The Hits Pay for Everything Else

Plus: a slapstick assignment!

Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash

I’m going to step away from Hollywood for a minute to look at a different segment of the entertainment industry: publishing.

Writing on her Substack, Elle Griffin went through The Trial, a collection of transcripts from the recent antitrust case brought by the government to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster. You may remember that PRH wanted to buy S&S to make PRHS&S (or something similarly protracted that called to mind the ad agencies of Mad Men), a move that would have given the new outfit control over nearly 50 percent of the publishing market. The judge ruled it would be a monopoly, the purchase was called off, and Simon & Schuster wound up being purchased by a private equity firm.

I don’t think anyone who has paid much attention to the industry—or listened to my podcast with Broadside Books editor Eric Nelson, who helped make Tim Miller a bestselling author—will be surprised by many of the revelations in The Trial. But it’s still pretty interesting to see it all laid out in one place and in condensed form, and there are three big takeaways.

Takeaway One: Most books are read by, functionally, no one. I just need you to sit with this for a second: “The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.” Trust me: Being read by 2,000 people or fewer is essentially equivalent to being read by no one. Even if that dozen copies stat is wrong or misleading, most books that get published are unread and unloved. Such is the fate of most writers, whether or not they get an advance. C’est la vie.

Takeaway Two: The incredibly rare hits pay for alllllll those misses. Books like the Twilight series or the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series and franchise authors like Lee Child, Tom Clancy, and (more recently) Colleen Hoover are what generate the actual revenue for the publishing houses. They are rare, but they keep the whole business afloat. “So once every five years, ten years, those come along for the whole industry and become the industry driver that’s drawing people into bookstores because there is such a commotion about them,” Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch said. In the Bulwark context: JVL, Sarah, and Tim pay for The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. (And for that, we are eternally grateful.)

Takeaway Three: The back catalog is where publishers make money and going to a Spotify- or Netflix-style all-you-can-eat stream of books would likely destroy the whole industry as it currently exists. “Our backlist brings in about a third of our annual revenues, so $300 million a year roughly, a little less,” Pietsch said. The backlist consists of bookstore standards like Bibles, SAT guides, children’s books, etc., in addition to evergreen fiction like 1984 or The Stand or the Harry Potter series. (Fun fact: Harry Potter currently accounts for six of the 20 best-selling books on Amazon.) But a big chunk of new and sales would dry up if people were granted instant access to digital libraries. “Around 20 to 25 percent of the readers, the heavy readers, account for 80 percent of the revenue pool of the industry of what consumers spend on books. It’s the really dedicated readers. If they got all-access, the revenue pool of the industry is going to be very small,” Penguin CEO Markus Dohle said.

You can see reflections of all these takeaways in the world of film: When we think of films we think of movie theaters and ad campaigns, but numerically, the bulk of movies are indies that are made on a shoestring and are watched by a handful of people on VOD if they even get that mode of distribution and then just kind of disappear. The hits (for the last decade or two, the big franchise pictures, your MCUs and Star Wars and Jurassic Worlds) pay for all the stuff that doesn’t land. And the all-you-can-eat format of Netflix destroyed the incredibly lucrative home video business and threatens the incredibly lucrative theatrical business (though the studios have been trying to reclaim some portion of that with their streaming businesses).

You may argue that it wouldn’t really matter if these companies became, ultimately, unprofitable: Books and films alike would both continue to exist without the publishing houses and the movie studios. But studios and publishers alike perform important services: their money provides some modicum of support for some number of artists; as gatekeepers, their names suggest some baseline level of quality; and as distributors, they aid booksellers in winnowing the marketplace to a manageable level for consumers. What comes next will be different, but it won’t necessarily be better.

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On today’s episode of Across the Movie Aisle I am cruelly and brutally attacked by my so-called friend Peter Suderman for the cinematic spectacle of Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver. It’s a hateful, shameful thing, I’m sorry you had to hear it.

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Links!

This week I reviewed the tennis threesome movie. In other news, “the tennis threesome movie” is a phrase that makes sense outside of the context of an xxx site.

Last Saturday’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood is one of my all-time favorites. I talked to costume designer Kelli Jones about her work on The Beekeeper (out on Blu-ray and 4K UHD now!) as well as Sons of Anarchy, Straight Outta Compton, and Nyad. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot; I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

I’m not really a film festival guy, but one thing I enjoy about them is the short programs; it’s basically the only time you can watch short movies on a big screen. If you’re in Dallas this weekend, make sure to swing by the Dallas International Film Festival and track down a screening of “TR(ol)L: New Kids on the Block, Total Request Live and the Chain Letter That Changed the Internet,” by Yourgo Artsitas. (It’s playing Friday night and Saturday afternoon at the Violet Crown as part of the documentary shorts lineup.) It’s a fun look at a weird moment in MTV history, when a bunch of Internet pranksters joined forces to get the then-passe New Kids on the Block on Total Request Live, the hippest show in all the land. Artsitas got interviews with a bunch of MTV folks—including Dave Holmes, who was on guest-hosting duty on that fateful day—and it’s honestly a little scandalous for anyone who grew up in that era of TV and thought their vote counted. Democracy: more fragile than we thought!

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Assigned Viewing: Hundreds of Beavers (VOD)

I want to preface this assignment by saying that it’s the sort of thing you should only watch if you’re in the right sort of mood. (Silly.) Possibly under the right sort of chemical influences. And definitely with the right sort of crowd. Have some friends over, crack open a bottle of wine or three, and let the absurdity wash over you. Hundreds of Beavers has been described as a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, and that’s a fair and accurate summation: it’s just a series of slapstick gags and callbacks to previous slapstick gags, as an applejack-distiller-cum-fur-trapper learns the tricks of the beaver-trapping trade. It’s the sort of movie that’s impossible to summarize, except to say that it plays like an early Chaplin movie about a boy in love who, to win the hand of his amour, must slay the titular number of rodents.

It is aggressively lo-fi—some would say the effects are intentionally bad—but all in the service of highlighting the cartoonish nature of the proceedings. I understand why this movie couldn’t get mainstream distribution despite selling out crowds all over the country as part of a roadshow (the ad campaign is, frankly, impossible to visualize working with the audiences you need to get a film on 2,000 screens), but man: I really wish I could have watched this with an audience at the Drafthouse after having had an IPA (or, again, three). Watching it at home, by myself, stone-cold sober is … not quite the vibe this movie needs to succeed. And it’s probably a little long: there’s a weirdly large amount of backstory before we get to the titular beaver slaughter. Still, kudos to director Mike Cheslik (who cowrote with star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) for believing in this and forcing it into the public’s subconsciousness. It’s destined to be a stoner classic for decades to come.