On May 9, 1893, Thomas Edison demonstrated his Kinetoscope to four hundred spectators in Brooklyn, unveiling what he believed would be his next patent empire. Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ordered Hollywood's Big Five studios to dismantle the vertical integration that had made them America's most powerful entertainment oligopoly. Edison lost. The studios won-and then survived their own legal destruction. This is the story of how five companies built an impregnable monopoly by controlling every stage of motion pictures: production, distribution, and exhibition. How Adolph Zukor discovered in 1916 that distribution-not production or exhibition-was the real lever of control. How MGM perfected the factory system in the 1920s, churning out fifty films a year with assembly-line precision. How sound technology, the Depression, and World War II only strengthened the Big Five's grip. And how the Paramount Decrees of 1948-the most aggressive antitrust intervention in entertainment history-ended vertical integration's legal structure while leaving its economic logic untouched. By 1955, the five major studios were still the majors. Theater ownership was gone. Block booking had ended. Exhibition monopolies were broken. But distribution control-the capacity to deliver annual slates, coordinate national releases, and dominate international markets-survived intact. The oligopoly adapted faster than law could confine it. Structure is not function. The mechanism can be banned while the logic endures. Owning the Audience: The Birth of the Studio System traces Hollywood's first monopoly across five decades of industrial evolution-from Edison's failed patent empire through the Big Five's golden age to the Paramount Decrees' paradoxical aftermath-revealing why controlling distribution has remained the key to controlling cinema, regardless of what courts, technologies, or competitors attempt.