It is sometimes said that millions of people can't be wrong. Well, millions of people voted for the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 general election, so this is obviously not a hard and fast rule. But, in the realm of culture, it is always worth considering as a useful corrective to the kind of hipster snobbishness that insists anything very popular can't be good. "Because people are inherently social," the Harvard business professor Anita Elberse points out, "they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do." What's more, and equally understandably: "People have a taste for winners: if, say, a book is popular and has been widely discussed in the media, consumers have more reason to read it."
The blockbuster, then, is desirable on social grounds, as well as – what this book spends most of its length arguing – on economic grounds. According to Elberse's statistical scrutiny of the film, music and publishing businesses, it generally makes sense in marketing to bet big on a few blockbuster products. Spreading your resources over a greater number of properties is actually likely to be more risky. True, any given blockbuster could be an enormous flop. Disney's 2012 John Carter, Elberse relates, "cost an estimated $250m to produce and likely lost almost as much". On the other hand, a successful blockbuster can make so much money that it lifts the company's entire bottom line, despite loss-makers elsewhere in the portfolio. "The real goal," as one executive explains to the author, "is overall profitability."
In 2006, the then editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, published The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. Thanks to new digital distribution methods, it claimed, the blockbuster was on the way out, and most profits would henceforth come from niche products. It didn't work out that way, as Elberse now demonstrates. "The importance of individual bestsellers is not diminishing over time," she shows. "Instead, it is growing." (A remarkable statistic: 74% of all individual MP3s purchased online in 2011 sold fewer than 10 copies each, while 0.00001% of songs made up 15% of total revenues.) Why The Long Tail was nonetheless a blockbuster book is a mystery Elberse does not investigate.
Elberse satisfyingly deflates the glee of techno-futurists such as Anderson at the allegedly imminent dismantling of everything. Take "disintermediation", when creators bypass traditional corporate structures. This can work very well for some, as when Radiohead sold In Rainbows direct to fans, but such examples do not show that record companies or publishers are doomed. They are very good at performing what are called "channel functions" (paying advances, editing, marketing) that most artists can't or don't want to perform themselves. Meanwhile, today's online media companies seem to be busy emulating old-media models. Netflix is commissioning high‑budget series (the David Fincher/Kevin Spacey House of Cards, and Orange Is The New Black), while even YouTube is now piling money into original channels.
To most sensible people it's plain that some "tent-pole" blockbuster movies (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) are better than others (The Hangover Part III). But, presumably because creative worth is not amenable to investigation by econometric tools, Elberse attempts very early on to sideline the question of artistic value completely. "The purpose of this book is not to pass judgment on what makes for 'good' or 'bad' products," she insists, "or to question purely creative decisions; there's no arguing about taste, after all."
The Latin tag of which this last phrase is a translation – de gustibus non est disputandum – is often a resort of the philistine, as though debating the merits of artworks made as little sense as arguing furiously over whether salt and vinegar Squares crisps are superior to roast beef Monster Munch. (For the record: they are both delicious; it just depends what mood you're in.) In any case, Elberse's haste to dispose of the question of aesthetics is rather undercut soon afterwards by the reported opinion of a studio executive. If you're going to bet large on blockbusters, the chairman of Disney tells her, you have to make the right bets. "There is no hope if you just make a bad movie," he says. What Elberse rather grandiosely dubs "blockbuster strategy", then, only works if the films are good more often than not – but she has taken any discussion of what makes a film good off the table.
Even so, Elberse's book is actually more nuanced than the cheerleading subtitle suggests. Blockbuster strategy, it turns out, is the right strategy – except when it isn't. Take spending huge sums to secure the services of stars for your products, which also counts here as blockbuster strategy, in sport as much as in cinema. Elberse writes admiringly of the "Galácticos" strategy of Real Madrid during the 2000s, when it paid enormous sums for Zidane, Beckham et al, driving it to the top of the football clubs' overall revenue league, if not winning it many trophies. But, as she points out, Barcelona was also very successful during the same period, even though it followed the opposite model, that of "talent development", rearing home-grown stars (while still occasionally splurging on big players from elsewhere).
This is a book aimed at media business executives, so perhaps it is not surprising that it shares their values and not those of the "talent". Stars such as Jay-Z or the basketball player LeBron James receive pats on the head to the extent that they dream up "innovative" deals. (There is a hilarious moment when an executive is quoted saying wonderingly of Lady Gaga that "she could be a chief marketing officer for a big corporation, because she understands the brand". With potential like that, what kind of idiot could be content with remaining a mere musician?) But Elberse's partisanship comes to distort her factual assertions when discussing the huge salaries of leading actors in the film industry. She writes darkly of "the growing ability of powerful stars to undermine the profits of the studios". Whereas in Hollywood's golden age actors such as Bob Hope and Bette Davis were locked into strict and wide-ranging contracts, by 2005 "a handful of stars had become so powerful that studios had to pay ruinous fees to enlist their services".
Oddly, the melodramatic rhetoric of Elberse's "undermine" and "ruinous" is not borne out by her own evidence. According to her analysis, "whereas movies that starred A-list actors typically had higher box‑office revenues, the fees for those actors were so high that they wiped out the extra revenues the stars brought in." So not actually, you know, "ruinous" – just not "even more profitable". "As economists might put it," Elberse concludes in empathetic disappointment, "the stars themselves must have captured most of the surplus that resulted from their involvement." Of course, such equitable distribution of rewards is not at all how capitalism is supposed to work.
