Good Things on the Horizon

1. Virtual Production – I love my job – being my own boss and only working with brands and people I like on movies I find interesting. But if I were to quit (on myself) and take a “real” job, the only one I would consider would be working with Epic and Unreal Engine on the future of films, and by extension, the future of the metaverse. That's how excited I am about this space. Most people know about this arena, if they know anything about it at all, from its use in projects like The Mandalorian. If you want a good primer on the entire trend in detail, you could do worse than watching the line-up from 2020’s Future of Film Summit, or you can also watch their video series, or read their report which are more recent. Virtual production boomed so much during the pandemic that there’s almost been too much hype, and there’s a bit of a backlash to it, but it remains one of the most promising developments for the future of media, and I see big things on the horizon – for films big and small (including a merger of technologies with the next big thing…)
2. AI and Film – This is a bit more speculative, but only just a bit. The advances in AI, machine learning, neural networks related technologies have been one of the major tech stories of the pandemic, and they’re going to have a big impact on film soon (bigger than NFT’s and Blockchain). Right now, we already have GPT3 for language (with GPT4 around the corner), and DALLE-2 for art. People are already using AI for script analysis and predictions of future box office performance for films, but that’s the minor stuff. And people are worried about the deep fakes that are already happening and around the corner. Read this recent NYT article on how AI is mastering prose, or look at this Ai created date chatbot (which is also an NFT and a deep commentary on where this is all going) and you’ll realize it won’t be long before these things combine into entirely new mechanisms for storytelling. I particularly like the example the NYT article gives of a common test for AI art programs where they ask the AI to create “an illustration of a baby daikon radish, wearing a tutu, walking a dog” and it does just that. It won’t be long before we’ll be asking AI to come up with a script based on this article, and then shoot the entire thing in Unreal Engine, and re-create all of the cast based on famous actors from the past – and it will work, and no one will notice the difference (except maybe if it’s better than what’s preceded it). 
3. The Rise of Infrastructure for Nontheatrical Releases - Stepping back into the present, with a tinge of the past… Revenues from nontheatrical outlets – things like fests, community screenings, etc. – have always been an important but small slice of the revenues for films, especially documentaries. But they’ve been undervalued by any measure, because they’re small enough to get overlooked and are tough to implement at scale. In fact, when I worked on the Transparency Project for Sundance, we found that nontheatrical revenues were a surprisingly important piece of the total revenue pie for indies (especially docs), and theoretically had room for growth. They’ve remained a space for very niche players, but a bevy of new companies (whose founders have experience in this arena) have been founded in the past two years, and are building systems to improve the sector. Here’s just three to check out (there are more) - Kinema, Artinii, and SimpleCinema (from Ro*Co Films), all of which have great potential. Of course, being a consolidator, I’d like to see them all merged into a nontheatrical powerhouse that could become sustainable, but their creation is a good start.
4. Slow-Build Theatrical & The Return of Alternate Models for Releasing – Probably the most talked about story of the past year in the indie film distribution and exhibition sectors has been the success that a team of folks had with Drive My Car, which used a slow-build theatrical strategy to build audiences and awareness, and eventually an Oscar for the film. It’s now wrapping up a five-month theatrical release (!). But in a weird way, that’s also what Neon is doing with their theatrical-only tour of Memoria right now. This type of strategy works best for the kinds of cinema that demand a theatrical viewing. Not only do these two films benefit from the big screen artistically, but forcing audiences into theaters somewhat ensures they’ll stick around for the rewards, where they might be enticed by their second/third screens at home. But I bet it would work for many more films that need that slow burn to build recognition – the way we once did more often for quality cinema – and I hope to see more experiments like these soon. That’s something that has been missing from the sector for a while now – experimenting with release strategies. Sure, people played around with windows for the past decade, but we used to see a broader range of release strategies for different films, and there’s been a bit of homogeneity to the process until recently – a sense of many distributors doing the plug and play routine. During Covid, folks started re-engaging with older models like drive-ins, event cinema and now we have even theatrical-only releases. As the major streamers move away from quality cinema, cinemas slowly try to recover from the pandemic, and audiences are distracted by abundance, we’re going to need lots of creative strategies to get them back in theater seats, or even get their attention, and I’m willing to bet a lot of this will come via the return/tweaking of older models.
5. Brands at the Oscars – I mentioned this last week in the news, but I can’t emphasize enough how big of a deal it is that WeTransfer commissioned a film which won an Oscar – The Long Goodbye by Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed. This is the first time that a brand film has won the Oscar, ironically just as the Awards become less culturally relevant, but a big deal, nonetheless. And it seems WeTransfer is doing this right, on many fronts. First, I love that they use the word commissioned, which is what they did and most brands do – they don’t make these on their own (nor do their agencies, who love to take the credit), the filmmakers do. Second, it shows that brands can fund both narratives and docs (most fund docs), and they can be taken just as seriously by the public and Academy voters as any other film, when done well. Third, I hope it pushes more brands to follow their lead, and I think it will. Every day now, I get on the zooms with a new client who was planning to make a feature doc, but now wants to make a short based on either this news, or the Oscar for Short Doc earned by Ben Proudfoot for Queen of Basketball, which was a NYT Op-Doc and as such – I have argued – another version of a brand film (the brand being the NYT). Overall, I see a strong trend of brands “upping their game” in this space, and working with better producers and filmmakers, and taking bigger swings, and as such, I think this will be the first of many brand films in the Oscars. Now, maybe they can use their marketing prowess to help the Academy figure out its relevance again...

Stuff I'm Reading

REI Co-Op Studios Heads to Tribeca with Kyra Sedgwick's Space Oddity:

What Brands Are Getting Wrong About The Metaverse: AdAge’s Brian Wallace unpacks what he calls the three core building blocks of the metaverse (no, the metaverse isn’t just a space where your avatar can float around), and how brands can optimize these pillars to reach customers effectively in new and innovative ways. These pillars are (1) A customer crypto wallet; (2) smart NFTs; (3) virtual spaces. So how can brands effectively participate in all three ‘areas’ of the metaverse, without defaulting to another random/silly virtual experience (like Wendyland)? 

In Graphic Detail: How do consumers really feel about the metaverse?: Recently, the metaverse has been all the rage. Brands, tech companies, and gaming companies are all rushing to claim (metaversal) real estate. But what do these companies as well as everyday people — the normies like me and you (?) — really feel or know about this thing that kind of exists but also doesn’t really yet? Digiday pulled together the data from five data reports and surveys... key takeaways are as follows: 

1. People are a bit confused about what the metaverse even is (see pie chart). A substantial amount even think it's “a huge tech company”. 
   
   

2. Marketing executives, too, aren’t so sure how the metaverse will impact their brand (only 18% know where they stand). 

3. Millennials are among the most likely to shop online at a 3D virtual store, surpassing Gen Z-ers by almost 10%. 

   This is all new territory, though we’ll likely all be more familiar with what the metaverse is and what it looks like (or what it can look like) in the coming months. My biggest takeaway here, and as Digiday’s Alexander Lee puts it, is “if brands put the virtual cart before the horse, they could risk burning their audiences out on the metaverse before it is able to fully take shape.” ( GSH)

   GSH = Articles written by Sub-Genre's Gabriel Schillinger-Hyman, not Brian Newman (BN)