faster than I thought.
With Disney buying Hulu, Hulu's going to become a bigger player in movies for sure. The Disney direct-to-consumer platform, is something again I think that's predicted in the book, but not talked about. Disney is making original films, family films for its direct-to-consumer platform.
How do the traditional studios differentiate their content? How do you get people to leave their homes and leave streaming to see a movie in a theater? What is the definition of a movie anymore? Those are questions I thought were a few years out when I finished the book, and in reality, they're maybe one year out. They're happening right now.
What are we losing out on?
The great thing about a movie like "Get Out" or "Black Panther" is we're all seeing it at the same time and we're all talking about it in this cultural moment. That's something that's special about theatrical release that might be lost. A Netflix movie, I put in my queue and I get around to it when I get around to it. You might see it now; I might see it in a few months. It's not this cultural moment, and that is something movies were always able to do and it's tougher now.
How does the book help readers understand the future of movies?
The entertainment business is changing so rapidly now. Since I finished the book, Disney agreed to buy Fox, Netflix has accelerated their push into movies, China's investment has taken a pause. These are all things that are changing. My hope and belief is that the book is not just about little specifics but about these big picture trends and these things happening now are not surprising to anyone who's read the book.
See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour »
calendar@latimes.com
@LATimesMovies
L.A. Times Reporter Ben Fritz to Leave for WSJ (Exclusive)
The film business reporter is the latest in a string of departures from the Times' entertainment section
Alexander C. Kaufman | January 10, 2013 @ 4:56 PM
Last Updated: January 11, 2013 @ 10:04 AM
Los Angeles Times film reporter Ben Fritz is leaving the paper, a Times spokeswoman told TheWrap.
The Los Angeles TimesFritz, who has long covered the business of Hollywood and videogames, is taking a job at the Wall Street Journal, as the lead business film reporter, according to an individual with knowledge of the hire.
He will replace Erica Orden, who is moving back to the East Coast from Los Angeles to take over the Journal's Albany coverage.
'It's correct that Ben is joining the Journal," Sara Blask, a Journal spokeswoman, told TheWrap in an email on Thursday. "His start date is February 11."
Nancy Sullivan, vice president of communications for the Times, said the paper would replace him in the coming weeks.
"Yes, Ben Fritz will be leaving the Times in the next few weeks," Sullivan said in an email to TheWrap. "We’ll be announcing a terrific new reporter who’ll be joining our entertainment team at that time.”
Fritz is the latest in a string of recent departures from the Times' arts and entertainment desk.
Assistant managing editor for arts & entertainment Sallie Hofmeister left in June. Then, longtime film writer Patrick Goldstein, who wrote the "Big Picture" column, announced his departure in August. A month later, Geoff Boucher, who founded the popular "Hero Complex" fanboy blog, resigned and joined Entertainment Weekly.
Other entertainment section departures include arts and entertainment editor Craig Turner and Nightlife Editor Dean Kuipers. A year ago, TheWrap hired the Times' former online arts and entertainment editor, Lisa Fung, as its first executive editor.
The Tribune Company, the Times' Chicago-based corporate parent, emerged from a four-year bankruptcy on Dec. 31, marking yet further uncertainty in the Times newsroom as the media giant is widely expected to be preparing its newspaper holdings for sale.
A Swarthmore College graduate, Fritz, 35, previously worked at Variety, where he served as a videogame critic and a film business reporter.
He also co-founded the political rhetoric blog Spinsanity before publishing his bestselling book "All the President's Spin."
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Alicia Kirk, a television producer and writer.
Ben Fritz
Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
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Ben Fritz covers the film business and media companies including Walt Disney Co. out of The Wall Street Journal's Los Angeles bureau. Before joining the Journal, Ben wrote for for the Los Angeles Times and Variety. He is an author of the best-selling book "All the President's Spin." Follow him on Twitter @benfritz and at Google+. He can be reached at ben.fritz@wsj.com.
Ben Fritz
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Reporter at The Wall Street Journal and author of "The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies"
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Experienced newspaper reporter who has covered the entertainment industry for more than a decade.
Author of Los Angeles Times best-seller "The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies," about the dramatic shake-up of Hollywood this century that has made super-heroes, sequels and toy franchises inescapable and original movies for adults an endangered species. Published March, 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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How China came to control the future of Hollywood
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Publish date March 9, 2018
March 9, 2018
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Experience
The Wall Street Journal
Staff Reporter
Company NameThe Wall Street Journal
Dates EmployedFeb 2013 – Present Employment Duration5 yrs 5 mos
LocationGreater Los Angeles Area
I cover the film industry, including major and independent Hollywood studios, as well as media conglomerates likes Walt Disney Co., for America's largest newspaper. Break news and write trend stories, profiles and features for business and arts sections.
Various
Book Author
Company NameVarious
Dates EmployedAug 2004 – Present Employment Duration13 yrs 11 mos
Author of Los Angeles Times best-seller "The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies." Published March, 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Co-author of New York Times best-seller "All the President's Spin," published August, 2004 by Simon & Schuster.
Los Angeles Times
Staff Writer
Company NameLos Angeles Times
Dates EmployedMay 2009 – Jan 2013 Employment Duration3 yrs 9 mos
Lead film industry reporter, covering major and independent studios with a focus on how digital technology and globalization are transforming established business models
Variety
Staff Writer
Company NameVariety
Dates EmployedJun 2004 – Feb 2009 Employment Duration4 yrs 9 mos
Reported on the film business, box office, corporate earnings, digital media, and video games for the venerable Hollywood newspaper. Started Cut Scene video games blog, which quickly became the no. 2 blog on Variety.com. Edited video game reviews.
Spinsanity
Editor/Writer
Company NameSpinsanity
Dates EmployedMar 2001 – Nov 2004 Employment Duration3 yrs 9 mos
One of the three founders and editors/writers of Spinsanity (http://www.spinsanity.org), a popular non-partisan website that challenged deceptive rhetoric and political spin.
Digital Coast Reporter / Venture Reporter
Editor/Reporter
Company NameDigital Coast Reporter / Venture Reporter
Dates EmployedOct 2000 – Apr 2003 Employment Duration2 yrs 7 mos
Started as a reporter for Digital Coast Reporter, a magazine and website devoted to Southern California Internet companies. I was later promoted to managing editor. Then as the dot-com economy imploded, the company morphed into covering venture capital and I oversaw mergers & acquisitions for a new publication called Venture Reporter.
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Education
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore College
Degree NameB.A. Field Of StudyPolitical Science and Economics
Dates attended or expected graduation 1995 – 1999
Activities and Societies: Volleyball team (co-captain), entertainment columnist for school newspaper, editor and co-founder of political newspaper, theater director.
QUOTE:
I love my job,” Fritz says. “I go to premieres, talk to interesting people, and explain it all to readers.
Woog’s World / Westport’s Ben Fritz and the future of Hollywood
By Dan Woog Published 12:00 am, Friday, March 16, 2018
Ben Fritz Photo: Contributed Photo
Photo: Contributed Photo
Ben Fritz
Ben Fritz had a great growing-up experience in Westport. During summers here with his father, he enjoyed Camp Mahackeno and beach school. On weekends, he went to the movies.
At Swarthmore College, Fritz majored in political science and economics. He was always a voracious reader — including Variety magazine, at the Westport Library. After junior year he got a summer internship at that publication.
As a senior he took a journalism course at the University of Pennsylvania. He learned how to interview, and turn people’s stories into narratives.
He considered writing as a career, but spent a year after graduation with Americorps in South Carolina. Then it was off to Los Angeles, where Fritz blogged about politics in media. In 2004 he wrote “All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth.” He jokes, “It’s available on Amazon now for one cent. It’s definitely worth the price.”
Variety hired Fritz as a reporter. He interviewed studio executives, producers and filmmakers, and immersed himself in the movie industry.
In 2009 he joined the Los Angeles Times, covering the business of entertainment. Four years later he was hired by the Wall Street Journal. His beat there is the movie business in general, with a focus on the Walt Disney Company.
“I love my job,” Fritz says. “I go to premieres, talk to interesting people, and explain it all to readers.”
Several themes come through in his coverage. One is the rise of China. The most populous country on earth is emerging as a strong rival to Hollywood — and American studios are noticing. In a 2012 remake of “Red Dawn,” for example, a late decision was made to replace China as the enemy. Using digital technology, every reference — in dialogue, scenes with flags, you name it — to that nation was changed to North Korea.
