Selling Realities: The Secret Essence of All Blockbuster Movies.

Another early "synergy pioneer" was George Lucas who used a half-billion-dollar movie (Star Wars) as advertising trailer for his souvenir marketing business.  Another early medi-alchemist was Henry Edwards, who used a 110-million-dollar movie and a 150-million-dollar album as promotion for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band).
The secret of blockbusters is the shift in emphasis from the past to the future in storytelling. Now the orienting context of the story is a future-pull, whereas in the past tradition supplied the gravity-center that story, as you placed the hardback on your evening stand to fall asleep, fell backwards into. Now, stories strive upwards to a new sense of the sublime.

Read on:

"Legend has it that Ron Bernstein, upon observing how movies, T.V. shows, albums, novelizations were all used as hype for each other, came to the startling conclusion which totally changed Human Ontology.  "Why not use all forms of media, working together synergistically, to hype a Future Reality?"

Bernstein thus became the first Reality Movie Maker.  If movies could get people to buy albums -- why then movies could get people to buy realities.  Reality became a spin-off of show biz.

Starting in 1979 every sentient being on the planet was systematically exposed to Bernstein Futures.  Blacks walked out of Bernstein movies excited by the blueprints -- colorfully, romantically, precisely detailed -- for building exactly the kinds of futures they wished.  By 1983 the Bernstein Empire was making Future Reality Movies for every gene-colony in the Western World.

Before Bernstein movies relived the past.  After Bernstein movies created futures."

End quote.