Week 3: 2.1 Entertain Me! Who makes your entertainment? Institutions, audience & participatory culture

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Reading Material:
Cucco, M. (2009) The promise is great: the blockbuster and the Hollywood economy. Media Culture and Society, 31(2), 215-230
     http://mcs.sagepub.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/cgi/reprint/31/2/215
Coppa, F. (2008) Women, Star Trek and the early development of fannish viding. Transformative Works and Cultures 1(1).doi: 10.3983/twc.v1 i0.44
     http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/44/64
Summary: 
The promise is great: the blockbuster and the Hollywood economy
  • Blockbuster
    • the audiovisual product
    • when come into cinematographic field - distinguishing characteristics its the size
      • the major economic investment
      • the amount of taking
    • everything revolves around the idea that a big production gives a better performance at the box office
    • the investment nowadays
      • the promotional process
      • the choice of genre
      • the narrative component
      • the place of consumption
    • Steven Spielberg - the director of Jaws - the father of blockbuster genre
    • Blockbuster and the new economic politics of Hollywood, would not exist without television
    • The advent of television turned the home into new entertainment centre, changing the forms and places of film consumption (Gomery,1992)
    • The first distinctive feature - the high economic investment involved
    • Costs are much higher
    • Blockbuster was born as a transnational product (Stringer, 2003)
    • A commercial product targeted at an international market
    • In blockbuster, the economic of media products are more important 
  • The cinematographic transposition of successful novels/TV series/ plays, participation in festivals
  • The saturation booking strategy
    • able to influence the economic performance of a film converge in it
    • represented a revolution in the three stages of the film industry's value chain
    • Jaws 1975 taught the film industry 3 lessons: 
      • the central role of advertising in order to guarantee the success of the film
      • television's capacity to advertise a film to viewers and make them want to see it
      • the importance of the opening weekend, considered to be the most critical moment in the life-cycle of a product
    • Why the strategic role of the opening weekend
      • to concentrate advertising costs and optimize effects
        • the new distribution strategies increased the concentration of advertising in that period but did not reduce it in terms of quantity
      • to avoid a qualitative debate
        • These movies depend on the so-called 'uninformative information cascade' (De Vany, 2004)
        • hit and run (De Vany, 2004)
        • the effect does not last long (De Vany, 2004)
        • this way quality becomes irrelevant (Lewis, 2003) and is no longer an economic threat
      • to maximize the cost of transfer rights
        • movies that manage to maximize their presence at the begining of the life-cycle will command the highest prices
      • to maximize the star and pre-sold identity effect
        • stars have turned into brand products (Bakker, 2005)
        • pre-sold identity concept
          • only consider the phenomena of sequel, prequel and remake
          • they are not completely new products, public more familiar
      • to reduce the danger of competition
        • major distributions always reach an agreement on the release of their most important list of movies
        • blockbusters tend to come out in the summer when the networks' competition is weaker
      • to exploit the potential of multiplex cinemas
        • the life-cycle of movie has been shortened by (the windowing system)
          • the wide opening weekend release pattern
          • the concentration of advertising in the weeks immediately before the first screening
      • to maximize distributors' receipts
        • distributors and exhibitors share the takings according to percentages that change over the weeks
        • the concentration of revenue on the first weekend brings a higher remuneration for the distributor
  • Conclusions
    • blockbuster manages to propose a kind of film where the promise of novelty and greatness lies in the use of advanced technology able to offer exciting special effects
    • the risks liked to original and against-the-mainstream choices
    • the opening weekend has become the central moment of the life cycle