And, Fritz says, “I can’t report enough on the effect digital distribution on traditional studios.” Netflix and other streaming companies are reacting in different ways. Disney is launching its own streaming service. Some studios are cooperating with the newcomers.
Three years ago — after a trove of Sony Pictures’ confidential data was hacked — an agent approached Fritz with an idea for a behind-the-scenes book about the incident and its ramifications. That evolved into a different concept: a book exploring a major studio, in today’s quickly changing entertainment environment.
Fritz wondered, “How has Hollywood gone from making a wide array of movies for adults, to focusing so much on superheroes, spinoffs and sequels?”
The result in “The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies.” It was published last week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
His book explains, for example, how Sony stuck with stars like Will Smith and Adam Sandler for so long.
The studio also passed on the opportunity to buy movie rights to all Marvel characters for $25 million, Fritz adds.
The underlying theme of Fritz’s new book is that “we’ve entered the franchise era of films. Today, movies are brand-driven. Now they go to movies because they’re loyal to Pixar, ‘Star Wars,’ or ‘Mission: Impossible.’”
Fritz writes that DVD sales once provided an enormous revenue stream, allowing studios to produce diverse films. “I don’t think anyone in Westport has bought a DVD in years,” he says.
Another factor: the internationalization of movie audiences. “Rain Man” was typical: aimed at American filmgoers. It’s been replaced by “Transformers”-type movies.
In addition, Fritz says, “television is no longer ‘the idiot box.’ HBO and other subscription networks are now the places making original dramas.”
His book ends with the question: “After the rise of streaming and digital technology, what’s next?” The answer is that Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others are providing more and more Oscar-worthy films. “They’re taking the creative risks that studios used to take,” Fritz says.
If you believe that movies should be seen communally in theaters, the future is not good. However, he notes, “if you want good, original movies made for adults,” and enjoy watching them at home, the future looks fine.
So what does Fritz watch? Thanks to his job, he attends plenty of premieres, of all kinds. And he’s got a 6-year-old. So he every animated film ever made.
Dan Woog is a Westport writer, and his “Woog’s World” appears each Friday.
QUOTE:
Although the book sometimes bogs down under the weight of so much information, for those looking for
inside scoops on the hidden relationships among movie studios, movie development, and choosing actors,
this book is a treasure house.
6/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1529778729104 1/2
Print Marked Items
Fritz, Ben: THE BIG PICTURE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fritz, Ben THE BIG PICTURE Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 3, 6
ISBN: 978-0-544-78976-0
How the superhero movie saved Hollywood--for now.
In November 2014, a cyberbreach at Sony Pictures Entertainment released thousands of emails. Wall Street
Journal entertainment industry reporter Fritz (co-author: All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the
Media and the Truth, 2004) believed that these emails/documents "could be the core of a much bigger story-
-one about the changes in Hollywood and why we get the movies we do." He first focuses on Sony's senior
executives, financial records, and films, unveiling a new Hollywood in which "franchises and brands
dominate, original ideas and stars are marginalized, and TV and film have swapped places in our culture
and our economy." Thanks to additional interviews, the author is able to bring us right into the Sony offices
to listen to executives grappling with what film to make next, why the last one failed, which actors to pass
over, and what they can do to make money for their investors. As Fritz shows, Sony made many bad
decisions, and even though they did well with Spider-Man, Sony's highest-grossing domestic release ever,
they were late to catch the franchise train other studios were riding to the bank with the Avengers, X-Men,
Iron Man, and Star Wars. Fritz shows how studios responded to the income drop in DVD sales brought
about by internet piracy and the rise of Netflix and Redbox. The international market was exploding, and
China, which had vast financial influence in the studios, was at the top. The author explores the
"extraordinary" rise of Marvel studios, the rise and fall of many former A-list actors--Will Smith, Adam
Sandler, Tom Cruise--and the stunning rise of TV's smart series shows, like Breaking Bad, "better than
anything most movie studios have made this century."
Although the book sometimes bogs down under the weight of so much information, for those looking for
inside scoops on the hidden relationships among movie studios, movie development, and choosing actors,
this book is a treasure house.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Fritz, Ben: THE BIG PICTURE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461616/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7d7f4b04.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461616
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QUOTE:
quintessential look at moviemaking gone wrong.
The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future
of Movies
David Pitt
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p13+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies. By Ben Fritz. Mar. 2018.336p. HMH, $27
(9780544789760). 791.43.
Fritz, who covers the film business and media companies for the Wall Street Journal, covered the muchpublicized
hacking of Sony's emails in late 2014. Now, using those emails as a jumping-off point, he
examines the current state of the movie business. What's happened to the movie industry in the twenty-first
century, he asks, that has sent so many studios into panic mode? Is the current trend toward franchises and
cinematic universes (hello, Marvel) a good thing or a bad thing? Is there still a place on the big screen for
modestly budgeted original properties? To what extent is the current "golden age of television" making bigscreen
filmmaking difficult, even, perhaps, irrelevant? Although the book looks at the movie business as a
whole, its focus, driven by the emails, is on Sony, and it becomes a kind of up-close look at the downfall of
a studio and its executive, Amy Pascal, whose contract was not renewed after the hack. Like Steven Bach's
Final Cut (1985), about the fall of United Artists after the release of the phenomenal flop Heavens Gate, this
is a quintessential look at moviemaking gone wrong.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Pitt, David. "The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 13+. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250783/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e1df17fb. Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250783
QUOTE:
“The Big Picture” holds the reader’s attention by telling the stories of senior executives whose careers were destroyed or made by the changes in the entertainment industry.
BOOK ENTRY
Review: ‘The Big Picture’ Chronicles a Changing Entertainment Industry
Image
“The Big Picture” offers a vivid picture of life inside Sony after the hack that exposed executives’ emails and internal documents, and led to the collapse of the relationship between its top leaders.CreditHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
By Jonathan A. Knee
March 6, 2018
News flash: Movie studios have come to rely overwhelmingly on “sequels, reboots, spinoffs, adaptations, and animated movies” and “now exist primarily for the purpose of building and supporting branded franchises.” By contrast, the number of original scripted television series commissioned continues to break records, reaching almost 500 in 2017. The challenge for The Wall Street Journal’s entertainment reporter Ben Fritz’s new book, “The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies,” is to build a compelling business narrative from phenomena that are obvious to anyone who has walked by a multiplex and has a subscription to Netflix or Amazon Prime. Despite some distracting lapses, to a surprising degree he succeeds.
“The Big Picture” holds the reader’s attention by telling the stories of senior executives whose careers were destroyed or made by the changes in the entertainment industry.
Mr. Fritz culled the fruits of the infamous Sony hack to paint a vivid portrait of life inside the studio as it struggled to respond to the structural challenges it faced. Sony’s Columbia Pictures, under the leadership of Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton, relied disproportionately on the mid-budget dramas most endangered by the explosion of blockbuster franchises on the big screen and must-see dramatic series on the small screen. The “Big Picture” makes good use of the stolen emails and internal corporate documents to chart the decline of the studio’s fortunes and the corresponding collapse of the once idyllic business partnership between the creative Ms. Pascal and financially oriented Mr. Lynton.
Ms. Pascal, who was fired in 2015, and Mr. Lynton, whose departure in 2017 was announced just weeks before a $1 billion studio write-down, never managed to figure out how to thrive in the franchise era. Indeed, they ultimately ceded significant control over the one franchise — Spiderman — to which the studio had secured rights.
A number of executives have built wildly successful careers optimizing the creative and financial potential of a single brand. Some of them, like Dan Lin, whose Lin Pictures is responsible for exploring the creative possibilities of Legos, are a new breed of executive who combine creative and financial chops. Others, like the Academy Award-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who has been charged with turning Hasbro’s toys into a film franchise, are established industry figures who have reinvented themselves to align with the times.
The portrait of Hollywood that emerges is one in which the power of stars and directors has been usurped by writers/producers whose expertise is brand exploitation. A single producer will manage a cinematic universe across properties, but directors and actors are swapped in and out as economics and professional idiosyncrasies dictate. When Terrence Howard demanded more money for Iron Man’s first sequel, he was quickly replaced by Don Cheadle. The six Spiderman movies since 2002 have grossed almost $5 billion with three different starring actors and directors.
