Are Studios Dead?

While it may be true that in the movie business nobody knows anything, although I imagine James Cameron begs to differ, what about other businesses? Steve Jobs seems to know exactly what we want in elegantly styled electronics products, even before we do and even if they aren't quite perfect. Jeff Bezos knows how to sell us almost everything we want online -- and we thought he'd never make it past books. And how about that guy at Groupon who just turned down $6 billion for a company that didn't exist 3 years ago and has zero barriers to entry in its business plan -- he must know something. Of course, you can forget about Jesse Eisenberg/Mark Zuckerberg -- he knows, what, about 600 million somethings.

So, what does this have to do with movie studios? Well, it's possible that the General Motors model of a studio -- to paraphrase Alfred P. Sloan, "a movie for every person and purpose" -- where one studio and its executives try to make a steady stream of comedies, dramas, genre pictures and those $200 million-plus things that hold up tents, is over. With studios' high overhead and proven inability to control costs on one hand, and the daily onslaught of new technology that takes their product from them in ways they can't understand and pays them less per viewing on the other, the very model of a modern major studio may just be dead.

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