How the U.S. Film Industry Impacts Corporate Entertainment Strategies
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Film is rarely used in the film industry these days. The cameras and microphones make use of sensors. They convert the sights and sounds to bits and bytes. Instead of using light boxes and scissors, directors and editors use computers to modify raw video. Finished "films" are distributed as huge files rather than giant spools. Analog has made way for digital.Although the film business has seen many technological breakthroughs, such as the introduction of sound, color, and television, digitalization, more than any other, has unleashed a fundamental transformation. It has transformed not just the nature of production but also the distribution and display industries. It has called into question industry standards and processes that have been around for decades.
COVID-19 has hastened this change
When the pandemic forced individuals to stay at home, streaming services stepped in, delivering video entertainment to viewers' televisions, computers, tablets, and other digital devices. Since the onset of digitization in the late 1990s, some of the industry's more drastic reconfigurations have been stalled by people with entrenched interests in the old structure. However, the pandemic has swept their reservations away.Major players have repositioned themselves, reimagining their business strategies. After nearly a century of reaching audiences through intermediaries, Disney became the first studio to provide its material directly to consumers. By December 2020, only one Hollywood studio (Sony) had yet to develop its own streaming service. Hollywood studios and parent companies have already started to release their films on streaming services. Universal/Comcast's "Trolls World Tour" debuted on video-on-demand. It generated about $100 million in pay-per-view revenue, with the majority going directly to the studio (Whitten 2020). Warner/AT&T stated that their full slate of blockbuster projects in 2021 will debut on the company's streaming service, HBO Max, on the same dates as they are released in theaters.
Digitalization affects more than just movie theaters and studios
The old television approach, sometimes known as "linear" television, in which a single uniform signal is broadcast to all viewers while alternating between content and commercials, is also in decline. Digital distribution has made it easier and less expensive to provide viewers with the content they want, when they want it. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime provide all-you-can-watch video content with little to no advertising.Digitalization has also hampered academic study into the film industry. Decades of insight into the factors influencing the success and failure of filmed entertainment had been gained by analyzing the previous model, which had been dominant for more than a half-century.Footnote1 However, as the model advances, many of the previously discovered patterns lose their validity. The film industry has become divided into two camps: tentpoles and niche films. Anything in between is becoming increasingly rare. People watch more video content than ever before, but in a variety of ways. The strategic landscape has evolved, causing changes throughout the industry's value chain.However, it remains unclear how all of these shifts have rewritten, or will rewrite, the "recipes" for success in film. We recruited a group of industry specialists, the "Mallen Group"—economists, finance, marketing, and strategy scholars—to think deeply about how digitization might affect the various phases of the cinema value chain. Which past patterns are likely to persist? Which ones have become obsolete? We designed the groups to span disciplines and include both academics and practitioners, ensuring that each group had a broad base of expertise and grounding in the topic under investigation.
This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economics features their responses
It contains five articles, each of which addresses the challenges that digitalization brings to filmed entertainment in a different segment of the industry: film producers, integrated film studios and conglomerates, theatrical exhibitors, television broadcasters, and digital streaming services and platforms.In this introduction, we will provide some historical history on the "Mallen Group" and its founder, Bruce Mallen. We then outline some of the important themes presented in these five papers. Finally, we widen the scope and speculate on what the future may hold beyond what the contributing writers offer, both in terms of the industry's ongoing evolution and an emergent research agenda for the new digital era.A Brief History of the "Mallen Group"In the fall of 1999, Bruce Mallen, a former marketing scholar with an interest in filmed entertainment and then Dean of Florida Atlantic University's College of Business, hosted the first of a series of conferences on the business and economics of the film industry in Boca Raton, Florida.The initial conference and its annual sequels included a number of distinctive elements. Most notably, the early events introduced some of the glamour of Hollywood to the academic community. Stretch limos would take the attendees back and forth. In homage to the Oscars, black tie celebrations with poster-size framed front pages from the prize winners' stories would celebrate the Carol & Bruce Mallen Award Winners. Scholars were recognized during the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival's awards ceremony.Just as streaming premieres have supplanted extravagant events in the industry, the initial glitz has gone. However, two more significant characteristics of the meeting have persisted across the 22 conferences that have followed. First, "Mallen Conferences" have always attracted a varied and interdisciplinary audience, including experts from economics, finance, history, law, management, marketing, sociology, and strategy. The connecting thread has been the fact that everyone has been studying the film industry. While the cast of characters has changed over time, the group is nonetheless connected by a love of movies and an openness to different ideas.
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