Download or read book Blockbusters written by Anita Elberse and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the future of popular culture will revolve around ever bigger bets on entertainment products, by one of Harvard Business School's most popular professors What's behind the phenomenal success of entertainment businesses such as Warner Bros., Marvel Entertainment, and the NFL—along with such stars as Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, and LeBron James? Which strategies give leaders in film, television, music, publishing, and sports an edge over their rivals? Anita Elberse, Harvard Business School's expert on the entertainment industry, has done pioneering research on the worlds of media and sports for more than a decade. Now, in this groundbreaking book, she explains a powerful truth about the fiercely competitive world of entertainment: building a business around blockbuster products—the movies, television shows, songs, and books that are hugely expensive to produce and market—is the surest path to long-term success. Along the way, she reveals why entertainment executives often spend outrageous amounts of money in search of the next blockbuster, why superstars are paid unimaginable sums, and how digital technologies are transforming the entertainment landscape. Full of inside stories emerging from Elberse's unprecedented access to some of the world's most successful entertainment brands, Blockbusters is destined to become required reading for anyone seeking to understand how the entertainment industry really works—and how to navigate today's high-stakes business world at large.

Download or read book Blockbusters written by Anita Elberse and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What’s behind the phenomenal success of entertainment businesses such as Warner Bros., Marvel Enterprises, and MGM — along with such stars as Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, and LeBron James? Which strategies give leaders in film, television, music, publishing, and sport an edge over their rivals? Anita Elberse, Harvard Business School’s expert on the entertainment industry, has done pioneering research on the worlds of media and sport for more than a decade. Now, in this groundbreaking book, she explains a powerful truth about the fiercely competitive world of entertainment: building a business around blockbuster products — the movies, television shows, songs, and books that are hugely expensive to produce and market — is the surest path to long-term success. Along the way, she reveals why entertainment executives often spend outrageous amounts of money in search of the next blockbuster, why superstars are paid unimaginable sums, and how digital technologies are transforming the entertainment landscape. Full of inside stories from Elberse’s unprecedented access to some of the world’s most successful entertainment brands, Blockbusters is destined to become required reading for anyone seeking to understand how the entertainment industry really works — and how to navigate today’s high-stakes business world at large.

Download or read book Blockbuster written by Tom Shone and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-12-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's a typical summer Friday night and the smell of popcorn is in the air. Throngs of fans jam into air-conditioned multiplexes to escape for two hours in the dark, blissfully lost in Hollywood's latest glittery confection complete with megawatt celebrities, awesome special effects, and enormous marketing budgets. The world is in love with the blockbuster movie, and these cinematic behemoths have risen to dominate the film industry, breaking box office records every weekend. With the passion and wit of a true movie buff and the insight of an internationally renowned critic, Tom Shone is the first to make sense of this phenomenon by taking readers through the decades that have shaped the modern blockbuster and forever transformed the face of Hollywood. The moment the shark fin broke the water in 1975, a new monster was born. Fast, visceral, and devouring all in its path, the blockbuster had arrived. In just a few weeks Jaws earned more than $100 million in ticket sales, an unprecedented feat that heralded a new era in film. Soon, blockbuster auteurs such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron would revive the flagging fortunes of the studios and lure audiences back into theaters with the promise of thrills, plenty of action, and an escape from art house pretension. But somewhere along the line, the beast they awakened took on a life of its own, and by the 1990s production budgets had escalated as quickly as profits. Hollywood entered a topsy-turvy world ruled by marketing and merchandising mavens, in which flops like Godzilla made money and hits had to break records just to break even. The blockbuster changed from a major event that took place a few times a year into something that audiences have come to expect weekly, piling into the backs of one another in an annual demolition derby that has left even Hollywood aghast. Tom Shone has interviewed all the key participants -- from cinematic visionaries like Spielberg and Lucas and the executives who greenlight these spectacles down to the effects wizards who detonated the Death Star and blew up the White House -- in order to reveal the ways in which blockbusters have transformed how Hollywood makes movies and how we watch them. As entertaining as the films it chronicles, Blockbuster is a must-read for any fan who delights in the magic of the movies.

