Gerben Bakker

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: This paper examines the history of the Hollywood studios’ back catalogues of motion pictures. Examining aggregate annual time series as well as a dataset of sales transactions of entire film libraries, it tries to document the value of these intangible assets over time, what determined their value, how their value changed over time, and how this was affected by technological disruption. Before television, most old films were on the books of a studio for one dollar. Subsequent technological disruption affected the value of film libraries. Cases in point are television, cable, VCRs, pay-TV, DVDs and streaming. The result is a picture of the long-run evolution of the value of film libraries, and also of the exploitation strategies of the handful of Hollywood majors who owned these libraries. This will be put in the perspective of the history of other intangible cultural assets, including both commonalities and differences, and will be compared within the value of sales of music back catalogues. This is already an original contribution because we know so little about this in business history terms. Second, we get insight in to what extent technological disruptions affected the value of film libraries. We get some feel for the order of magnitude, and we can roughly estimate an upper bound to the effect of such disruptions between 1948 and 2018. The research is relevant, first, because it adds to our understanding of the value of cultural assets, second, because it examines how technological disruption can affect these asset values, and third, because it also investigates how institutional-legal changes can affect the assets’ value. Also, cultural assets have become important for very-long-run investors such as insurers and pension funds, so any very-long-run studies will be relevant for those working in policy and practice who would like to learn from business history.