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Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age
by Paul Grainge
As illustrated by the continuous cycle of summer prequels, three-quels, and new franchises, a key strategy for the Hollywood conglomerates has been to (re)invent recognizable brands such as Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Sex and the City. Big event pictures can mean big business and big authences for the studios, breaking box office records by landing among the top annual grossing films domestically. In order to guarantee profits and an adaptable brand the films are constructed as huge media events situated within a universe of marketing, ancillary markets, and multilayered distribution deals.
In Brand Hollywood Paul Grainge examines how industrial changes and branding practices have shaped these event films within the context of a globalized fdm industry. Situating his work alongside Charles Acland, Grainge explores how the new gestalt of 'total entertainment" affects the status and selling of films. He focuses on the period between 1995 and 2003, when "branding became an organizing principle . . . within the (new) media economy of Hollywood" (14). For example, as the structure of Time Warner changed through various mergers, the company's strategy for producing, marketing, and releasing films centered on creating and maintaining valuable brands, from Batman to Harry Potter.
The study focuses on the complexities of cultural production (production history, marketing, distribution, and exhibition) rather than use and reception. Grainge offers a wide approach that includes industrial history and practices that follow the wave of mergers in the 1990s as well as discourse and textual analysis of the event pictures and franchises that followed.The author examines how "branding has come to 'make sense' to corporate actors to the status and selling of film" in what he caUs the "global media age" (14).
Grainge structures bis work in three parts, outlining the practice, poetics, and politics of branding, respectively. Part 1 explores branding as discourse, specifically, the changes in the marketing and media environment toward "the concept of 'total marketing' and 'total entertainment' within and between consumer and cultural industries" (15). In chapter 1 Grainge identifies how trade discussions regarding brands have come to distinguish the "core values" of a product or service in order to elicit new levels of consumer engagement (26). Referencing...