Has Hollywood become more 'packaged' over the last fifteen years?

Five years ago, 7,000 Hollywood writers fired their agents over a practice called packaging and won.That fight, though, was almost entirely about television, not film. The most pernicious version of packaging lived in TV series, where an agency could earn as much as, or even more than, the very people who created the show, and where the agency had little reason to push for higher writer pay, because its money came from the package fee rather than the writer’s salary.Packaging fees may have ended (at least for television writers), but today I want to look into two questions:How prevalent was/is packaging among movies?Did it really end?What is packaging, and how do we track it?Despite being carried out by a small number of well-known agencies that represent the world's most famous people in the biggest movies ever, packaging is relatively hard to study.For today’s research, I have built a fairly good proxy, but before I reveal the numbers, I need to explain a little more about what…