Box Office Throwdown

The Big Picture – The Fight for the Future of Movies – Ben Fritz (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

It is a frequent question when the weekend rolls around, “anything good playing at the movies?” The answer more often than not is a resounding NO! Just to be clear, I am not a movie snob by any measure; I take guilty pleasure in regularly watching re-runs of Die Hard, the Resident Evil series or The Italian Job, so I am not easy to please. My scale to measure my interest in heading down to the movie plex runs along the lines of is the movie based on one of the book series my teenage daughter has read or do I really want to shell out 60 bucks for tickets and overpriced concession stand popcorn, to see this movie? Hence the regular NO!

Ever wonder what happened to the good old days where you actually looked forward to a whole slate of movies that would being rolling into your local theatre? You remember when you and a gang of friends would truck down to the theatre on a Saturday and catch the latest offering. Well it seems those days are no more…unless you are a fan of movies that come complete with a full slate of toys, sheets and pillowcases and side order of sequels and spinoffs. Veteran Hollywood reporter Ben Fritz takes inside the current studio thought process to show how the formula to decide what movies get made and what gets passed on. It is an amazing tale of insider insight and an eye opening look at how Hollywood works with an eye firmly on the bottom line.

Fritz utilizes info he gleaned from the infamous Sony Pictures hack from a few years ago as his jumping off point. While most in the media focused on the more salacious tidbits in the tens of thousands of leaked emails, Fritz delved deeper to see if there was more of a story to be had in this treasure trove. While certainly not on the scale of the Pentagon Papers or Deep Throat’s Watergate, Fritz was able to piece together a great story about the current state of the movie business.

Fritz also details the impact of non-traditional moviemakers like Netflix, Amazon and Marvel Comics have had on the business of movies. He paints a picture that is both enlightening and a bit frightening about where this all leads when it comes to fans of films that fall out of the current franchise rules approach to movie making. He raises the thought provoking question about whether some classic films would have ever got off the drawing board in the current state of things. Fritz manages to give an inside story without coming off as too much inside baseball, which makes this a great read for movie fans.