Norman Lear Center Senior Fellow Neal Gabler.

 

In a piece for the Los Angeles Times, Neal Gabler of USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center discussed the Walt Disney Co.'s recent purchase of Lucasfilm and Hollywood's evolution from an "entertainment business" to a "branding business." "What the Lucasfilm acquisition suggests is that deals are a thing unto themselves and that movie studios are no longer in the movie or even the entertainment business at all," Gabler said. "They are in the branding business, and Lucasfilm is one of the biggest brands." Gabler argued that because pre-established brands like "Star Wars" are proven profit makers for studios, sequels and franchise reboots have become extremely popular. "The budgets for movies have skyrocketed along with the marketing costs, so that practically every movie is not only a risk, it is a high risk, which is why studios lust after sequels and familiar characters that are effectively pre-sold to the audience on the premise that those audiences are just as risk averse as the studios," he said. "So now the studio [Disney], like all studios, is back to generating films that have already been road-tested for audience receptivity." Promoting a brand, Gabler said, has become more crucial to the financial success of a movie than filmmaking itself. "It used to be that the movie created the brand, which is exactly how George Lucas built his empire," he said. "Now the brand creates the movie." "The holy grail of Hollywood has always been trying to find a way to make movies that sell themselves without the movies necessarily having to be any good. With the acquisition of Marvel and now of Lucasfilm, Disney may have finally found the grail. You don't need imagination or art. All you need is a brand." Read the article here. Norman Lear Center