The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Hollywood edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of Hollywood, I guess, this week.

All right.

Guess what, people?

Ben Fritz is here.

What?

Ben Fritz is here. Where? Anna. Ben Fritz is here. We are in the studio with the one and only Ben Fritz. Ben, introduce yourself. I am Ben Fritz. I am a Wall Street Journal reporter where I cover the entertainment industry. and I'm the author of the new book, The Big Picture, The Fight for the Future of Movies.

And so this is our excuse to spend an entire episode geeking out on the economics of Hollywood, which are absolutely fascinating.

And we've talked about Hollywood economics, like en passant.

Yes.

Occasionally. And we haven't really delved in.

We've done super deep dives into the music industry, but not the movie industry.

And so now we get to do this with the help of Ben, who has literally written the book on this subject.

And I'm going to dive right in because the one thing I know about Hollywood, the one thing that everyone knows about Hollywood is that nobody knows everything.

Anything.

This is like the one quote that everyone knows.

William Goldman-Wallens said like 50 years ago, something like that, wrote this famous thing where he says nobody knows everything.

And now you have come along and you're like, actually, that's a little bit out of date.

Now we actually know.

Yes.

Somebody finally figured out something about the movie business, which is that if you have branded franchises where the movies connect to each other, ideally in a cinematic universe, people like to come back to them over and over.

And while obviously nothing is flop-proof, you can get a fair amount of reliability and predictability

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