Nick Rabjohn

The work was interesting. The people were brilliant. But it was zero-sum. Someone wins, someone loses, money moves. What pulled at him was different. He kept thinking about the business owners he’d known in Florida and Washington, people trying to solve problems for customers, building something that could endure.

The comedies of Anchorman ’s era were, in short, about people, which may at first appear to be a tautology—what else would the movies be about besides people?—but is increasingly rare in our current era of runaway IP. These comedies, hilarious and imperfect, are a reminder of a wilder, woollier, more humane era of moviemaking, telling stories meant... See more

With half a dozen more remakes in production and development, Disney are at genuine risk of running out of animated films to remake – next year’s Lilo and Stitch is the first remake to be based on a film from this century, but it will be knocked out of the park a few months later by Moana , coming out less than eight months after the animated Moana... See more

Dissenters have been loud. In 2019, Martin Scorsese pronounced Marvel movies “not cinema,” earning the undying enmity of comics fans. Last year, Quentin Tarantino lamented Marvel’s “choke hold” on Hollywood and said, “You have to be a hired hand to do those things.”

In the seventies, “Jaws” and “Star Wars” gave Hollywood a new model for making money: the endlessly promoted summer blockbuster. The M.C.U. multiplied the formula, so that each blockbuster begets another. David Crow, a senior editor for the Web site Den of Geek, calls it a “roadmap for a product that never ends.”

Collectively, the M.C.U. movies—the thirty-second, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” opened in May—have grossed more than twenty-nine billion dollars, making the franchise the most successful in entertainment history.

Vanguard, for example, owned the largest stake in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery. It holds a substantial share of Amazon and Paramount Global. By 2010, private-equity companies had acquired MGM, Miramax, and AMC Theatres, and had scooped up portions of Hulu and DreamWorks. Private equity now has its hands in Univision,... See more