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Studios, for their part, increasingly focus on a relatively small number of established franchises. The rest of their slate is filled with mid-budget films financed by others from whom the studios extract a fee for marketing and distribution. Although Mr. Fritz seems to suggest that something profound has been lost culturally in these shifts, I was left feeling this new industry configuration is preferable for both shareholders and viewers. Everyone is worse off in a world where the “hot” star or director of the moment can force a studio to fund their latest vanity project.
The strength of the narrative and reporting in “The Big Picture” is not matched by equally trenchant judgments and predictions. Mr. Fritz’s observations, both aesthetic and financial, are often unconvincing and unnecessarily hyperbolic — particularly in contrasting the contemporary film and television businesses.
I have not attempted to watch all of the new original scripted TV series — it would be more than a full-time job — but what I have seen makes me skeptical of Mr. Fritz’s assertion that “most” of them are “interesting, sophisticated and made for intelligent adults.” He repeats the canard that Netflix has magical powers to pick hits. As evidence, he points to Netflix’s awareness of how previous Kevin Spacey and David Fincher films had performed on its platform to justify the $100 million bet on “House of Cards.” Mr. Fritz does not share the talismanic algorithm that led Netflix to spend almost as much on the disastrous “Marco Polo” series. In television, as in film, if you count only the hits, everyone is a genius.
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Mr. Fritz claims that “a new economics of film” has emerged in which dependable funding will come from “subscriptions to video services, wireless packages, and free product shipping.” He expresses confidence that this model “will flourish” indefinitely producing “as many and perhaps more” movies than ever alongside the apparently limitless flow of new series.
History has shown, however, that even the deepest pockets eventually tire of being emptied. As long as there are no structural barriers to creating new entertainment content — or investing to establish the next great branded franchise — the quest for sustainable superior returns will remain elusive. As a result, the future of entertainment — with a rotating cast of hapless investors embracing a shifting set of new and improved strategic imperatives — is likely to look a lot like the past.
Jonathan A. Knee is Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Business School and a Senior Advisor at Evercore. His latest book is “Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education.”
QUOTE:
In just under 300 pages, the Wall Street Journal reporter quickly and clearly establishes a history of how Hollywood transitioned from being a star factory, dependent on celebrity to sell its product while still ostensibly interested in original voices and stories, to being a desperate assembly line designed to exploit intellectual property to the point of exhaustion.
BOOK REVIEW
Review: Ben Fritz’s The Big Picture dissects the age of the easy-to-sell blockbuster
BARRY HERTZ
PUBLISHED MAY 8, 2018
UPDATED MAY 8, 2018
Title: The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of the Movies
Author: Ben Fritz
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages: 304
Price: $38.00
“Nobody knows anything.” With those three words, screenwriter William Goldman long ago summed up the whys and wherefores of Hollywood. And Goldman’s maxim was on full, hilarious, garish, desperate, blinded-by-the-light display the other week at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, where the titans of the film industry gathered to present their wares for the all-powerful National Association of Theatre Owners.
What will dominate the box office for not only 2018, but for years to come? Each and every major studio offered their best guesses – crass comedies starring wildly inappropriate puppets? Dramas about sexy young women adrift at sea? Musicals culled from ABBA’s back catalogue? The continuing opportunity to see Tom Cruise defy death? – but they are merely guesses.
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And guessing leads to panic. Which means relying on the one sure thing Hollywood has going for it the past few years: superheroes. Known quantities, in other words: characters and concepts rooted in comfort and only occasionally, tangentially related to artistry. After all, if someone tells you that the sky is falling – and with theatre attendance in North America last year recorded as the lowest since 1995, the atmosphere is certainly in peril – wouldn’t your first call for help be to the supermen and superwomen who have proven time and again that only they can save the day?
This is the entertainment landscape, and devastating line of thinking, that is explored with thorough attention to detail and only a necessary bit of cynicism by Ben Fritz in his new book, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies. In just under 300 pages, the Wall Street Journal reporter quickly and clearly establishes a history of how Hollywood transitioned from being a star factory, dependent on celebrity to sell its product while still ostensibly interested in original voices and stories, to being a desperate assembly line designed to exploit intellectual property to the point of exhaustion.
As Fritz writes, the current superhero industrial complex – where it is easier for studios to rely on the box-office returns of even third-tier comic-book creations than it is to invest pocket change in original material – is not entirely of Hollywood’s making. Silicon Valley gets its own fair share of the blame, with myriad technological disruptions (streaming, state-of-the-art home-entertainment systems, video-on-demand) all helping push audiences away from theatres and toward their living rooms, or bedrooms, or bathrooms even. Why pay $12 – not counting concessions, parking and the babysitter – to watch a quiet and dignified studio drama in a sticky movie theatre when the same content can be enjoyed in the peace and comfort of one’s own washroom for $10.99 a month via your Netflix-equipped tablet?
This landscape-shifting dilemma – combined with a growing global audience, especially those in China, ravenous for franchise-ready American product – has resulted in massive upheaval across the studio system. As Fritz writes, the Big Six studios – Disney, Paramount, Fox, Universal, Warner Bros., and Sony – quickly came to the realization that the bigger (and more familiar) the spectacle, the larger the chance that audiences would have no choice but to experience it in theatres.
In dissecting the various creative mistakes and financial triumphs that led to this current age of the easy-to-sell blockbuster, Fritz takes an especial shine to the plight of Sony’s Columbia Pictures. By looking at how the studio under Amy Pascal struggled to reconcile its past as a star-friendly home – it enjoyed strong relationships with Adam Sandler and Will Smith, who once upon a time could do no wrong – with the current franchise-fuelled marketplace, Fritz finds a perfect litmus test for the state of the industry.
It didn’t hurt, though, that Sony was the victim of a massive e-mail hack – perhaps sparked by North Korean agents unhappy with its Pyongyang-mocking comedy The Interview – which afforded Fritz a wealth of confidential material. The author acknowledges the ethical dilemma right away in his book’s introduction: “This book is based, in part, on stolen material. I won’t make any bones about it,” he writes, but ultimately justifies using the data. “Interesting information worthy of public scrutiny is fair game for journalists.” Perhaps, but after ploughing through Fritz’s book, there is doubt it would be as breathless and detailed a read as it is without the help of those anonymous hackers.
For the savvy and hungry moviegoer, the industry shifts Fritz details may seem obvious. All it takes is one glance at the marquee or your Netflix queue to determine what is and isn’t being sold. Yet Fritz uses his skills as both a financial journalist and a natural storyteller to spin a narrative that is detailed, funny and a little terrifying. Anyone with a love for intelligent cinema made for discerning adults should be concerned. After reading Fritz’s final pages, it is impossible to imagine major studios making something as bold and daring as, say, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. A $76-million dystopic drama based on a downer of a novel, with no sequel possibility in sight? Those days are over. (Cuaron’s next film will arrive via Netflix.)
Like any industry-focused reporter, Fritz relies on too-frequent moments of inside baseball to carry his story – there is little evidence that those outside Culver City are curious about the details of a long-ago power war between Pascal and Sony’s Steve Mosko. Problematic, too, is the book’s complete absence of #MeToo material. Due to the timelines of the book world, the New Yorker and New York Times’ investigations into Harvey Weinstein and the ancillary reports and investigations it sparked were published after Fritz was done writing. Yet it is still a queasy experience to read here about the creative successes of Amazon Studios executive Roy Price, with no word on the subsequent sexual-harassment allegations that extinguished his career.
Still, in an industry where nobody knows anything, it is fair to say that Fritz knows at least enough to make sense of nonsense.
Barry Hertz is the film editor for The Globe and Mail
QUOTE:
it is Bush who has raised that art to a level of dangerous perfection that is misleading our citizenry to the point of rendering public power and accountability moot.
I felt very angry reading this book, and my anger is directed at all politicians who lie to the public.
Once we all stop believing everything we see and hear on television and radio and the newspapers, and do our own research and truth-seeking, we the people just might win the game of spin.
All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth
Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, & Brendan Nyhan
Touchstone
Paperback
352 pages
August 2004
rated 5 of 5 possible stars
previous review next review
“To everything, spin, spin, spin, there is a season, spin, spin, spin…” OK, I know the correct word is “turn,” but in today’s world, spin is far more likely to be the case when referring to the media, our current presidential administration and just about every politician of every stripe on the planet. Spin rules. Truth gets its walking papers, and this powerful and enraging book shows just how much truth has taken a back seat to propaganda on all fronts of the political spectrum.
