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  • Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age
  • Courtney Brannon Donoghue
Paul Grainge . Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. New York: Routledge, 2007. 212 pp. $34.95 (paper).

As illustrated by the continuous cycle of summer prequels, three-quels, and new franchises, a key strategy for the Hollywood conglomerates has been to (re)invent recognizable brands such as Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Sex and the City. Big event pictures can mean big business and big audiences for the studios, breaking box office records by landing among the top annual grossing films domestically. In order to guarantee profits and an adaptable brand the films are constructed as huge media events situated within a universe of marketing, ancillary markets, and multilayered distribution deals.

In Brand Hollywood Paul Grainge examines how industrial changes and branding practices have shaped these event films within the context of a globalized film industry. Situating his work alongside Charles Acland, Grainge explores how the new gestalt of "total entertainment" affects the status and selling of films. He focuses on the period between 1995 and 2003, when "branding became an organizing principle . . . within the (new) media economy of Hollywood" (14). For example, as the structure of Time Warner changed through various mergers, the company's strategy for producing, marketing, and releasing films centered on creating and maintaining valuable brands, from Batman to Harry Potter.

The study focuses on the complexities of cultural production (production history, marketing, distribution, and exhibition) rather than use and reception. Grainge offers a wide approach that includes industrial history and practices that follow the wave of mergers in the 1990s as well as discourse and textual analysis of the event pictures and franchises that followed. The author examines how "branding has come to 'make sense' to corporate actors to the status and selling of film" in what he calls the "global media age" (14).


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Grainge structures his work in three parts, outlining the practice, poetics, and politics of branding, respectively. Part 1 explores branding as discourse, specifically, the changes in the marketing and media environment toward "the concept of 'total marketing' and 'total entertainment' within and between consumer and cultural industries" (15). In chapter 1 Grainge identifies how trade discussions regarding brands have come to distinguish the "core values" of a product or service in order to elicit new levels of consumer engagement (26). Referencing Jean Baudrillard's discussion of the meaning of goods in relation to value of commodity signs and Anne Cronin's concept of "consumer citizenship," chapter 1 discusses how "the specificity of branding in the 90s can be measured in relation to various forms of institutional discourse, co-linking ideas of consumer behavior, corporate equity and intellectual property in ways that have come to yield a particular effectivity within cultural and economic practice" (31). The author utilizes two case studies (BMW film series and Chanel No. 5: The Film) in order to examine the strategy of product placement as a branding tool and as part of a new reflexive style in the production and consumption of promotional signs (35–36). In the following chapter Grainge begins by discussing how one of the most famous entertainment complexes, Disney, has become a leader in "total entertainment" and in the development of branding within a system of vertically integrated media conglomerates. The remainder of the chapter explores how Time Warner [End Page 75] altered business strategies to compete in this transforming global media market. Grainge explores Warner Bros. (Time Warner's major film subsidiary) and The Matrix series as an "illustration of the brand regimes of total entertainment at the close of the nineties" (61). Through exploiting politics of style, taste, and youth subculture and spinning off subsequent sequels, animation series, and games, Warner Bros. creates a spectacular experience that is simultaneously "a corporate property revealing anxieties, as well as ambitions, of Hollywood in continuing to remodel the motion picture as a multipurpose object" (66).

Part 2 follows the poetics of branding by exploring corporate logos as institutional signatures and how these reveal the negotiations between studio identity and trademark power (71). Situated in the postclassical era, chapter 3 considers...

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