Hollywood's Perfect Storm
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I’m happy to be rejoined by the first (and, perhaps one day, final) Bulwark Goes to Hollywood guest, Richard Rushfield of The Ankler (subscribe today!), to talk about Hollywood’s shaky summer. Nine-figure flops, the collapse of IP, labor woes, c-suite shakeups: it’s a weird time out west. How is the industry going to handle it? And what might the future look like? All that and more on this week’s episode. If you enjoyed it, share it with a friend!
Hollywood's Perfect Storm
Richard’s comment about the “mid-market” movies, that you have to work hard to make them work, stopped me cold: it seems to me that ‘working hard’ is what has gone missing across the industry. Richard also commented that there doesn’t seem to be a business model that works also rang a bell: I don’t know that there is a model beyond EBITDA and stock price. This should be a planning executive’s dream: never before has there been more data that should be available about what’s being “purchased” by whom and what’s being liked, but it looks as though decisions are being made off the cuff, based on the decision-maker’s taste (and, perhaps, magical thinking of those same people). It’s as though those who want to be arty and show-bizy are treating data as if it were salt water and going to some juice-bar-on-the-rise instead! God knows planning is at least as much art as science, but a base of real and ready available science and apply some serious art to the decision making done using it! Among people who know movies an TV, not at Goldman desks!😉
Movies will still be made. I think Sonny’s vision of 15-20 million dollar projects is overstated. I see 7-10 million dollar projects that find their niche in the wide-open media market. I’m looking forward to it.