The Big Picture

February 1, 2018
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.

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March 12, 2018
For anyone wondering why the current output of Hollywood is so dissatisfying, journalist Fritz (coauthor of All the President’s Spin) has a simple explanation: greed. Drawing in large part on the hacked emails of Amy Pascal, the Sony Pictures chief with a reputation for nurturing talent and championing mid-budget adult dramas, Fritz succinctly lays out the economics behind the current dominance of big-budget franchise movies over smaller, character-driven films. Nowhere is this more evident than in the diverging fates of two studios, Sony and Disney. Pascal’s Sony, which from the 1990s onwards emphasized “mid-sized interesting movies” such as Jerry Maguire and As Good as It Gets, increasingly found in the 2000s that this formula could not compete with even one franchise movie—Disney’s The Avengers alone grossed $1.5 billion. Fritz also recounts the rise of Marvel Studios, Amazon and Netflix’s embrace of the smaller films that major studios now ignore, and the role of Chinese investors in keeping Hollywood afloat. Pascal emerges as an almost tragic figure, someone “who had lost herself” or at least “a place for people like her” in today’s Hollywood. Fritz’s book is a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse at the forces that determine what gets played at the local cineplex. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick Literary.

March 15, 2018

If Bob Woodward and Michael Lewis cowrote a book about the movie business, it would probably look a lot like this one. Wall Street Journal reporter Fritz explores the dramatic changes in Hollywood's financial landscape over the past 15 years through the recent fall from grace of Sony Pictures. Much of the author's inside information came from reading thousands of private emails made public in the 2014 cyberhack on Sony, adding a sense of both intrigue and exploitation to his story. What executives at Sony failed to do was realize the culture of entertainment on a national and international scale had shifted toward a demand for serialized and superhero-based films, with studios such as Warner Bros. and Marvel beating them to the punch. With new players Netflix and Amazon creating brilliant dramatic content, and TV reaching new heights of quality programming, the days of the old models are gone. VERDICT A revealing portrait of the current state of the business of Hollywood, written with a journalist's ear for making complex material clear and engaging.--Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA

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