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January 15, 2009
Angela Ndalianis, who is Head of Screen Studies at Melbourne University, argued in one chapter of her book, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, that:
Since the 1980s....the transnational effects of globalization have expanded the film industry’s economic interests, shifting economic concerns to the global market ... In addition to the general global expansion that occurred in the 1980s, changes specific to the entertainment industry were nourished by a transnational climate. As Wasko observes, the deregulation of previously regulated media markets, including cable, the development of new computer technologies and the computer game industry, and corporate mergers that integrated companies with diverse media interests contributed to the emergence of an entertainment industry that not only thrived on investment in multimedia forms but aimed at dispersing multimedia entertainment products to a global market.
She argues that in an industry driven by cross-media extensions and cross merchandizing the dynamism and the multicentered narratives that characterize entertainment forms of recent years are paralleled by a serial economic rationale that is concerned with self-promotion.
Late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century seriality is the outcome of a marketing strategy that aims at squeezing from a product its fullest marketing potential. Financial risk and gain is reduced or amplified by promoting serial variations based on previously successful formulas in the hope of reproducing their success in sequel or cross-media format. At times this entails affiliations with companies beyond the cor-
porate fold. Ideally, however, major economic benefits are to be reaped when a corporation owns subsidiary companies that can serialize a story franchise and thus extend potential profits across the corporation’s multiple investment interests.
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