Ownership Essay

 The Big 5 consist of the conglomerates Disney, Sony, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. They are the oligopolies that have dominated the film-making industry over the years. This is because of the acquisition of many subsidiaries that has increased their influence. Disney for example in 2019 acquired Fox for a large sum of $71.3 billion dollars, their most expensive acquisition. Disney’s box-office market share peaked in 2019 at 33.1%. This statistic was harmed in the Covid-19 pandemic but in 2021 Disney still had a claim to a 25.5% market share. This domination has led to a guarantee that almost every film put out by Disney will be a success, and Disney is just one of the Big 5. 

New Zealand’s film industry, however, is in a very different situation to Hollywood. Its purpose is not solely financial. Organisations like the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) seek to promote New Zealand culture to the world. Of course, being on a much smaller scale, even if NZFC films attempted to compete financially with the Big 5 they probably would not find much joy in that arena. NZFC films are usually telling New Zealand stories, to support the purpose of promoting the country.  

In terms of cross-media convergence and synergy, the Big 5 have the resources to maximise the effect of it. The “Why So Serious” marketing campaign for “The Dark Knight” is a great example of the resources of a Big 5 conglomerate (Warner Bros.) being used to market a blockbuster film. Having an established fanbase contributed to the success of this viral marketing campaign and the film ended up grossing more than a $1 billion USD. Subsidiaries are a pathway for conglomerates to have synergy in the marketing of their films, seen with Black Panther and Marvel Studios, having the character appear in the film but also in video games, comics and the like. However, independent films are not exempt from this method of marketing. What We Do in the Shadows changed the sign in the capital city Wellington to Vellington in their marketing campaign. Albeit this is still on a much smaller scale than the Why So Serious campaign. 

Another advantage the Big 5 has over the film industry is the ability to use large amounts of money in all stages of production. When A-list actors are in a film, they promote it on social media to their fans that follow them. For example, Chris Pratt, for Jurassic World, has almost 38 million followers. Also having the funding to use the best equipment possible, eg. Cameras, sound equipment etc. Having this better equipment is very beneficial because it will improve the overall production quality of the film which should drive more people to recommend it to others once they’ve seen it. This creates word of mouth that should in the end produce more revenue, ideally a bigger profit as well, making more than they lost. 

The Big 5 also has a huge head start in distribution as their subsidiaries include distribution companies. These integrated companies give the conglomerates even more control with their movies. They can effectively do whatever they want with their films. Unlike conglomerates, independent films will find it a lot more difficult to distribute their films to a wider audience and may have to sell the rights to their film to a distribution company, which they do not own, to do it. This can limit the filmmaker’s success as a bigger company is still cutting a slice of whatever profits there are. 

Conglomerates are also affecting the type of films being produced and shown. Original stories are becoming even fewer in number and big franchises is what is driving cinema. Marvel Studios raked in $4.5 billion in 2021 alone and even that compared to their best year is low; they made $11.3 million in 2019. This drop is only attributed to production delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic and not because people are not going to watch them anymore. 

With the rise of streaming services, there also is a rise in piracy. Despite moving a lot of movies to streaming services, piracy is still a plague on production companies because they lose millions of dollars because of it. The main reason for piracy in the streaming arena is the inconvenience of subscribing to multiple streaming platforms. In the minds of those pirating films online, it is easier to subscribe to a couple of main services for the majority of film-watching and pirate the rest for convenience's sake.