October 10, 2024
Last week, I talked about the need for a new map – to stop following the old rules, and chart a new path because the film biz is stuck. As I’ve written here before, my favorite companies in the business right now are blowing things up and making a new map – in very different ways, that’s what both Edglrd and Angel Studios are doing, for example, and I know many people building new businesses which I think will also chart a new path.
I stand by that need, but it also brings up another reality (yes, there’s always more than one), which is that sometimes you need to clearly understand the current cartography to succeed. Meaning, as my favorite film says, you need to know the rules of the game. It’s been a few weeks now, but this is what one well-placed reader reminded me when we met at the Toronto Film Fest – lots of people are doing just fine in the film/entertainment biz right now, but while they aren’t building a new map per se, they’re following what the map clearly shows them, and it’s leading them down a path towards success. The ones who aren’t succeeding are either following the old map, or not building a new one, but the current map works for a few, if you just follow the directions.
Of course, no one wants to hear that when things are tough. And the current map is much easier to navigate if you’re doing it from a sponsored Mercedes rather than a hand-me-down Camaro. Ok, I’m bad with car metaphors since I don’t even drive, but my point is, it’s easier now if you already have a leg up and come from a place of privilege and/or earned success. Just like it’s also easier to strategize for the future when you aren’t putting out fires, it’s also easier to see where to go now.
My friends who are succeeding in the current business, and the folks I don’t know at all but just read about in the trades, are all playing by the rules of the game. Sure, they might insert their artistry here and there to make something better than what the market wants, but for the most part they are delivering what the market wants, instead of attempting to do what used to work. In fact, they aren’t even speculating, because most folks who are succeeding today are being told – deliver X and we will distribute it and pay you this much. I won’t name any names here, but look at the credits on Netflix (or Apple, etc.) and you can guess who has been following the rules of the game. Or they live in countries with different rules, but whose rules better support artists – or they’re figuring out how to work with producers in those countries to get things made.
I was once lucky enough to work a nonprofit job where I never applied for a grant before the program officer (or higher) had told me what to apply for, and for how much, and when we’d get the money. All I had to do was send in the formalities. While that’s a lucky place to operate from, the organization I worked for had earned that status by doing good work, keeping up our contacts, and by reading what the funders wanted and proposing just that. We didn’t propose to do X when we knew they wanted A. In another sense, that’s why my company is doing well now – we read the tea-leaves a few years ago and went where the map showed us (brands). Do we get creative in how we interpret the map? Sure… but we try to help our clients either make what the market wants – or chart a new path, which brands can do because they have money and know their audience (usually).
This is anathema to most artists I know. That’s good. That’s why they’re artists, and I’m not. But as the cliché goes – this is the film business. There are times when the getting’s so good, you can make what you want without concern for following the rules. But unless you’re rich, or sponsored/funded/commissioned -now is not one of them. I wrote about what the market wants and the new rules of the game not too long ago. Go follow those if you want a hint at how to succeed in this new environment – under either model.
Now, of course, I am not here to tell you to just follow the rules, paint by the numbers and accept the status quo. In fact, the industry might end up dying if everyone keeps following the current map and playing by the rules of the game. Right now, we need fresh perspectives and new ways of doing things, or we might stay down this path where before too long, we’re playing films only at opera houses to the local elite (oh wait, check your local festival… we might already be there?) and to pat one another on the back. That’s not how you keep an art form relevant and cutting edge.
But…
I think right now, you have two choices – read the tea leaves and figure out a way to attach yourself to the few models that are working, or… chart that new map. There’s not much in-between. Success comes from playing the game by the current rules – not the ones we wish for, or knowing them well enough to break them, and being willing to take that risk.
