Denise Hearn & Vass Bednar’s new book, The Big Fix, explores how Canadian government policies entrench monopolies, stifling innovation and competition. Nowhere is this more in our faces than in Canada’s dying entertainment industry; an apocalypse of giant zombie companies eating our brains, creative workers, and cash – where cultural ideology, quotas, and broadcast rules unintentionally benefit corporate zombies while the independent creators who brought us the industry’s golden age that we grew up in struggle to survive like Fremen on Dune.
This monopolistic stranglehold limits creativity in storytelling, suppresses emerging talent, and creates an industry that serves corporate and ideological interests over audience demand, leaving Canadians with fewer choices and Canadian creative companies with fewer opportunities to even enter the market let alone make the shows Canadians want. This chokehold on creativity not only diminishes our real cultural identity but also hampers economic growth in one of the world’s most dynamic industries.
Hearn and Bednar recently sat for a long-form interview with Goose Media for an important and well-supported discussion of the problem.
📖The Big Fix: https://sutherlandhousebooks.com/prod…
📖The Myth of Capitalism: https://www.wiley.com/en-in/The+Myth+…
📖Chokepoint Capitalism: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo…
🎧 Monopolies Killed My Home Town: https://pod.link/1620872180
⛺ CAMP (Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project): https://antimonopoly.ca
Canadians over 30 grew up in an era of new music, new shows, new books, and interesting new entertainers who led the way in style, ideas, information, and fun. It’s obvious to everyone searching for a new show to watch that something has changed. That system has failed, shedding jobs by the thousands, and devolving into a commoditized, monopolistic haunted house of horrors. From the home improvement shows and Much Music, to HBO-style drama, we’ve lost the plot.
The media has been disturbingly misled. Reporting on the issue has been obsessed with cord-cutting, cultural diversity, and demographics, but these are distractions, red herrings, the truth is more like an elephant in the room – the cancerous growth of giant megacorps in the entertainment industry: moving toward monopoly, with corporate raiders robbing the zombie giant companies they created of every dollar of free cash flow at the expense of their very reason for being… Entertainment. All while the problem is ten times as bad in the USA and coming for the last of our zombie companies.
Why will the future of popular culture revolve around ever-bigger bets on entertainment products?
What’s behind the phenomenal success of entertainment businesses such as Warner Bros., Disney, Marvel Entertainment, and the NFL―along with such stars as Taylor Swift, Shohei Ohtani, and Margot Robbie? Which strategies give leaders in film, television, music, publishing, and sports an edge over their rivals?
Ten years ago Anita Elberse’s Blockbusters provided a deep dive into the entertainment industry’s strategy of focusing resources on a few high-budget projects to secure massive returns. Think of what we used to call the summer blockbuster. It’s more complex than we imagined. By analyzing case studies across music, film, TV, sports, and publishing, the book demonstrates how, counterintuitively to our understanding of diversifying risk, this high-risk, high-reward approach can dominate markets and shape cultural consumption. The results are nuclear explosions that suck all the air and attention out of a space, either winning it all or destroying the very market in which they exist.
Elberse argues that the blockbuster strategy is not just a gamble but a calculated business model that leverages star power, marketing muscle, and scale to destroy any possible competition. While this approach generates significant profits for major players, it also concentrates risk and limits opportunities for smaller creators and niche projects, undermining the promise of a democratized digital landscape.
The book concludes that while the blockbuster model is here to stay, it poses systemic challenges for industry diversity, risk distribution, and creative freedom. It called for an industry-wide reckoning to balance profitability with sustainability, urging stakeholders to explore paths that support both cultural variety and economic success.
It didn’t happen.
Introduction: The Inevitability of Commodification and Monopoly
Economic and cultural theorists have long argued that as industries mature, they gravitate toward commodification and lower profit. The market’s natural answer to that? Monopoly! From manufacturing to telecommunications, the pattern is clear: markets consolidate, competition diminishes, and the distribution of wealth becomes increasingly unequal. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident today than in the entertainment industry.
In Canada and the United States, the concentration of power among a few dominant players has reached staggering levels. Recent figures suggest that less than 1% of participants in fields such as music, entertainment, sports, and publishing capture more than 99% of the revenues. For the majority of creators, the prospect of earning a sustainable income has all but disappeared. In fact, for many in industries like music and writing, the very expectation of financial success is being abandoned. Passion, recognition, and the hope of reaching an audience have replaced traditional economic goals.
