Ownership

Chené Harris 

Media essay

Ownership 

Media ownership has always played a huge part in the overall success of a film. Media ownership is structured in the way that only the conglomerates have possession over the big Hollywood block busters such as the big 5, paramount, MGM, Columbia, Warner brothers and Disney. These specific multimillion dollar companies produce films to keep its audience entertained and gets them to own subsiders. The warner brothers largest subsideries is DC comics, Disney has matched Warner brothers with marvel comics and studios. In order to reach a new branch of media consumers, marvel did a cross over with the avengers and X-man, this was then published to create more hype for the new avengers film. 

Disney is in fact the second largest conglomerate in the entire world. It’s one of the biggest companies across the world, Disney has been estimated to have a total of more than $130 billion dollars. Disney does not have vertical or horizontal integration with other companies – this meaning that all publicity that is being shown for their film is all being done for them. During 2018 Disney took up the top three spots for the highest grossing films domestically. At just number 1- black panther had generated around $700 million dollars as a profit, second place- with only a few dollars less was Avengers infinity war, with $679 million dollars. And in third came the Incredibles 2 which had generated about $609 million dollars. 

Hollywood Films saturate the markets – this ends up creating a lot of competition for the much smaller Filipino industries such as Indi films, which don’t have much wealth in the area of filming. Despite many of these competitions, few Indi films have ended up making to be successful world wide. Some Indi films have been proven to be one of the top films in the world despite their financial value and the type of ownership. 

Money has always been a massive influence to just about everything including film making. Having the right amount of money can make so many steps like cross-media convergence and synergy opportunities easier to happen. Looking back to the Indi films that ended up being a success – there is proven prof that this is true because “what we do in the shadows” is a New Zealand kiwi comedy film directed by Jermaine celement and Taika Waititi. This movie ended up being a success despite the lack of funding it had. It was funded through crowd funding where both directors appealed to NZ to raise funds that they needed to make the final product. The film then provided its total gross of about $6.9 million dollars world wide. These directors from where they were have come a long way, to be well known. With Jermaine celement being the voice over of the crab in Moana. 

In this current day and age there are various types of ways to stream platforms of media. For example Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, Disney+, Apple TV, YouTube red and so many more. Netflix is currently one of the top websites to be streaming media content. This is currently worth $189.92 billion dollars. Many of these platforms to watching media, have a down fall to them such as always having to pay for your “free movie streaming website” or having to pay for subscription or having to pay a monthly fee on it. These payments are always getting to the consumers because they are not wanting to pay for the subscriptions when they could just download the movie illegally. The streaming platforms are also always updating their content which helps to keep the audience entertained but they are they are also taking away media, this could also be caused by the movie it’s self not being age appropriate or for bad views across the younger audience.