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Film
RSVP Now: The HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS Distribution Case Study: Join 8 Above’s Jon Reiss and Filmmaker Magazine’s Scott Macaulay and producer Kurt Ravenwood for a deep dive into how the independent film “Hundreds of Beavers” became a breakout success that grossed over $500K at the theatrical box office — more than tripling their production budget of $150K. Kurt will reveal how their team identified, mobilized and grew their audience, how they eventized their theatrical release and created a content strategy to drive more audiences to repeated sold out screenings, how and why they signed a VOD deal before the theatrical release and what ramifications that had for their success (eg - would they do that again?), their windowing strategy, how they leveraged their theatrical success for a unique success in transactional VOD and more. This co-venture with Filmmaker Magazine is the first in a monthly series of case studies that Jon Reiss will be conducting for his Substack. Time: October 17th at 2pmET/11amPT. Location: Zoom link provided upon registration. RSVP here. (GSH)
What Happens When You Become Netflix and The ‘Uberfication’ of Hollywood: Willy Staley writes a great piece for The New York Times about “what happens to entertainment when a newcomer, armed with an effectively endless amount of money, starts making it.” Key takeaways: (1) Massive players like Netflix spent massive amounts of cash and went into major debt to acquire customers, change their habits and overwhelm competitors until they transformed the world and made returns. In doing so, Netflix and the others “demoted the creative talent from sharing in profits to working for hire, like Uber drivers (Staley),” which the producer and writer James Schamus has called the “Uberficiation” of Hollywood; (3) It would take the average American viewer 29 years to watch the entire Netflix library assuming the streamer stopped pumping out content, which if you think about it, is really what we’re paying for — a “fathomless sense of abundance…. which in turn means that any given show just doesn’t matter quite as much as it could in the era of broadcast TV.”; (4) Layoffs, a new head of film who’s been canceling big-budget projects, and the introduction of an ad-supported tier signals and end to Netflix’ expansionary era, “inviting back in the very forces it had liberated television from.” (GSH)
 
Streamers Return To The Cable Playbook To Make Money: Despite absolutely bulldozing over Hollywood and building a new entertainment ecosystem, the streaming giants are now, ironically, making a profit by emulating the very practices that made traditional TV profitable in the first place. Check out Wes Morton’s piece for The Drum to learn about the evolutions (or revolutions in the cyclical sense) of subscription prices, consolidation bundling, originals, and ads. Key takeaway: “What’s old is new again.” (GSH)
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Branded Content
Who's the New Sucker? Well, that's quite a title I gave Shareen Pathak for her article in Toolkits, about new models in brand funded films as Hollywood comes knocking. There's a lot of this happening everywhere, and that's a good thing overall. My actual note to her was that historically, Hollywood is always looking for the next sucker - the next source of money - and so smart brands will be super picky about who they work with, so they can be the "smart money." (BN)
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Miscellany:
Meta Leans into Videos With New AI Tool: Meta Movie Gen (adorable and impressive website btw) can create videos of up to 16 seconds based only on a text prompt. What more, it allows for “personalized” video generation, where it can take a still image and transform it into a video (i.e. you can change a still picture of yourself into a moving, walking, breathing version of you). A couple takeaways: (1) Some wonder whether this impressive technology is the stuff that’ll displace them as movie studios try to cut costs. Meta tried to dissuade those concerns in this blog post, where they wrote that “while there are many exciting use cases for these foundation models, it’s important to note that generative AI isn’t a replacement for the work of artists and animators.” (2) With the introduction of Meta Movie Gen and the soon-to-come full-screen video tab that will elevate Reels on Facebook, Will Facebook and IG Reels become the new hub for movie-watching? “More than half of young adults watch Reels daily,” Meta announced, so the loyal, built-in audience is certainly there. Read on at Alex Weprin’s article for The Hollywood Reporter. (GSH)
The 12 immediate dangers of AI, according to Gary Marcus: AI expert Gary Marcus who wrote a book about why we might need a universal basic income, why we need an AI agency that oversees all things AI, and why we all need to be aware of these problems points out the 12 greatest, immediate dangers of AI. Most of these are things you’d expect, but two stood out a bit: (1) Accidental misinformation (as opposed to “Deliberate, automated, mass-produced political disinformation” which ranks #1 on his list). A huge area of concern is medical advice. A Stanford study showed that Large Language Models’ (LLM) responses to medical questions were “highly variable, often inaccurate.” (2) Environmental costs: “Generating a single image takes roughly as much energy as charging a phone. Because Generative AI is likely to be used billions of times a day, it adds up…the overall trend for the last few years has clearly been towards [training] bigger and bigger [LLM] models, and the bigger the model, the greater the energy costs (Marcus).” Head to Jonathan Wai’s piece for Forbes for the other 10 immediate dangers. (GSH)
GSH = Articles written by Sub-Genre's Gabriel Schillinger-Hyman, not Brian Newman (BN)
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