The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies
Written by Ben Fritz
Narrated by Timothy Andrés Pabon
4/5
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About this audiobook
The stunning metamorphosis of twenty-first-century Hollywood and what lies ahead for the art and commerce of film
In the past decade, Hollywood has endured a cataclysm on a par with the end of silent film and the demise of the studio system. Stars and directors have seen their power dwindle, while writers and producers lift their best techniques from TV, comic books, and the toy biz. The future of Hollywood is being written by powerful corporate brands like Marvel, Amazon, Netflix, and Lego, as well as censors in China.
Ben Fritz chronicles this dramatic shakeup with unmatched skill, bringing equal fluency to both the financial and entertainment aspects of Hollywood. He dives deeply into the fruits of the Sony hack to show how the previous model, long a creative and commercial success, lost its way. And he looks ahead through interviews with dozens of key players at Disney, Marvel, Netflix, Amazon, Imax, and others to discover how they have reinvented the business. He shows us, for instance, how Marvel replaced stars with “universes,” and how Disney remade itself in Apple’s image and reaped enormous profits.
But despite the destruction of the studios’ traditional playbook, Fritz argues that these seismic shifts signal the dawn of a new heyday for film. The Big Picture shows the first glimmers of this new golden age through the eyes of the creative mavericks who are defining what our movies will look like in the new era.
Ben Fritz
BEN FRITZ is an editor for the Wall Street Journal. He previously covered Hollywood for the Journal, the Los Angeles Times and Variety and is coauthor of the best-selling All the President's Spin. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he lives in Los Angeles.
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Reviews for The Big Picture
34 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5What started as interesting story of corporate espionage and hacking ended up as boring list of movie budgets and box office receipts.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It provides a nice overview of the business as it stands currently. It also provides enough clues as to how the movie business will develop in the near future. If you are trying to get into writing or filmmaking this book will encourage you and give you a glimpse of some on-ramps. Storytelling will never die, and Hollywood & Silicon Valley & China have converged. Some people are primarily concerned with cinema & storytelling, while others are concerned primarily with profits. With that being said, a writer, producer, or filmmaker needs to know who is whom, and which is which. . .and behave accordingly. This book, in my mind has provided the best & clearest rationale as to why we keep seeing the same type of big budget, VFX laden, franchise films at the cinemaplex. And the writer does it without resorting to the whiny, preachy, high-snobbity insults that most critiques rely on. And the reason is not due to "lack of creativity", "laziness", or "nostalgic idealization of the past as a better time for auteurs & true cinema". This book is about the business of movies and is worth the read.