Download or read book Movie Blockbusters written by Julian Stringer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Big-budget, spectacular films designed to appeal to a mass audience: is this what - or all - blockbusters are? Movie Blockbusters brings together writings from key film scholars, including Douglas Gomery, Peter Kramer, Jon Lewis and Steve Neale, to address the work of notable blockbuster auteurs such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, discuss key movies such as Star Wars and Titanic, and consider the context in which blockbusters are produced and consumed, including what the rise of the blockbuster says about the Hollywood film industry, how blockbusters are marketed and exhibited, and who goes to see them. The book also considers the movie scene outside Hollywood, discussing blockbusters made in Bollywood, China, South Korea, New Zealand and Argentina

Download or read book Creating Blockbusters written by Gene Del Vecchio and published by Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-03-08 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to creating "ever-cool" entertainment. An asset to entertainment executives or anyone aiming to create the next big hit, this book offers guidelines for developing concepts and marketing blockbusters. Whether it is a best-selling novel, a video game, or a high-tech toy, blockbusters play a big part in American society. Despite the prominence of these breakthrough hits, most entertainment ventures do not survive in today's competitive market. This guide identifies the key principles that will ensure lasting success.

Download or read book Blockbuster History in the New Russia written by Stephen M. Norris and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-19 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeking to rebuild the Russian film industry after its post-Soviet collapse, directors and producers sparked a revival of nationalist and patriotic sentiment by applying Hollywood techniques to themes drawn from Russian history. Unsettled by the government's move toward market capitalism, Russians embraced these historical blockbusters, packing the American-style multiplexes that sprouted across the country. Stephen M. Norris examines the connections among cinema, politics, economics, history, and patriotism in the creation of "blockbuster history"—the adaptation of an American cinematic style to Russian historical epics.

Download or read book Epics Spectacles and Blockbusters written by Sheldon Hall and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the history of the American blockbuster—the large-scale, high-cost film—as it evolved from the 1890s to today. The pantheon of big-budget, commercially successful films encompasses a range of genres, including biblical films, war films, romances, comic-book adaptations, animated features, and historical epics. In Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History authors Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale discuss the characteristics, history, and modes of distribution and exhibition that unite big-budget pictures, from their beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the present. Moving chronologically, the authors examine the roots of today's blockbuster in the "feature," "special," "superspecial," "roadshow," "epic," and "spectacle" of earlier eras, with special attention to the characteristics of each type of picture. In the first section, Hall and Neale consider the beginnings of features, specials, and superspecials in American cinema, as the terms came to define not the length of a film but its marketable stars or larger budget. The second section investigates roadshowing as a means of distributing specials and the changes to the roadshow that resulted from the introduction of synchronized sound in the 1920s. In the third section, the authors examine the phenomenon of epics and spectacles that arose from films like Gone with the Wind, Samson and Deliliah, and Spartacus and continues to evolve today in films like Spider-Man and Pearl Harbor. In this section, Hall and Neale consider advances in visual and sound technology and the effects and costs they introduced to the industry. Scholars of film and television studies as well as readers interested in the history of American moviemaking will enjoy Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters.

Download or read book Blockbusters written by Gary S. Lynn and published by Harper Paperbacks. This book was released on 2003-08-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Makes a BLOCKBUSTER? More than half of all new products fail in the marketplace. But companies can dramatically improve their odds of success by implementing five key practices -- all within their control. Drs.Gary Lynn and Richard Reilly share the results of a ten-year research study illustrated by the inside stories of nearly fifty of the most successful products ever created. Lynn and Reilly explain the five keys for companies wishing to develop the next blockbuster. Without these crucial elements a blockbuster new product is virtually impossible: Compelling Product Vision • Product Improvisation • Information Exchange • Senior Management Commitment • Teamwork

