Abstract

"Writing the History of Hollywood Using Contemporary Hollywood's Biggest Databases"

Shawna Kidman, University of California, San Diego (skidman@ucsd.edu)

This paper considers how the use of large datasets may help reinvent a business history more relevant to practitioners and more grounded in quantitative evidence. Specifically, I look at three data services designed for and targeted to contemporary decisionmakers in the media sector (i.e. investors, talent agents, marketers, and upper management): Refinitiv (a major software system for financiers), Luminate (the data arm of Variety, a prominent industry trade), and Opus (behind the publicly available box office tracking on TheNumbers.com).

While the intended use of these tools is explicitly utilitarian (tracking current projects and companies, finding contacts) and predictive (forecasting market trends, choosing winning projects to back), these services have vast amounts of data, much of which goes back six decades. They are thus excellent—and virtually untapped—resources for media historians interested in tracking how changing economic conditions led to new business models and new cultural formations. Their use is nonetheless fraught: some of the data is incomplete and requires cleaning; the organization and formatting of the databases is not conducive to historical work; and both the data and the services are generated by monopolistic companies active in the sectors they monitor.

To better illustrate some of the benefits and challenges these tools pose, I use a case study that draws from the above databases as well as additional primary and secondary sources. It examines Hollywood from 2008 to 2013, during a tumultuous transition from the Blockbuster Era of Cinema to the Franchise Era. Although the narrative focus is on a relatively short five-year window, I look at forty years (1980-2020) of box office revenue, theatrical release numbers, data on individual movie titles, and financials from the major studios to better understand how rapid structural change was able to upend long established practices and trends.