In particular, the movie industry seems to have shifted to a model perfected by Marvel Studios, which builds a cinematic universe that can drum up excitement for future installments and generate huge grosses overseas. Steve Jobs turned out to be a financial disappointment, and its failure-despite the prestige of its subject, director, and cast-feels emblematic of the move away from films driven by stars to those that depend on “intellectual property” of the kind that Sony lacked.

That’s-for better or worse-who you are and who you will remain. Fall on your sword-when you’ve lost that, it’s finished. Face it…Force yourself to muster some confidence about it and do the exact thing right now for which your career will be known in movie history: be the person who makes the tough decisions and sticks with them and makes the unlikely things succeed. Here’s the fact: nothing conventional you could do is going to change that, and there is no life-changing hit that is going to fall into your lap that is not a nervous decision, because the big obvious movies are going to go elsewhere and you don’t have the IP right now to create them from standard material. So you’re feeling wobbly in the job right now. You’re making this decision in the anticipation of how you will be looked at in failure. You ought to be doing this movie-period-and you and I both know that the cold feet you are feeling is costing you this movie that you want. Pascal had expressed doubts about the project, particularly over the casting of Michael Fassbender in the lead, and after arguing it was less risky than The Social Network, Rudin delivered a remarkable pep talk: One of the most memorable finds is an exchange between studio head Amy Pascal and the producer Scott Rudin, who was trying to convince her to take a chance on Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Steve Jobs.

Whatever you might think about the ethics of using such material, it’s a gold mine of information about how Hollywood has done business over the last decade, and Fritz has come up with some fascinating nuggets. For his new book The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of the Movies, the journalist Ben Fritz reviewed every email from the hack of Sony Pictures, which are still available online.

The genius of the system thomas schatz