According to the editors of Spinsanity.com, a popular website that keeps track of lies and misinformation in the media and government, the current president has made a mastery of the art of spin, but it didn’t begin with Bush. In fact, the art of spin has been around for eons. But, the authors argue, it is Bush who has raised that art to a level of dangerous perfection that is misleading our citizenry to the point of rendering public power and accountability moot.
This chilling book documents all the president’s speeches, SOTU addresses, campaign debates and interviews with the media, then proceeds to show where and when the lies occur, which is pretty darned often. The authors do the same with John Kerry and other deceitful Dems, too, for you conservatives who are about to bash the book as liberal fodder. In fact, they show how spin has been used by a number of politicos and pundits to get a certain agenda pushed forward by manipulating public perception via the weak, spineless media. Oh, and it works every time, folks. Half the country still thinks Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Ignorance is bliss, but it is also very stubborn.
From 9/11 to the war in Iraq to the upcoming elections to Bush’s brilliant (sarcasm here) tax cuts and everything in between, the authors explain how Bush and his team have used the willing media to lie, cheat and deceive the American public in ways that absolutely will have you gasping and wondering, “How could we all be so stupid?” The answer: spin control. He who controls the spin, controls the people. In fact, so blatant has the Bush pattern of media deception become that even some of his fellow Republicans in office are hiding their heads in shame (although not enough to make a difference).
Each chapter covers so much detailed research and offers a multitude of quotes, excerpts of speeches and interviews as examples of exactly how certain words, phrases and statistics were skewered and redelivered to the public as truth, and how the media goes along with this deception as if it were a mighty and noble purpose. The White House’s aggressive PR team including the master of lies, Karl Rove, is profiled, and the use of repetition of lies is looked at in detail as a powerful method of convincing the public that truth is simply a matter of perception… the perception of those in power, mind you.
I felt very angry reading this book, and my anger is directed at all politicians who lie to the public. I don’t care if they are Republicans or Democrats or Greens. Spin is spin, and it always hurts the public who, like the cheated-upon wife, are usually the last to know. This book presents the problem – government control of a spineless media - but also offers some advice for how to fix the problem. Unfortunately, that solution involves people like you and me waking up to the manipulative ways of our “elected” leadership, and demanding that our media tell the truth and our government do the same. It also demands accountability to the public – something that just simply doesn’t exist today, what with Fox News and CNN and MSNBC all leaning rightward and refusing to counter or investigate stories coming directly from the White House or Pentagon.
The final two pages begin with this line: “The harm George W. Bush has done to our political system is profound and will almost certainly last far beyond his time in office.” (pg. 254). Lies upon lies lead to a political system that no longer knows the meaning of truth. Scary, but stoppable if we all just stop acting like Jethro on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” who once told Granny “It has to be real. It says so right in this here comic book!”
Once we all stop believing everything we see and hear on television and radio and the newspapers, and do our own research and truth-seeking, we the people just might win the game of spin.
© 2004 by Marie D. Jones for curledup.com.
QUOTE:
lucid critique
for letting statements like this go unchecked and for being so overly concerned about objectivity that they've become a mere outlet for politicians'""talking points."" Well organized and heavily referenced, this passionate indictment will pique readers' awareness of political spin
All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth
Ben Fritz, Author, Bryan Keefer, Author, Brendan Nyhan, Author Touchstone Books $22.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7432-6251-4
MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
George W. Bush vowed to restore""honor and integrity"" to the White House during his 2000 presidential campaign, but instead he has launched an""assault on honesty,"" argue the authors, who founded the watchdog Web site Spinsanity.com after concluding during the 2000 election that the""national debate had been reduced to an endless barrage of spin."" In this lucid critique of Bush's""permanent campaign of policy disinformation,"" the authors evenhandedly point out instances when other politicians, including Kerry, Clinton and Reagan, have distorted the truth to their advantage, but they contend that Bush is the""current leader of the arms race of deception."" Bush's weapons:""emotional language designed to provoke gut-level reactions, slanted statistics that are difficult for casual listeners to interpret, and ambiguous statements that imply what Bush does not want to state outright."" The authors support their claims with many solid examples. For instance, when commenting on the method that Bush used to imply a connection between Saddam and September 11, they point to a televised address that aired prior to the war in which Bush linked Iraq, al Qaeda and September 11 without saying directly that Iraq was responsible for the attack. The book isn't just a critique of Bush's spin tactics, however. The authors also reproach the media for letting statements like this go unchecked and for being so overly concerned about objectivity that they've become a mere outlet for politicians'""talking points."" Well organized and heavily referenced, this passionate indictment will pique readers' awareness of political spin and of the outlets--bloggers, publications like the Economist and""infotainment"" programs like Comedy Central's The Daily Show--that are purportedly fighting it.
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 08/02/2004
Release date: 08/01/2004
Open Ebook - 352 pages - 978-0-7432-7071-7
QUOTE:
must-read.
A Review of Ben Fritz’s “The Big Picture”
A Recent History of the Movies and Where They Are Headed
Zachary Houle
March 3, 2018
https://medium.com/
“The Big Picture” Book Cover
I don’t go to the movies anymore. That might surprise you if you know me, as I minored in Film Studies while pursuing a Journalism degree some 20 years ago. (Though that was more of a time management move on my part — it was easy to cut film class if they were showing a popular film that you could rent at Blockbuster if you really needed to be somewhere else to do journalism work.) In fact, I think the last movie I saw at the theatre was the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters, and I was one of only a few people who did see that film. The reason I don’t go to the movies much anymore is thus: while I was a comic book nerd in my 20s, and while I liked movies such as Iron Man and The Avengers, I grew tired of having to see other films that didn’t interest me, such as, say, Ant-Man, in order to be able to make sense of what was going in in the next Iron Man sequel. Same goes with Star Wars — I missed Episode VII on the big screen and getting caught up would essentially mean shelling out money that I don’t really have for Netflix and Internet plan upgrades to get caught up. The type of movies being made, with their cinematic universes, is akin to trying to keep up with Bob Pollard’s Guided by Voices and otherwise musical output. No sane middle-aged person can do it or would want to do it. Or maybe even afford to do it for us impoverished writer types.
So it was with this interest that I read Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz’s new book on the movies, The Big Picture. This book recounts why the types of movies we see now — reboots, franchises and so on — are being made at the expense of quality, adult mid-budget films that were a mainstay of Hollywood 10 years ago. This tome goes into detail about why TV has supplanted the big screen as the place where quality programming is being made, and why tech firms such as Amazon are now getting into the movie making business — to fill the void that the mainstream movie companies are now ignoring. The Big Picture also notes why China has become a big power player in the movie market. In a sense, The Big Picture is a state of the union address for the art of moviemaking.
Even though I may not be going to the theatre much these days, if at all, I still found this book to be a captivating, engrossing read. I simply could not put it down. Fritz goes behind the scenes to show readers how movies are selected to be made — using data culled from the 2014 Sony hack in the process, as I’m doubtful that no movie studio in their right mind would give the unfettered access that Fritz would need to write this book. Now, I’m of two minds of using hacked data for the purposes of writing a book — which Fritz also acknowledges. As a former journalist, I can say that because the material is public knowledge, it’s fair game. On the other hand, it’s a massive privacy breach and probably isn’t fair to the parties involved to have their dirty laundry exposed as it is. I must say that Fritz is, at least, thoughtful about the material that he uses. I didn’t feel that the book was exploitative by any means, though sometimes the book does tiptoe into that territory. I also questioned the lack of follow-up interviews with Sony executives, but they may be keeping their heads down in light of the hack and don’t want to lose their jobs. (The acknowledgements section notes that Sony staffers were consulted, but it seems that many didn’t want to speak on the record for fear of being shown to the curb. Maybe that should have been made more clear in the bulk of the book.)
