ABSTRACT
According to Justin Wyatt’s influential work on contemporary Hollywood, the high concept blockbuster depends on a simple, catchy tagline which inspires multimedia marketing and merchandizing campaigns in an attempt to lure audiences and separate success from failure at the box office (Wyatt 1994). As Steven Spielberg – one of its founding fathers – once put it, the high concept strategy emphasizes a film’s reducibility: “I like movie ideas that you can hold in your hand … if a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it’s going to be a good movie” (quoted in Schatz 1993: 33).
