I enjoy reading books on the making of movies. Like potato chips, the books come out, are read on the sofa, and you go on to the next.

Every now and then, a book will stick in your mind. When you are reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, or The Wrap, some tidbit comes back. I’ve seen that name before…

So when I was given Ben Fritz’s The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, I expected just another potato chip.

Oh, no, in no way is The Big Picture, a simple nacho. It’s a timely book on the business of movies as the old ways are being overwhelmed, subsumed and replaced by the new such as franchises from Disney such Star Wars, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Think The Avengers and Iron Man. He covers the rise of Netflix and Amazon Prime’s original films.

Fritz, now the West Coast editor for The Wall Street Journal, covered the entertainment industry for years. He has done copious research and interviews to give an insightful view of today’s motion picture industry. He also admits in his introduction that he used stolen emails from the Sony hacking of 2014 to get insight.

Ever wonder why some of those small films are ever made? The decision might be launched two years before before the industry changed to wanting a franchise “tentpole” film for the summer. Often it’s not a matter of art, but connections that got it made.

The Big Picture puts human faces on the business decisions that land  films in your theater. It speaks the importance of merchandising, of toys and Halloween costumes, and the need to always have something in the pipeline, though I doubt Lucasfilm/Disney suspected the immense consumer demand for the birdlike #Porgs when they created Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

The Big Picture is a book that I will keep on my shelf along with three others: Disneywar by James B. Stewart, Indecent Proposal: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street by David McClintock, and Rebels on the Backlot by Sharon Waxman, which covered the rise of Quentin Tarentino and others. These four books cover the last thirty years of the film industry in Hollywood and now, worldwide.

The latest, The Big Picture, takes us into the future.