The shift toward monopolization has profound implications for creators and audiences alike. It reshapes the kinds of stories that get told, the voices that are heard, and the ways in which cultural value is defined. The dominance of mega-corporations in entertainment not only stifles innovation but also undermines the promise of the digital age: a thriving, democratized landscape where niche creators could flourish alongside global brands. Government systems, once the gold standard of giving a helping hand to Canada’s industry are now so far out of date and so mismatched to the task at hand that they are exaggerating the problem they were created to solve.
This essay examines how the blockbuster strategy—and the consolidation it fuels—has led to these inequities, particularly in the Canadian context. It also explores potential paths forward, drawing on historical lessons and contemporary insights to suggest solutions for a more equitable and sustainable entertainment ecosystem.
The Entertainment Industry’s Blockbuster Dilemma
The entertainment industry—encompassing music, television, film, sports, and publishing—has long been a field of dreams and disappointments, where the pursuit of the next big hit, or “blockbuster,” dictates strategy, budgets, and careers. Anita Elberse’s book Blockbusters unveiled the relentless logic behind this strategy: by focusing on massive investments in a few potential hits, companies can dominate markets and reap astronomical rewards. However, since the book’s publication, the proliferation of this strategy, compounded by mergers and acquisitions (M&A), has reshaped the entertainment landscape—and not for the better.
The blockbuster mentality emphasizes high stakes, high returns, and concentrated risk. While this approach has proven wildly profitable for a few individuals and companies, it has created a chasm of inequality and a huge barrier to entry for new ideas, new goals, new paradigms, and new talent.
The promise of the digital age—a democratized “long tail” where niche creators could find sustainable success—has largely gone unfulfilled. Instead, market power continues to concentrate, with a handful of oligopolies dictating the terms of engagement for creators and audiences alike.
What Has Changed Since Blockbusters
When Elberse published Blockbusters, streaming services like Netflix and Spotify were in their infancy, heralding a potential shift toward diverse content and audience empowerment. Today, these platforms dominate the industry but operate within the same blockbuster framework. Netflix pours billions into tentpole productions to retain subscribers, while Spotify prioritizes major-label partnerships over indie artists who famously don’t make pennies but rather thousandths of pennies.
Consolidation has accelerated, particularly in Canada, where now only a few companies exist in a meaningful way: three public entertainment companies remain (Rogers, Bell, and Corus), one government entity (CBC), one indie (Blue Ant), and two provincial (TVO and Knowledge). This from a world of what was once hundreds of channels and choices. In the US things are just as bad where just six companies control more than 905 of the market.
Merger mania continues unrelentingly. Merger and Acquisitions (M&A) deals are bad because of their intent. Companies created to make money by entertaining and informing audiences with new content are now zombie giants chained into the service of M&A vampires who milk them for their free cash flow generated by the sheer inertia of the giant’s library and legacy as they fall and fail.
The merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia, Disney’s acquisition of Fox, Paramount buys Smithsonian, and similar moves have reduced competition and eliminated mid-sized players. In the music industry, Universal, Sony, and Warner control nearly 70% of the entire global market, leaving little room for smaller labels or independent artists.
At the same time, platforms and audience behaviors have dramatically shifted. The rise of short-form content like TikTok has splintered audiences, pulling attention away from sustainable traditional long-form entertainment that could create jobs and reasonable profits. Now the ‘profit’ is all there is and, in TikTok’s case cash goes into a mysterious world involving the Chinese government.
Meanwhile, the industry’s growing focus on identity politics and ideologically issue-driven stories, though virtuous, has flooded the market with content “lessons” that—by its very definition—is not designed for broad pop appeal. This trend, coupled with the dominance of blockbuster strategies, exacerbates the divide between niche and mass-market offerings.
The Canadian Connection
Canada’s entertainment industry is deeply entwined with America’s, amplifying the challenges of the blockbuster era. Canadian creators often rely on American platforms for franchising, distribution, and exposure, placing them at the mercy of foreign gatekeepers. While initiatives like the Canada Media Fund and CRTC regulations aim to support local talent, they struggle to compete with the gravitational pull of Hollywood, and bureaucrat “pick a winner” systems, influenced by lobbying of all sort, are ill-equipped to weigh in on either rapidly changing industries or identity politics.
The Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) has reported apocalyptically on the steep decline in Canadian content. Yet, the Canadian system appears to be in denial. Organizations like the CMF, Telefilm, CBC, and government agencies have doubled down on diversity initiatives at the expense of addressing the core issue: oligopoly in the entertainment industry. Without tackling this monopoly problem, other ideological or political goals risk becoming distractions from the systemic failures undermining the industry.