Aside from ethical questions about the source of much of this book’s information, I still found it to be completely fascinating, even if Fritz names movies that I’ve never heard of. That goes to show just how ignorant I’ve become of what’s playing in the cinema, which is odd for me at the age of 42, because, when I was younger, I could have told you what was playing and when and how much money it was grossing at the domestic box office. Now, I couldn’t care less. I really came to understand why I’ve stopped caring about the movies, and the book forced me to ponder why I haven’t moved over to Netflix to get my mid-sized budgeted fare in the form of scripted TV series despite the costs I would incur. It’s clear from Fritz’s book that the delivery methods and types of movies being made are in flux. We’re really at a turning point in terms of the major players in Hollywood and the types of content being produced, and having Fritz show us the implications of all that is utterly spellbinding.
According to Fritz, the days of directors and stars having something of a final say over production and scripts are over. The “star vehicle” is a thing of the past. Instead, and as hinted earlier here, we are in the gilded age of the cinematic universe, where lesser-known actors who command less of a paycheque star in various sequels and offshoots that are released in a shorter delivery span. What interested me is the fact that movie studios now view these films, which are budgeted at $100 million or over, are seen as being more profitable, because of the money to be made not only from that film’s likely success internationally, but from all of the merchandizing and spin-off opportunities. As Fritz puts it, La La Land only makes its money once (no sequel opportunity there!). Transformers, on the other hand, makes its money many times over from the sequels and toy sales and so on and so forth.
What also surprised me was the knowledge that former A-list stars such as Adam Sandler are now commanding roughly the same amount of money that they did in the past by making movies from dot-com studios. That I didn’t know. Already, I feel behind the times when it comes to movies’ shifting role in the pop culture landscape — not caring for or not seeing them notwithstanding. Therefore, this book is crucial for getting adult movie-goers up to speed with how movies are now being made. In conclusion, this is a vital book — one that I think is going to get added to any university’s Film Studies’ curriculum. If you love movies, or even if you don’t love where the movie industry has headed these past few years, you need to read The Big Picture to get, well, the big picture on how movies are changing partially in response to new technology. This is a complete, well-rounded book that has been impeccably researched. Knowing what I now know from reading this book, maybe I’ll have to get that Netflix subscription after all. Like anything else, The Big Picture shows that there is room for intelligent, adult films — you only need to know where to now look for them. Maybe in my case, maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough, as this book so rightfully attests. For that insight alone, I’d consider this book a must-read.
Ben Fritz’s The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies is coming soon to a book store near you! (Ha.) It will be published by Eamon Dolan / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 6, 2018.
Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands icon below) and share it with your followers.
QUOTE:
Fritz gives us a brilliant and thorough analysis of how Hollywood’s major studios have changed. It is a devastating portrait of their creative decline. The Big Picture contrasts this with the new “golden age of television.”
he Truth About Hollywood: On Ben Fritz’s The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies
Avengers: Infinity War
by Peter Broderick
in Distribution, Filmmaking
on Jun 18, 2018
https://filmmakermagazine.com/
Ben Fritz, Hollywood, Marvel, The Big Picture
Hollywood has been transformed. The six major studios — Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Fox, Sony, and Paramount — have all changed significantly. Few filmmakers understand how profound these changes have been and how they have altered their opportunities.
What follows is my review of a recently published book, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, that opened my eyes to the new configuration of studio filmmaking. It was written by Ben Fritz, who has been covering the entertainment industry since 2004 for Variety, the Los Angeles Times and currently the Wall Street Journal.
The goal of my Distribution Bulletins is to empower independent filmmakers. I’m highlighting this book because I believe reading it will provide a revealing and useful overview of Hollywood today. The major studios are the 800-pound gorillas for independent filmmakers, who need to understand their competition. I’ll cover how this could impact your future at the end of this Bulletin.
THE FRANCHISE FILM ERA
The Big Picture begins: “how franchises killed originality in Hollywood,” which is in the title of the book’s introduction. Fritz states that “the dawn of the franchise film era is the most meaningful revolution in the movie business since the studio system ended in the 1950s.” He notes that before this era “no other industry pumped out so many products so frequently with so little foreknowledge of whether they would be any good.” He contrasts this with the success Warner Bros., Universal, and most notably Disney have had developing and/or exploiting major brands, including Harry Potter, the Fast and the Furious, Star Wars, and all the various Marvel properties.
Successful branded franchises provide much greater predictability. The cost of making the next film in a series and its anticipated revenues can be much more accurately determined than those of an original film. High-budget franchise films can “spawn endless sequels, spin-offs, and product tie-ins,” as well as amusement park rides, toys, and lucrative ancillaries. The audience built around a franchise greatly reduces risk.
Fritz illustrates the recent dominance of franchise film by noting that “of the top 50 movies at the global box office between 2012 and 2016, 43 were sequels, spin-offs or adaptations of popular comic books and young adult novels (five of the remaining seven were family animation).”
“The ‘cinematic universe’ is the most important trend in studio moviemaking today,” according to Fritz. Originated by Marvel, a cinematic universe consists of a series of films with interwoven superheroes and story lines, like Iron Man, The Avengers, and Captain America. The more, the merrier.
SONY REVEALED
Fritz presents an incisive case study of Sony, which vividly illustrates his overall analysis of how the studios have changed. He analyzed internal documents and emails that were put online during the Sony hack.
He portrays Amy Pascal, chairman of the studio’s motion picture group, as an executive who “thrived at making all kinds of movies for all types of people” and specialized in “mid-budget original films for adults rather than global ‘event’ films engineered to spawn sequels.”
Although the first Spider-Man film was a huge hit for Sony, the sequels and reboot produced under Pascal had increasingly disappointing results. She was also unable to develop other franchises, while Warners, Universal, and Disney were having great success with theirs.
Franchise filmmaking also significantly reduced the power and salaries of stars. Fritz observed that audience loyalty shifted from stars to franchises, noting that now “stars only matter in the right roles.”
Sony had benefited greatly from the relationships Pascal nurtured with two A-list actors, Will Smith and Adam Sandler. Each actor had starred in a number of profitable films made by Sony but eventually their box office power waned as did that of many other stars. After assessing their declining options at the major studios, both actors abandoned the sinking Sony ship for the ascending Netflix rocket, where they both made substantial deals.
INTERNATIONAL DWARFS DOMESTIC
The international box office exploded from $8.6 billion in 2001 to $27.2 billion in 2016. It has grown to over 70% of the worldwide box office total of $38.6 billion. Ticket sales outside North America in 2016 were 2.3 times greater than North American ticket sales of $11.4 billion.
The increasing importance of international ticket sales reinforces the studios shift to franchise filmmaking. Fritz notes that “the 48 highest-grossing Hollywood films overseas are all visual-effects-heavy action-adventure films or family animation” (with the sole exception of Titanic).
Fritz examines the impact of China, where ticket sales were 6.6 billion in 2016 and exceeded U.S. ticket sales in the first quarter of 2018. Adam Goodman, who previously headed production at Paramount, is quoted saying “we’re at the point where Hollywood can’t exist without China.”
Fritz details the ways China has gained influence over the movies Hollywood makes and distributes. While China is a critically important market where event movies can do incredibly well, censors there can prevent the distribution of any U.S. films with unacceptable content. There are also import quotas. Studios have formed partnerships with Chinese companies, cut content from films that might offend Chinese officials, and added content designed to please Chinese audiences. Studios want to make films that will succeed in China. I assume their willingness to make non-franchise films will continue to decline as the value of the Chinese market continues to increase.
WHAT’S MISSING?
No longer seeking to make “every type of movie for everyone,” the studios are “focused on the types of movies that delivered the biggest and most consistent profits,” according to Fritz. When home video revenues fell dramatically, the studios cut costs and “risky original scripts and adaptations of highbrow books were the first to go.” Between 2006 and 2016 the studios reduced production by 32%. “The decline is explained entirely by the evaporation of interesting, intelligent mid-budget films.” Fritz notes that today “anything that’s not a big budget franchise film or a low-cost, ultra-low risk comedy or horror movie is an endangered species at Hollywood’s six major studios.”
Customers also went missing. Viewers 18 to 25 “saw two fewer films per year on average in 2016 than they did in 2012.” Luring viewers off the couch became harder. Ticket sales in North America fell from 1.57 billion tickets in 2002 to 1.31 billion in 2016. In the first chapter of The Big Picture, there is a momentous point when Amy Pascal and her teammates realize that “creativity would no longer drive business at Sony Pictures.”
In the final chapter, Fritz notes that “spending big money on anything original in the age of franchise film dominance is usually a suicide mission.”