Download or read book Beyond the Blockbusters written by Rebekah Fitzsimmons and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Megan Brown, Jill Coste, Sara K. Day, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Amber Gray, Roxanne Harde, Tom Jesse, Heidi Jones, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Leah Phillips, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, S. R. Toliver, Jason Vanfosson, Sarah E. Whitney, and Casey Alane Wilson While critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first-century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, classroom materials and scholarship have remained static in focus and slight in scope. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give overwhelm conversations among scholars and critics—but these are far from the only texts in need of analysis. Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limiting perspective, bringing together essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have until now been overlooked. The collection tackles a diverse range of topics—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice. The approaches are united, though, by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting entryway into a field that continues to grow and change even as its works captivate massive audiences. It will prove a crucial addition to the library of any scholar or instructor of young adult literature.

Download or read book Directed by Steven Spielberg written by Warren Buckland and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the blockbuster is the most popular and commercially successful type of filmmaking, it has yet to be studied seriously from a formalist standpoint. This is in opposition to classical Hollywood cinema and International Art cinema, whose form has been analyzed and deconstructed in great detail. Directed By Steven Spielberg fills this gap by examining the distinctive form of the blockbuster. The book focuses on Spielberg's blockbusters, because he is the most consistent and successful director of this type of film - he defines the standard by which other Hollywood blockbusters are judged and compared. But how did Spielberg attain this position? Film critics and scholars generally agree that Spielberg's blockbusters have a unique look and use visual storytelling techniques to their utmost effectiveness. In this book, Warren Buckland examines Spielberg's distinct manipulation of film form, and his singular use of stylistic and narrative techniques. The book demonstrates the aesthetic options available to Spielberg, and particularly the choices he makes in structuring his blockbusters. Buckland emphasizes the director's activity in making a film (particularly such a powerful director as Spielberg), including: visualizing the scene on paper via storyboards; staging and blocking the scene; selecting camera placement and movement; determining the progression or flow of the film from shot to shot; and deciding how to narrate the story to the spectator. Directed By Steven Spielberg combines film studies scholarship with the approach taken by many filmmaking manuals. The unique value of the book lies in its grounding of formal film analysis in filmmaking.

Download or read book Blockbuster Performances written by Daniel Smith-Rowsey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines performances in the American film industry’s highest-earning and most influential films. Countering decades of discourse and the conventional notion that special effects are the real stars of Hollywood blockbusters, this book finds that the acting performances in these big-budget action movies are actually better, and more genre-appropriate, than reputed. It argues that while blockbusters are often edited for speed, thrills, and simplicity, and performances are sometimes tailored to this style, most major productions feature more scenes of stage-like acting than hyper-kinetic action. Knowing this, producers of the world’s highest-budgeted motion pictures usually cast strong or generically appropriate actors. With chapters offering unique readings of some of cinema’s biggest hits, such as The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, Iron Man and The Hunger Games, this unprecedented study sheds new light on the importance of performance in the Hollywood blockbuster.

Download or read book Blockbuster Plots Pure and Simple written by Martha Alderson and published by Illusion Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blockbuster Plots Pure and Simple presents step-by-step strategies that demystify the structure of story. Track the 7 most important elements of scene - pre-plot; cause and effect; conflict, tension, suspence; complex characters; compelling action; clarify theme; re-vision rewrites. You will be able to develop a multi-layered plotline for your story.

