I was a little disappointed by the Espenson article because for whatever weird reason I'm endlessly fascinated by the economics of Hollywood. Edward Jay Epstein wrote a book called The Big Picture about how Hollywood really makes money off of movies. The Washington Post, in their review of the book, wrote:
Each week the box-office grosses rung up by the big new movies are published, and each week it is near universally assumed, reflexively and reverentially, that they represent not merely an accurate ranking of current films but also an accurate record of how much they are making for the studios that produced them. Tommyrot, says Epstein. These seemingly huge earnings are wildly misleading, as the cost of making, distributing and showing new movies almost always far exceeds what they earn in theaters. Hollywood's highly imaginative accounting practices disguise this reality, but more to the point, theaters aren't where movies make money any more.
And Epstein writes in the book:
The main task of today's studio is to collect fees for the use of the intellectual properties they control in one form or another and then to allocate those fees among the parties -- including themselves -- who create, develop, and finance the properties. It is now essentially a service organization, a dream clearinghouse rather than a dream factory. As clearinghouses, they are very different creatures from their predecessors, and this difference is as apparent from looking at their financial reporting as it is from looking at their products.
Epstein also wrote a regular column for Slate called the The Hollywood Economist where he examined different aspects of the Hollywood money-making system, talking about, among other things, why Tom Cruise might be a wacky Scientology nut, but he's a brilliant businessman, and describing what steps you have to go through if you want to make an indie film, and telling why, until recent changes to their tax codes, Germany is an awesome place to find investors for your film. Anyway, people like me who watch movies to see something good and artistic would be well-served to never lose sight of the idea that, in a very direct way, films released in theaters are a vehicle to sell action figures in America and DVDs in Europe and Asia. If artistry manages to seep through, it is more a side effect rather than an intention of the film business.