Throughout the book Fritz makes clear that the major studios learned — some sooner than others — that they could increase profitability and reduce risk by devoting their resources to building and maintaining franchises or, better yet, connected universes. Once they were able to successfully launch a franchise, their focus was on providing more of the same. Genuine creativity is too risky. Making movies the viewers haven’t seen before is too unpredictable, especially as international ticket sales far exceed those in North America.
LIFE BEYOND FRANCHISES
While The Big Picture focuses on the status of studio moviemaking, it also provides a perspective on filmmaking outside the studios. Fritz highlights “peak TV.” He notes that not long ago “television was the medium of the familiar and cinema was the medium of originality.” He believes that the “rise of original, risk-taking television is directly tied to the decline of original, risk-taking filmmaking.”
Fritz explains how technological changes have ushered in a Golden Age of TV. VCRs made it possible to time-shift programs and DVDs made it easy to watch whole seasons of series. DVRs made it easier for people to record all the episodes of their favorite shows. Then Netflix began releasing all episodes of series at once, making binge viewing possible. It has never been easier to watch what you want when you want it. Staying home and watching a series you love at little or no cost on your high definition television became more appealing to many viewers than venturing out to a movie theater and spending their money on tickets, parking, concessions and possibly a baby sitter, to see a film you may or may not like. As the quality and diversity of television rose dramatically, the new habit of binge watching at home replaced the old moviegoing habit for significant numbers of people.
“It has long been obvious that television is a better business than movies,” according to Fritz. He notes that television networks are the most profitable parts of major media companies, including Disney, Viacom and NBC Universal. His in-depth examination of Sony illustrates this clearly.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR INDEPENDENTS
Fritz’s portrait of franchise filmmaking at the major studios is very persuasive. It is a cautionary tale for independent filmmakers passionate about making movies people haven’t seen before. While there are rare exceptions, including The Dark Knight, Wonder Woman, and Black Panther, the preferred approach to superhero movies is exemplified by Avengers: Infinity War. It is a thoroughly mediocre sequel that audiences have lapped up and critics have taken far more seriously than it deserves.
Fritz notes that “directors’s overall power in Hollywood has diminished considerably.” He explains that the role of directors of franchise movies resembles that of directors of television series — their job is to maintain the look and style of the overall series, whether it is Breaking Bad or Star Wars. They need to stay within the lane of the series rather than going off-road into new territory. The underlying assumption is that audiences want more of the same, whether it is Fast and Furious 10 or Mission Impossible 15. According to Fritz, there used to be more than 12 Hollywood directors who could easily get their films greenlit but today there are only three — Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Christopher Nolan.
As the major studios increasingly focus on franchise filmmaking, growing the same crop year after year, they are becoming monocultures. As agriculture has demonstrated, while farming a single crop may have short-term financial benefits, monocultures can create food deserts. By abandoning diverse production slates and providing a steady diet of franchise films, the studios are creating movie deserts, as demonstrated by the trailers and posters for their upcoming and seemingly interchangeable releases.
Instead of viewing the studios’ unwillingness to finance dramas as a problem, independents should see it as an opportunity. There is still a significant audience for adult dramas, and now studios offer little or no competition. This is also true for the full range of non-franchise filmmaking.
Beyond the major studios, the opportunities for producing and distributing independent films are wide open. The Big Picture includes a chapter on Amazon Studios. Fritz begins with Manchester by the Sea, the first independent film in seven years that was acquired at a film festival and then grossed more than $50 million (worldwide box office $77,540,751). Amazon Studios acquired it at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. At the following Sundance, Amazon bought The Big Sick, which was also a hit (worldwide box office $56,262,309).
Amazon Studios has been the exact opposite of a franchise filmmaking machine. It has financed and acquired truly independent films by established and emerging independent directors. By hiring acclaimed indie producer Ted Hope as its Head of Motion Picture Production, Amazon signaled that they were serious about making high-quality, provocative and original pictures. Fritz quotes Hope explaining that instead of making films that “80 percent of the audience eventually gets around to watching,” his team “wants the thing that 20% of the audience is so passionate about, they’ll break up with you if you don’t feel the same way.”
The Big Picture contrasts Netflix with the major studios and shows how it is challenging them. Unlike Amazon Studios, which launches films first in theaters, Netflix prefers to make films available directly to subscribers the day they premiere, whether or not they are simultaneously premiering in theaters.
When Netflix began as a DVD-by-mail service, it relied on the studios to make a significant number of the movies it rented. When Netflix prioritized digital distribution, it was determined not to be dependent on studio films so it made a growing commitment to original production that can only be seen on Netflix.
When Netflix first challenged the six major studios, it was an inexperienced David facing powerful and confident Goliaths. Instead of using an analog slingshot, Netflix used virtual weapons and innovative ideas to take on the studios. It managed the transition to digital distribution far better than the lumbering studios. Netflix ran circles around the studios by re-conceptualizing global distribution. It has a far greater ability to innovate than the studios, which have much greater inertia. Netflix is looking forward while the studios are too often looking backward.
NEW ECONOMICS
In the concluding chapter of The Big Picture, Fritz questions the “traditional economics of film, whereby each production aims to be profitable.” He believes that sticking to this goal will “further narrow down the types of movies that old-school studios like Sony make to the big, loud, and financially safe superheroes, sequels and spinoffs.”
He contrasts this approach with the “new economics of film,” which he is convinced will foster production of all sorts. Netflix is the leading exemplar of this approach. Its goal is to increase subscribers rather than to sell more tickets or downloads. Instead of marketing films one by one, it is selling access to a growing library of film and television. The priority is to attract new subscribers and retain existing ones.
Netflix is free of the constraints that limit traditional distributors who won’t pay more to acquire a film than they expect to net distributing it. Netflix can finance an original film or series without having to focus on whether projected revenues will exceed the cost of production. Amazon also prioritizes gaining and retaining subscribers (Prime members). Unlike Netflix, which only makes money from subscriber fees, Amazon benefits from revenues from theatrical ticket sales of its features and most importantly from all of the purchases Prime members make on the platform.
The Big Picture also describes Annapurna, Megan Ellison’s company, that produced Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, Her, Foxcatcher and American Hustle. Ellison has supported the kind of unique, provocative, risky, auteur-driven features that none of the six major studios would choose to finance. They’d rather make another franchise film sequel.
THE PARALLEL WORLD
There are many opportunities for independents today beyond the studios, and even a few left within them, but they are not the focus of The Big Picture. A24 studio specialty divisions Focus Features, Sony Pictures Classics, and Fox Searchlight (whose fate is uncertain because of the looming Disney sale) are barely mentioned.
There is a parallel world of independent filmmaking where originality is celebrated. The goal is to make films viewers haven’t seen before rather than to crank out interchangeable sequels. Many independents strive to change the way people see the world rather than attempting to duplicate as closely as possible an experience they have had several times before. Unlike on the franchise film assembly lines, truly creative directors, writers and producers are as important as they have ever been.
In this parallel world, there are unprecedented distribution opportunities far different from those at the center of The Big Picture. Filmmakers can split rights among distributors and retain the right to sell directly from their websites. Independents are connecting directly with core audiences while they are making their films. These direct connections enable filmmakers to build audiences initially around their films and ultimately around themselves. By taking these personal audiences with them to future projects they greatly increase their chances of having sustainable careers. Many independents are designing customized and flexible distribution strategies, unlike the studios which are using formulaic and fixed distribution plans.
These innovative approaches are outside the scope of The Big Picture. Instead Fritz gives us a brilliant and thorough analysis of how Hollywood’s major studios have changed. It is a devastating portrait of their creative decline. The Big Picture contrasts this with the new “golden age of television.” Fifty-seven years ago, FCC chairman Newton Minnow proclaimed television “a vast wasteland.” It is not hard to imagine him redirecting his famous phrase to studio franchise filmmaking today. - © 2018 Peter Broderick
Peter Broderick is a leading Distribution Strategist and President of Paradigm Consulting. He spearheads the distribution of independent films and consults with filmmakers and companies around the world. Peter helps design and implement customized strategies to maximize revenues, audience, and impact. His articles for Filmmaker, such as “The ABCs of Guerrilla Filmmaking,” which included the printed budgets of seminal ’90s independent films, were among the most noted of this publication’s early pieces. Subscribe to his free Distribution Newsletter, which offers news and advice to independents, here.
