From The Big Picture

Excerpt from the book The Big Picture by Ben Fritz:

What made the movie business unique in the history of corporate capitalism is captured in the screenwriter William Goldman's maxim, true for many decades: "nobody knows anything." No other industry pumped out so many products so frequently with so littel foreknowledge of whether they would be any good. The only feasible business strategy, it appeared, was to sign up the best creative talent, trust your strongest hunches about what looked likey to appeal to millions of people, and hope you ended up with Back to the Future instead of Ishtar.

Over the past few years, however, something big has happened: finally, people in Hollywood do know something. What they know is that branded franchises work. People say they want new ideas and fresh concepts, but in reality they most often go to the multiplex for familiar characters and concepts that remind them of what they already know they like. Big name brands like Marvel, Harry Potter, Fast & Furious, and Despicable Me consistently gross more than $1 billion at the global box office, not only raking in huge profits, but justifying studios very existence and the jobs of everyone who works on their glamorous lots.

This change has happened slowly over about a decade in Hollywood, making it hard to appreciate its magnitude. But now it is undeniable that the dawn of the franchise film era is the most meaningful revolution in the movie business since the studo system ended, in the 1950s. That shift ended studios' ability to control creative talent by essentially owning it with long-term contracts. It also increased the quality of movies Hollywood made over the next fifty years because companies had to compete to make the most influential talent happy, rather than the other way around.

The franchise film era is, in many ways, a return to the studio system. Only now the major entertainment companies don't own the most important talent - they own the most important cinematic brands. Instead of fighting for a deal at MGM or Paramount, actors and filmmakers vie for a chance to make the latest spinoff of Star Wars or X-Men. Many of those movies are satisfying crowd pleasers, but nobody is going to compare the 2010s to a standout era of Holllywood filmmaking like the 1970s.