Name: The Hollywood economist
ISBN: 9781933633848

The Hollywood economist

In a Freakonomics meets Hollywood saga, veteran investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein goes undercover to explore Hollywood's "invisible money machine," probing the dazzlingly complicated finances behind the hits and the flops, while he answers the surprisingly puzzling question: How do the studios make their money?Along the way we also learn much about star system and what makes the business tick:+ What it costs to insure Nicole Kidman's right knee...+ How and why the studios harvest silver from old film prints...+ Why stars do--or don't do--their own stunts...+ Why Arnold Schwarzenegger is considered a contract genius...+ How Hollywood goes about doping outside investors and hedge fund managers...+ Why Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is considered a "masterpiece" of financing...

What Hacker News says

yatsykJan 2015

The Hollywood Economist 2.0: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies by Edward Jay Epstein [1] just about that

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004ZZP5QA/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...

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jseligerJun 2013

This was, literally, a Great Contraction

I think the basic problem is that contemporary movie studios are publicly traded companies whose goal is to grow by 10% a year (or at least hit market growth rates). In some businesses, that's just not possible because of limits to the size of the market; book publishers, for example, have only rarely grown at market or above-market rates.

Books are an interesting example for a couple reasons: book publishers have been real businesses far longer than movie studios. In addition, studios for a long time set up businesses that relied on people repeatedly re-buying the same movie on different formats. Books have never really gotten away with that (although we might be seeing some re-buying like behavior in the shift from paper to digital). Now there's not an obvious successor to DVDs, and movie studios might become, or be becoming, more like book publishers.

* Further background reading: Edward Jay Epstein, The Hollywood Economist.

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gee_totesJul 2012

Also, if you're interested in "Hollywood accounting", I suggest checking out the book The Hollywood Economist[0]

[0]http://www.amazon.com/The-Hollywood-Economist-Financial-Real...

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