QUOTE:
highly entertaining book about Hollywood in the 21st century,
In a slightly-gossipy yet never exploitative style, Fritz combs through the data of the last decade, picking apart both behind-the-scenes shenanigans and emails gleaned from the infamous Sony hack. Fritz examines the fall of Sony as a major box office player; the rise of Marvel studios; the death of mid-budget films; the growth of Netflix original programming and much, much more.
‘The Big Picture’ is a Must-Read Book About Filmmaking in the 21st Century
Posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2018 by Chris Evangelista
http://www.slashfilm.com/
How did the movie industry get to this point? Why have mid-budget, adult-driven films all but vanished from the multiplexes while superhero movies and franchises reign supreme? Ben Fritz answers these questions, and more, in his addictive new book The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies.
Our The Big Picture review delves into Ben Fritz’s highly entertaining book about Hollywood in the 21st century, and highlights segments about Disney, Marvel Studios, Netflix, Sony and more.
In a slightly-gossipy yet never exploitative style, Fritz combs through the data of the last decade, picking apart both behind-the-scenes shenanigans and emails gleaned from the infamous Sony hack. Fritz examines the fall of Sony as a major box office player; the rise of Marvel studios; the death of mid-budget films; the growth of Netflix original programming and much, much more. If there’s one recurring element in the book, it’s Sony, and its former chairperson Amy Pascal. One gets the sense that Pascal is one of the rare Hollywood execs who actually loves movies as an art form, and not just as money-making machines. The way Fritz tells it, it was perhaps this undying devotion to small, adult-driven drama that ultimately lead to Pascal’s Sony downfall.
If you’re a film fan, The Big Picture is a must-read. It’s an informative, entertaining, often maddening look at how the film industry ended up where it is today – for better or worse. Below, I’ve highlighted some key revelations from the book, but they only scratch the surface. For the full story, pick up Fritz’s book. I guarantee you’ll likely power through it in one sitting, unable to put it down.
The Big Picture book
Stolen Material
First thing’s first: Fritz is clear out of the gate that a lot of the research he gathered for the book was taken from the hacked, AKA stolen, Sony emails. In 2014, a hacker group leaked a wealth of Sony material online, including personal emails, salary info and then-unreleased movies. The hackers were allegedly from North Korea, spurned on to their actions by the impending release of Sony’s North Korean-themed dark comedy The Interview (although there are some who think the hack actually came internally and used North Korea as a scapegoat).
There is an ethical question here, and I could certainly understand someone not even wanting to delve into the book for these reasons. For his part, Fritz is open about all of this. “This book is based, in part, on stolen material. I won’t make any bones about it,” the author says in the introduction. “Nevertheless, it’s an undeniable fact that much great journalism has used stolen material as its source.” As an example of this, Fritz cites the famous Pentagon Papers (recently chronicled in Steven Spielberg’s The Post).
“Whatever your views,” Fritz writes, “I hope you’ll agree that what you’re about to read is not exploitative.”
For what it’s worth, I do think Fritz does a good job of keeping things on the level. He never dives into personal issues (unlike, say, the similar Hollywood history book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), and sticks strictly to the business side of things.
The Fall of Sony
Since Fritz used the Sony hack as a springboard, Sony takes up a larch chunk of the first part of the book. Most of this focuses on Amy Pascal’s (failed) attempts to compete with Disney and Marvel.
As Fritz details, while other studios got into the franchise game, Sony essentially relied on three major franchises: James Bond, Men In Black and Spider-Man. Unfortunately for Sony, all three came with “baggage”. Sony didn’t actually own the Bond franchise – MGM did, so while the Bond film Skyfall made $1.1 billion worldwide, Sony only made about $57 million from the film.
Men In Black 3, Sony’s third biggest hit of 2012, grossed $624 million worldwide. But that wasn’t enough of a profit, since Sony had to pay star Will Smith and executive producer Steven Spielberg $90 million in gross points.
As for Spidey, Sony’s reboot The Amazing Spider-Man earned “about $110 million on $758 million of worldwide ticket sales,” which was “[l]ess than half the profits of 2007’s Spider-Man 3.”
In Sony’s desperate attempt to launch new franchises, they bought rights to titles like Barbie, the Fifth Wave series and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. They also considered combining the Men in Black and 21 Jump Street franchises (an idea that seems to be dead now). On top of that, they tried to launch a remake of Cleopatra, a third Ghostbusters, Bad Boys 4, a new He-Man film and a film based on the video game Uncharted. Almost none of these films have come to be.
marvel studios
The Rise of Superhero Films and Marvel Studios
Sony’s plan to reboot Spider-Man didn’t go as planned. The Amazing Spider-Man didn’t perform as well as the studio had hoped, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 fared even worse. One interesting tidbit Fritz reveals while discussing the Spider-Man series: after Amazing Spider-Man 2 failed to live up to expectations, Amy Pascal actually reached out to former Spider-Man director Sam Raimi and asked if he’d be interested coming back to revive the franchise. As we all know by now, Raimi did not return, and a deal between Marvel Studios and Sony enabled Spidey to be reborn into the MCU (although Pascal apparently threw a sandwich at Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige when he first proposed the idea).
Feige and Marvel “disliked” what Sony had been doing with Spider-Man. “[Feige] thought restarting with The Amazing Spider-Man, rather than moving on from Raimi’s mistakes in Spider-Man 3, had been a mistake,” Fritz writes, and quotes Feige as saying:
“In a million years I would never advocate rebooting…Iron Man; To me it’s James Bond and we can keep telling new stories for decades even with different actors.”
The not-so-friendly relationship between Sony and Marvel gets some attention in this segment. Specifically, Sony’s major blunder that cost them the entire MCU. Back when Sony first went to Marvel to snag the Spider-Man rights, Marvel’s new chief, Ike Perlmutter, offered up an even sweeter deal. Sony could have the rights to virtually every Marvel character, including Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, and Black Panther, for a cool $25 million. Sony’s reply? “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Fritz also tracks the rise of Marvel Studios from an office above a Mercedes dealership in Beverly Hills to a major Hollywood player. The author also reveals the reasoning behind launching the MCU with Iron Man: toys! As Fritz writes:
“To decide which film to make first, Marvel convened focus groups. But they weren’t convened in order to ask a random cross-section of people which story lines and characters they would most like to see onscreen. Instead, Marvel brought together groups of children, showed them pictures of its superheroes, and described their abilities and weapons. Then they asked the kids which ones they would most like to play with a toy. The overwhelming answer, to the surprise of Many at Marvel, was Iron Man.”
Further along, Fritz reveals what you might have long suspected about Marvel: they like to seek out directors they know they can control. As the author puts it, this was one of the reasons Marvel hired Jon Favreau to helm Iron Man:
“Favreau wasn’t particularly powerful in Hollywood, meaning that if battles over costs or creative choices arose, and if they needed to push him around, they could.”
“We would never have a final cut director,” David Maisel, then president and chief operating officer of Marvel Studios, is quoted as saying. “Our movies were not the director’s fiefdom.”
Maisel was one of the key-figures who saw the potential in a cinematic universe. “One of the best businesses in movies is sequels because you can better predict the revenue and the costs,” he’s quoted as saying. “I knew by interspersing our characters, I was making every movie a quasi-sequel.”
after earth
The End of Movie Stars
There was a time when the movie star reigned supreme. Audiences didn’t so much flock to the multiplexes for a film’s subject – they went to see the star. They went to see Tom Cruise, or Sandra Bullock, or Will Smith. These days, that’s not the case. Star power has waned.
“What happened?” Fritz writes. “Audiences’ loyalties shifted. Not to other stars, but to franchises. Today, no person has the box-office track record that [Tom] Cruise once did, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone will again. But Marvel Studios does. Harry Potter does. Fast & Furious does.”
As the author puts it, “Moviegoers looking for consistent, predictable satisfaction they used to get from their favorite stars now turn to cinematic universes.”
From here, The Big Picture goes on to talk about how two of Sony’s biggest stars, Will Smith and Adam Sandler, began to lose their luster. Smith and Sandler once commanded box office gold, but the 21st century put a stop to that.
One of the prime examples of this is Smith’s sci-fi epic After Earth, which was a box office failure for Sony. Smith had extremely lofty ideas for the film. He didn’t just want to turn After Earth into a movie – he wanted “a live-action television show, an animated series, webisodes and mobisodes, a video game, consumer products, theme-park attractions, documentaries, comic books, an ‘in-school education program in partnership with NASA,’ and ‘cologne, perfume, toiletries, etc.’”
