It’s time for producers of entertainment—movie studios, broadcast and cable TV networks, video game makers, publishers, music labels—to change the way they launch and market their products. In entertainment markets, a sizable portion of revenue is typically generated by a small number of blockbuster movies, best-selling books, and hit songs. But even talented, experienced executives acknowledge that predicting these hits is effectively a crapshoot. How else to explain why Miramax paid ten times as much for Happy, Texas—which grossed $2 million at the box office—as Warner Independent paid for March of the Penguins, which grossed close to $80 million?
A version of this article appeared in the September 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review.
