There have been many attempts to understand the statistical origin of black-hole entropy. Among them, entanglement entropy and the brick wall model are strong candidates. In this paper we show a relation between entanglement entropy and the brick wall model: the brick wall model seeks the maximal value of the entanglement entropy. In other words, the entanglement approach reduces to the brick wall model when we seek the maximal entanglement entropy. ©1999 American Institute of Physics.