Needless to say, none of this happened.
There’s one final indignity in the chapter dealing with Smith: the former box office king really wanted to star in Passengers, but Sony preferred newly-minted blockbuster champ Chris Pratt instead. Perhaps Smith got the last laugh, though – he went to Netflix for a big payday with Bright, and Passengers flopped.
Netflix Triumphs
Netflix seems unstoppable now. The streaming platform, which began life primarily as a mail-movie-rental service, has gone from loaning out other people’s films and TV to crafting their own. Netflix has plans to create 700 original movies and TV series to its service in 2018 alone. While purists will always cherish the theatrical experience, Netflix has put a serious dent in movie going.
As The Big Picture tells it, since Hollywood was resistant to license many of its titles to Netflix, Netflix decided to create their own content. People creating their own content instead of relying on the content of others is nothing new, but Netflix approached this in a different way. The author of The Big Picture writes: “Rather than rely on focus groups, subjective comparisons to similar content, and executives’ gut feelings, Netflix used data.”
With the early Netflix original hit House of Cards, for instance, “Netflix could easily see that Kevin Spacey movies had long done well on the service, and many subscribers had watched the director David Fincher’s The Social Network…from start to finish. Finally, the company knew that the British political drama House of Cards was also surprisingly popular among its American subscribers.”
When all was said and done, Netflix knew their House of Cards was a hit “not measured by viewership numbers” but “by the way everyone was talking about it.”
steve jobs movie
Why Studios Stopped Making Mid-Budget Dramas
There was a time when Hollywood thought making mid-budget, adult-driven dramas was good business. Now, such films are considered risky. If you need a recent example of this, look no further than Paramount’s Annihilation, an adult drama that received rave-reviews but underperformed at the box office. Audiences may say they want more adult movies, but when adult movies arrive, no one turns out to watch them.
The biopic Steve Jobs gets some prime attention here. Amy Pascal fought for years to get the film made, confident that the subject matter and the cast and director (originally Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson and David Fincher) would be enough to win audiences, critics and awards. Yet ultimately, when the film finally hit theaters – with Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet and Danny Boyle swapped in for Bale, Johansson and Fincher – Steve Jobs bombed.
Meanwhile, the latest superhero flick, no matter how dreadful the reviews, will always attract someone. So if you want to know why mid-budget dramas have vanished, the answer is simple: audiences avoid them, which in turn inspires Hollywood to stop churning them out. As The Big Picture states:
“The biggest change over the years is just how poorly mid-budget dramas now perform when they aren’t hits. In the past, if a major studio put its resources behind a movie, it was virtually certain to gross at least $15 million. But now, with big franchise films sucking up the oxygen in multiplexes and with most of the cultural buzz about interesting dramas centered on television, a new dramatic movie could come and go unnoticed, as if it never existed.”
disney logo
The House of Mouse
“Disney approaches movies much like Apple approaches consumer products,” writes Ben Fritz, and that is perhaps the most succinct summation of Disney’s success possible. The chapter in The Big Picture dealing with Disney chronicles how the classic Hollywood studio jumped head-first into the 21st century and embraced brands.
“Disney isn’t in the movie business,” Fritz writes. “It’s in the Disney brands business. Movies are meant to serve those brands. Not the other way around.”
Pirates of the Caribbean and Alice in Wonderland are the two films cited by The Big Picture as changing everything for Disney. Disney wasn’t sure Gore Verbinski’s first Pirates film would be a hit, and when they saw dailies featuring Johnny Depp’s out-there Jack Sparrow, they felt even more nervous. But the film was a smash hit. Ditto Alice in Wonderland, which received poor reviews but took in massive bank.
These results encouraged Disney to make both more live-action films based on recognizable brand names like Pirates, and also dip into their animation vault to recreate the animated films in live-action like Alice.
Per The Big Picture, Disney’s secret to success has meant “slashing the number of movies made per year by two thirds” and “largely abandoning any type of film that costs less than $100 million” or “is based on an original idea, or appeals to any group smaller than all the moviegoers around the globe.” The author sums it up bluntly:
“Disney doesn’t make dramas for adults. It doesn’t make thrillers. It doesn’t make romantic comedies. It doesn’t make bawdy comedies. It doesn’t make horror movies. It doesn’t make star vehicles. It doesn’t adapt novels. It doesn’t buy original scripts. It doesn’t buy anything at film festivals. It doesn’t make anything political or controversial. It doesn’t make anything with an R-rating. It doesn’t give award-winning directors…wide latitude to pursue their visions.”
This will no doubt sound bleak and depressing to some film fanatics, but the counterpoint to the woe is this: if you’ve been happy with what Disney has been churning out in the last few years, perhaps this approach isn’t such a bad idea?
QUOTE:
The Big Picture isn’t some jargon-heavy industry white-paper, though. While there is plenty of Hollywood-specific vernacular on display in the conversations pulled from some of the Sony emails, Fritz writes this in an accessible style that’s surprising given his years as a reporter covering the world of movies and the players behind the scenes. It’s loose and often funny, offering a quick read
BOOK REVIEW: THE BIG PICTURE BY BEN FRITZ
2018-06-06 CHRIS THILK LEAVE A COMMENT
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the big picture ben fritz
Writer Ben Fritz admits right at the outset of his book The Big Picture that the narrative he’s about to weave is based in part on stolen data, specifically the emails from Sony after that company was hacked several years ago. It’s the kind of “let’s get this out in the open right now” statement that not many people who covered the story as it happened in real time were willing to make, instead operating as if there weren’t murky ethical waters about to be swum. That he says so before anything else should tell you something about the kind of writer and reporter Fritz is.
Over the course of the book, Fritz takes the reader through the last ~10 years of the movie industry in a way that never comes off as insidery or inaccessible if you haven’t already been following along. As his hooks he offers a few different illustrations, including:
The end of Sony Pictures executive Amy Pascal’s run at the studio, one that closed out the Hollywood era of creativity uber allies
The rise of Marvel Studios and how studios now operate more as brand managers than anything else
The embrace of the Chinese theatrical market and how the money that has flowed from both ticket sales and investors has drastically changed the financial model Hollywood operates with
All of those should be very recognizable if, like me, you’ve been elbow-deep in watching the movie industry over the last decade. Still, Fritz brings new insights and stories to light that offer more background and show just how seismic a shift all that has been in a world that was governed for so long by mercurial filmmakers both in front of and behind the camera.
In a way, the story he weaves is one that could be told in a number of other industries. Pick up any book about how the corporate landscape has changed in the last 50 years and how that change has impacted workers and you’ll read stories about how accountants and money managers have taken over and turned family-run businesses that employed tens of thousands of people in small Rust Belt towns into multinational corporations that outsource production to Taiwan or Mexico, removing the foundation from an entire region.
That’s more or less what Fritz shares here. Where studios used to spend lavishly to indulge talent because they were popular with fans or simply because the studio heads liked them, the system now quantifies everything, using global box-office projections as the first and last arbiter of what movies move forward and which ones are spiked.
What’s notable is that for an industry that prides itself on power rankings – Fritz often talks about how someone’s title dictates where they fall on the food chain – so much of what transpired in the last 10 years seems to be out of the hands of executives, the ones who should be driving the ship. Pascal’s heartbreak – there’s no other word for it – is chronicled as we watch in real time as the ability to foster and nurture the kind of creativity she’s long championed is taken from her as the industry changes around her.
So too other executives at other studios are ousted as they find their talents, developed over years coming up through the ranks, are suddenly no longer applicable for what the industry needs at the moment.
The Big Picture isn’t some jargon-heavy industry white-paper, though. While there is plenty of Hollywood-specific vernacular on display in the conversations pulled from some of the Sony emails, Fritz writes this in an accessible style that’s surprising given his years as a reporter covering the world of movies and the players behind the scenes. It’s loose and often funny, offering a quick read that helps the reader really understand why the multiplex seems to offer nothing but IMAX 3D Dolby Digital presentations of the fifth film in a series he or she isn’t sure they’re up to date on while they don’t hear about anything else until it comes to Netflix or Amazon.
Highly recommended.
Chris Thilk is a freelance writer and content strategist who lives in the Chicago suburbs.
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