The movie business has changed dramatically over the past decade. Fewer people are going to the movies, and in response studios are investing more of their resources in big-budget film franchises that can fill seats and sell merchandise, at the expense of adult dramas and comedies. At the same time, tech companies like Netflix and Amazon are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on television and film production, while transforming the way people watch television and film. In The Big Picture, a compelling look at the recent history—and future—of the movie business, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz comes to the conclusion that, amidst these changes, we may be living in a golden age of visual content. I spoke to Fritz about movie studios’ growing reliance on blockbusters, what’s driving Netflix and Amazon, and why a movie like Children of Men probably wouldn’t get made in 2018. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.



If there’s a big idea in The Big Picture, it’s that the age of the movie star and the star director is over. The age of the franchise has arrived. How did we get here?



THE BIG PICTURE by Ben Fritz. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pp. $27.00

Unbeknownst to a lot of us, the old way of making movies where movie stars mattered a lot, where directors were powerful, where it made sense to have a broad array of films—original dramas for adults, romantic comedies, etc.—was driven by certain economic forces that have changed. We just thought that studios had to make every kind of movie. But it turns out that when the economic forces change, the types of movies that studios make change as well.



Those changes include the rapid decline of DVD sales. DVD revenue was so abundant before; people were just buying random DVDs from Walmart and Target because they were cheap and it was easier than going to Blockbuster. In that period, it was much easier to make money from a film and much harder to lose money, so you could make a more diverse array of films. The international market has also become so important that a film that’s culturally specific in any way loses its financial viability. You have to worry about appealing to people in Shanghai and Moscow and Rio.



The rise of the golden age of television and streaming—once that occurred, people’s calculus changed. It didn’t make sense to leave the living room and spend the money to risk seeing something on the big screen, when you have so many great choices to watch on your TV or your tablet. Before, the only way to see high quality dramas for adults was to go to the movie theater—there were very few of them on TV.