For instance, reports such as the CMPA’s Profile 2024 highlight declining film and TV production activity in Canada, despite growing national and global demand. The absence of strategies to address consolidation, alongside the focus on diversity-issue-driven content, limits the ability to create impactful projects that resonate with broader audiences. This dynamic underscores the need for industry leaders to recalibrate priorities and confront structural issues.
New Perspectives and Emerging Trends
Writers like Matthew Ball (The Metaverse) and Ben Smith (Traffic) have expanded the analysis of the blockbuster strategy’s fallout. Ball highlights the increasing dominance of intellectual property (IP) franchises—from Marvel to Harry Potter—as studios double down on pre-sold concepts. Smith examines how digital media’s pursuit of virality mirrors the blockbuster ethos, often to disastrous effect for journalism.
Industry reports reveal the economic toll of this consolidation. According to the Writers Guild of America, streaming platforms’ focus on blockbuster content has slashed budgets for smaller projects, leading to job losses and declining wages. Similarly, a recent New York Times report explored the economic fragility of Southern California’s entertainment sector, highlighting how consolidation undermines regional economies and diminishes opportunities for creators. In Canada, these trends are amplified by the country’s dependence on foreign-owned platforms.
A Path Forward
Is there a way to balance the blockbuster model with a more equitable system? Advocates for change point to several potential solutions:
Regulatory Reform: Governments can enforce antitrust laws to curb consolidation and ensure fair competition across the entertainment industry. Simply, we need more smaller companies that Canadians can have a real stake in as owners, employees, managers, or passionate customers. In Canada, this could involve stricter CRTC mandates for streaming platforms to invest in and promote local content – once a dream, then a law, now faltering in a legal netherworld.
Platform Innovation: Emerging platforms like Patreon, Substack, and Bandcamp offer alternative revenue models that empower creators to connect directly with audiences. Scaling these models could provide a counterweight to oligopolistic control if the government recreated its systems to support popular and successful creators/entertainers/informers at this level rather than the old corporate model… though this still doesn’t solve the YouTube Problem… we somehow have to find or create a public commons that the internet promised rather than these mega-co’s.
Public Investment: Increased funding for the best independent producers who are making the stuff people want and need could nurture diverse storytelling. CBC, for instance, whatever you think of it, is absorbing over a billion in public money and is producing less content and fewer hits than a midlevel Canadian YouTube channel like Veritasium, run from someone’s dining room table.
Focus on Core Issues: To address the oligopoly problem, the industry must prioritize market fairness over ideological goals. Progressive-era solutions from 100 years ago—such as trust-busting and regulatory oversight—offer historical precedents that could guide modern reforms.
Audience Education: Encouraging consumers to value and support independent content can shift market dynamics. Campaigns like #BuyLocal could be adapted to “stream local” or “support indie.” But let’s be clear, if people don’t want to go to the ballgame you can’t stop them. The idea is to create a small, passionate, and discerning local domestic market to support the best products which will then be of maximum export value. Think of German beer or French luxury brands.
Leveraging Digital Opportunities: The rise of platforms like YouTube offers a glimpse of how creators can bypass traditional gatekeepers. We can’t build our industry on the commercial YouTube platform but it underscores the importance of grassroots efforts to highlight and challenge industry consolidation. We must get a new appreciation for what YouTube and the other platforms actually are and their place in our communications and entertainment future. It’s something too valuable, too important, and too central to our identity and what it means to be a Canadian society to be unintentionally contracted out to multinational monopolistic megacorps and oligopolies.
What’s Next
The blockbuster mentality, as analyzed in Blockbusters, has reshaped the entertainment industry into an unequal and risk-addled army of giant zombies controlled by cash-sucking corporate vampires. For Canadian creators, the challenges are compounded by the overwhelming influence of U.S. oligopolies and a lack of domestic infrastructure unable to keep pace with the rapid and fundamental disaster that is happening to support alternative models. Yet, the digital age’s promise of a thriving long tail remains achievable if creators, audiences, and policymakers push for foundational systemic change. It starts with coming to terms with questions as fundamental as “What is YouTube?”, “What is entertainment for?”, and “Where is America going?”
The future need not be monopolistic. By embracing a new sense of purpose—in stories, creators, and business models—the entertainment industry can evolve beyond the blockbuster era to a more… entertaining and sustainable future. For Canada, this means reclaiming its cultural narrative, identity, and purpose, and ensuring that its entertainers have the resources to compete on the global stage while staying true to our goals – a clear sense of purpose and progress for a prosperous country in a peaceful world.
