The Economist has said that the film market is breaking up into two blocks - the blockbusters making tons of money at one end, and the niche movies making a smaller but still decent profit at the end. Caught in the middle are the movies that are, well, mid-range budget movies, and, according to the Economist, the producers can either go upscale into becoming blockbuster producers or shrink to becoming niche players.

?url? http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14966219?/url?

There's probably some truth to this, but I wouldn't say the mid-range will disappear. 20 years ago, when I was in college, people were saying that the mid-size professional firms - in law, accounting, and so on - would disappear. IOW, the mid-sized ones would either gang up to become giants, or they would disintegrate to become small niche-based players. Well, that hasn't happened. One of the largest accounting firms on Earth, Arthur Anderson, has disappeared, and many of the bigger national accounting and law firms have fragmented into regional players - the very type of mid-sized firms that were supposed to disappear.

With this in mind, I'm therefore not convinced the near-misses or almost-blockbusters or whatever-you-call them will disappear. First of all, trends come and go, as I've shown; second, the technology involving the internet is still evolving, and we really don't know what will happen - remember the dot-com bust? Actually, I saw that coming, but many of my colleagues refused to believe it. Last, but certainly not least, the global market is increasing, so there would be room for large niche markets serving, say, the Indian market in North America or the Asian cooking segment around the world. So what is a niche market by global standards in ten years would be a mid-sized market by today's standard.

I'm slowly learning about showbiz, and I hope others can chime in with their thoughts. CI? Bryan? Anyone?