Download or read book Writing the Blockbuster Novel written by Albert Zuckerman and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Albert Zuckerman, legendary literary agent, has worked with many bestselling authors, including Ken Follett, Olivia Goldsmith, Antoinette Van Heugten, Michael Lewis, and F. Paul Wilson. Zuckerman is a master at teaching writers the skills necessary to crack the bestseller list. For this revised edition of Writing the Blockbuster Novel, Zuckerman has added an analysis of Nora Roberts's The Witness, which he uses along with classic books like Gone With the Wind and The Godfather, to illustrate his points. Zuckerman's commentary on Ken Follett's working outlines for The Man From St. Petersburg provide a blueprint for building links between plot and character. A new introduction discusses social media and self-publishing. Writing the Blockbuster Novel is an essential tool for any aspiring author. As Dan Brown said in an interview: "Not long ago, I had an amusing experience meeting the author of a book I received as a gift nearly two decades ago a book that in many ways changed my life. I was halfway through writing my first novel when I was given a copy of Writing the Blockbuster Novel. [Zuckerman's] book helped me complete my manuscript and get it published. [When] I met Mr. Zuckerman for the first time. I gratefully told him that he had helped me. He jokingly replied that he planned to tell everyone that he had helped me write The Da Vinci Code." At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Bigger Than Blockbusters written by James Roman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether it's the hum drum existence of Marion Crane and her illicit love affair, the psychotic antics of Norman Bates, the sudden irrational migration of birds, a crop duster swooping down on Roger Thornhill in the middle of nowhere, or Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace's unforgettable dance at Jack Rabbit Slim's - they are all cinematic moments that forever changed the psyche and viewing experience of American audiences. Bigger Than Blockbusters: Movies That Defined America tells the stories behind the most significant and influential films in American culture, movies that have had a profound influence on the literary, cinematic and popular culture of our time. Arranged chronologically, the volume gives readers an opportunity to place the films within the context of the social and cultural historic dynamic of the time, making this an ideal source for student papers and reports. Each entry includes the filmmaker, actors, release information, a synopsis of the film, critics' reviews, awards, current availability, and then background on the making of the film in an artistic, economic, and technological context. Spanning all genres, including horror and drama, adventure, comedy, musicals, science fiction, and more, this volume is loaded with enough trivia and factoids to satisfy even the most die-hard movie buff. Also included are other Greatest Films compilations from the National Society of Film Critics and noteworthy sources for comparative purposes. Guaranteed to inspire forays into film favorites as well as some very lively debate, this resource is essential reading for film lovers and students alike.

Download or read book Built to Fail written by Alan Payne and published by Lioncrest Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does an iconic brand die? For more than two decades, Blockbuster was America's favorite way to watch movies. Millions of customers visited more than eight thousand stores around the globe every week, providing more data about movie audiences than anyone in history had ever owned. If any company should have predicted the disruptive forces coming down the pike, it was Blockbuster. But as new threats emerged, none of its five CEOs had answers, and the company collapsed long before its time. Built to Fail tells the complete inside story of Blockbuster's meteoric rise and catastrophic fall. Beneath the surface of explosive growth lay a shaky foundation of financial difficulty, tunnel vision, and missed opportunities. Written by Alan Payne, the man who built the longest-lasting Blockbuster franchise chain in the country, Built to Fail is a cautionary tale for today's disruptive marketplace, explaining why Blockbuster was a broken company long before Netflix ever streamed a single movie.

Download or read book The Blockbuster Complex written by Thomas Whiteside and published by Wesleyan. This book was released on 1981 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Blockbusting in Baltimore written by W. Edward Orser and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative study of racial upheaval and urban transformation in Baltimore, Maryland investigates the impact of "blockbusting"—a practice in which real estate agents would sell a house on an all-white block to an African American family with the aim of igniting a panic among the other residents. These homeowners would often sell at a loss to move away, and the real estate agents would promote the properties at a drastic markup to African American buyers. In this groundbreaking book, W. Edward Orser examines Edmondson Village, a west Baltimore rowhouse community where an especially acute instance of blockbusting triggered white flight and racial change on a dramatic scale. Between 1955 and 1965, nearly twenty thousand white residents, who saw their secure world changing drastically, were replaced by blacks in search of the American dream. By buying low and selling high, playing on the fears of whites and the needs of African Americans, blockbusters set off a series of events that Orser calls "a collective trauma whose significance for recent American social and cultural history is still insufficiently appreciated and understood." Blockbusting in Baltimore describes a widely experienced but little analyzed phenomenon of recent social history. Orser makes an important contribution to community and urban studies, race relations, and records of the African American experience.