The Growing Concentration of Power in Hollywood

Along with writer Jack Mathews (March 21 review), I was a bit amused at Tom Brokaw’s slightly hysterical look at “The New Hollywood” in his NBC special.

However, I think Mathews missed an important point of concern. The studios do not own only “a small percentage of the nation’s 23,000 theaters,” as he writes. Four studios--Warner Bros., Paramount, Columbia and Universal--own close to 17% of movie theaters. In the top 20 exhibition circuits, representing about 15,000 screens, these four studios own or control 25% of the market.

Seven major studios (Warner Bros., Paramount, Columbia, Universal, 20th Century Fox, MGM/UA and Disney) account for nearly 90% of all revenues from theatrical exhibition. That, coupled with the recent acquisition of important exhibition outlets, gives these majors a chilling control over what moviegoers see.

Furthermore, these seven studios own major book publishing firms, record labels, TV stations, cable outlets and home video companies and are the major producers of television shows. With the recent merging of Time Inc. and Warner Bros., and the recent acquisition of Columbia Pictures by Sony, unprecedented media power has fallen into the hands of a few.

With such big conglomerates at the helm of American culture, one should indeed worry, as Brokaw indicated, about the monopoly power of “The New Hollywood.”

HARLEY W. LOND, Editor, Boxoffice, Hollywood