Why are Marvel & Disney winning entertainment? | RP 88

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Dreams. Love. Escape.

Entertainment companies attempt to capture stories in bottles and sell them to us. The best stories make us stay up all night writing fan fiction, or dress up in costumes and duel our siblings with $200 lightsabers. The best companies make us want to give them our money for their stories.

Today we’re discussing another Matthew Ball essay entitled, ”What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter?”. It talks about how Disney and Marvel — two of my favourite entertainment companies — do just that:

1. Make cool stuff up

2. Get us to love their stuff

3. Make us pay them (a lot of money) to make more even cooler stuff up

It’s an incredibly simple, highly effective strategy that most people never notice.

Let’s get into it.

Why Marvel & Disney are winning entertainment —

What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter? by Matthew Ball

When we talk about entertainment companies, we often do it in terms of what they produce. When we talk Marvel, we refer to their comics and films. When we talk about Disney — Marvel’s parent company and one of the most profitable and enduring entertainment companies of the last 100 years — we rave about their animation and movies. Even Walt Disney put “Creative Talent of Studio / Theatrical Films” at the centre of his company’s synergy map.

But this isn’t what modern entertainment companies are all about. According to Ball, comics, books, and films are just cogs in the machine that allows the company to do three things:

1. It creates and tell stories

2. Builds love for those stories

3. Monetizes that love

Unlike Hollywood blockbusters, comics do not contribute billions of dollars to a publisher’s bottomline. Instead they are a gateway for new stories and intellectual property (IP).

This is true particularly for Marvel’s comic book business.

Comics allow Marvel Comics’ writers and illustrators to focus on creating amazing new characters and telling their stories. They don’t need to worry about how these stories will become profitable franchises, or how they’ll fit into the MCU.

Those are Marvel Studios’ problems.

According to Ball, films and shows are the best way for franchises to build love. This division of labor between Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios…

1. Gives the latter a lot of quality content to pick from, instead of having to dream up stories from the ground up unlike other movie studios

2. Allows Studios to focus on filmmaking, building the MCU, and introducing new characters in a fan-friendly way

For example, Marvel Studios’ latest slate of shows and films are based off of comic book characters from the past 10-15 years:

• Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (2013), debuted in 2014 with a solo series, Ms. Marvel

• Miles Morales/Spider-man (2011), first appeared in 2018 in Into the Spider-Verse

• America Chavez/Miss America (2011), first appeared in 2022 in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Zooming out, this is what the Marvel x Disney dynamic looks like:

1. Create and tell stories – Marvel Comics produces comic books and baptizes new media franchises and intellectual property.

2. Builds love for those stories – Marvel Studios produces blockbuster films, using existing fan love for the MCU to anoint new franchises and build affinity for new characters.

3. Monetizes that love – Disney inducts popular franchises into Disney Parks — its most profitable business. This gives fans the opportunity to enjoy their favourite stories as themselves.

Similar to musicians who show their audiences that they are artists too, the best and most successful entertainment companies of the future will take us to immersive worlds and tell such believable stories — places we can only dream of today.

Successful media franchises and entertainment companies fascinate me. They thrive only if they can strike the balance between sheer creativity and shrewd business, between the cold facts of the present and the warm fuzzies of the future.

The best entertainment companies turn our childhood dreams into reality. And that’s not something we can quantify on a spreadsheet.

What’s next?

There’s not enough space in this newsletter for a full treatment of Ball’s essay. In the original 7,300-word piece, he goes way deep into each concept, along with examples and charts from all over the entertainment/ industry. So if my summary intrigues you, take some time this weekend to read the entire thing!

To learn more about Disney’s business, check out more of Ball’s essays, like this one on digital theme parks as platforms for the future, and this one for more on how Disney builds love for its intellectual properties.

Finally, I’ll close this week’s newsletter out with a clip of an incredible MCU tribute at Disneyland:

As a Marvel fan, watching this in End Game choked me up and brought tears to my eyes.

I can’t wait to hear it in person one day.

😉 You’re welcome

• 📚This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone. I read a half dozen fiction books in Q1 and this is my favourite one, by far. The pacing and language was confusing at first because it’s speculative sci-fi. But if you liked the time-hopping adventures from Marvel’s Loki, you’ll like this.

• 📺 Stephanie Hsu’s Everything Everywhere All At Once Audition. I was blown away by how close her audition tape was her performance on the film. You can’t even tell at what point she’s breaking character or still acting.

• 🎵 Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour set list. It’s me, hi. I made this.

• 🫢 Did you know Spotify lets you exclude stuff from your taste profile? This new feature makes sure that listening to 500 hours of piano music for work won't mess with Taylor's spot in your Spotify Wrapped.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

— roxine