Want Hollywood’s conventional wisdom? Then read Blockbusters

You can learn a lot from this book. Latin America has a smaller economy than Europe. Big companies can spend more on advertising than small ones. Maria Sharapova is attractive. Given that the book is written in the dullest of academic prose, there may even have been a paragraph I missed about how there is a Tuesday in next week. I’ve often wondered what they taught in business schools and if this book, which has Harvard Business School plastered all over it, is a guide then the main subject is the stunningly obvious.

On 20 June 1975 Universal released Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws with a spend on television advertising and an opening in hundreds of cinemas, both of which were unprecedented at that time. Thus was the vocabulary of English enriched with the notion of a ‘platform release’ — the method — and a ‘blockbuster’: the hoped for result. One of the reasons that Universal was willing to take this huge financial risk was that the novel on which the film was based had itself been a huge hit.