Description

Hollywood meets Freakonomics

In The Hollywood Economist, veteran investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein goes undercover to find the answer to a puzzling question: Why is it that even the biggest grossing new movies, raking in millions at the box office, rarely break even during their theatrical release? How does Hollywood make money?

Epstein penetrates the dazzlingly complicated economics of Hollywood to uncover what he calls the studio's "invisible money machine"—the