The Event Movie: Marketing Filmed Entertainment for Transnational Media Corporations

Films have become an essential asset to transnational media corporations (TNMCs) such as Sony, Time Warner, or Disney. Since the 1990s these and other corporations have utilized a strategy called event movie. The central goal of this marketing strategy is to ensure the success of a film, as well as to provide content for the many different divisions owned or controlled by TNMCs, for example home entertainment, cable, and pay-television. The event movie strategy takes advantage of the film industry's macro structure and combines established concepts (blockbuster, high-concept marketing) with new business models, turning the value chain into a value cycle. This article describes an analytical framework for the event movie strategy that is used by the world's leading TNMCs. As a conclusion, the framework of the event movie strategy can be applied to better understand the success of individual films. The concept can also be expanded to describe the individual TNMC's strategy within the field of audiovisual content.