The Big Picture, Ben Fritz

Nov 1, 2020 · 7 minute read · Comments

Написано по мотивам корпоративной переписки Sony, ставшей публичноЙ после хакерскоЙ атаки в 2014 году. В книге описано состояние дел не только в Sony, но и во всей киноиндустрии. Каких-то шокирующих фактов нет - Marvel и Disney победно проходят по кинотеатрам, телевидение и Netflix убили среднебюджетные фильмы, Китай становится значимым рынком. Все это было известно и ранее, но тут снабжено фактами, уложено в стройную теорию и, конечно, рассказаны истории главных действующих лиц. Очень понравилось.

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What made the movie business unique in the history of corporate capitalism is captured in the screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim, true for many decades: “nobody knows anything.” No other industry pumped out so many products so frequently with so little foreknowledge of whether they would be any good. The only feasible business strategy, it appeared, was to sign up the best creative talent, trust your strongest hunches about what looked likely to appeal to millions of people, and hope you ended up with Back to the Future instead of Ishtar.
Over the past few years, however, something big has happened: finally, people in Hollywood do know something. What they know is that branded franchises work. People say they want new ideas and fresh concepts, but in reality they most often go to the multiplex for familiar characters and concepts that remind them of what they already know they like. Big name brands like Marvel, Harry Potter, Fast & Furious, and Despicable Me consistently gross more than $1 billion at the global box office,
We’re living in the “golden age of television.” Shifting economic and technological factors have fueled an explosion of originality and risk taking that makes the “idiot box” home to arguably the best content Hollywood has ever produced. In 2016, networks and streaming services produced 454 original scripted series, more than double the number created in 2010. Some were good, some were bad, but most were interesting, sophisticated, and made for intelligent adults. It was, to borrow a term from the head of the FX cable network, “peak TV.”
Of the top fifty movies at the global box office between 2012 and 2016, forty-three were sequels, spinoffs, or adaptations of popular comic books and young-adult novels (five of the remaining seven were family animation, the sole genre in which originality still consistently works). Sure, every year a live-action movie without a brand name, like Gravity or La La Land, becomes a major hit. But those are as rare as a joke in a Christopher Nolan film—no sane company would build a business around them.
Increasingly, that meant movies that appealed to audiences in Russia, Brazil, and China. These consumers weren’t likely to understand the cultural subtleties of an American drama or to consider people talking or even running for their lives to be adequate bang for their buck on an expensive night out. They expected spectacle, particularly if they were paying premiums for an IMAX or 3D screen, and they wanted stories that made sense to a villager in China, a resident of Rio de Janeiro, or a teenager in Kansas City.
Utilizing a crew of second-rate superheroes and run by a team of unproven executives, Marvel upended the industry’s conventional wisdom. Previously, almost everyone in Hollywood believed that the general public was interested only in marquee superheroes like Batman and Spider-Man, and nobody would see a movie about Ant-Man or the Guardians of the Galaxy; that the resources and experience of major studios gave them an unbeatable advantage over upstarts; that tightly managing budgets on would-be global “event” movies was penny-wise but pound-foolish; that tying together the plots of disparate films was too risky because if one failed, they all would; and that the only Hollywood brand name that meant anything to consumers was Disney.
Their instructions to Landau, they thought, were quite simple: “Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man.” It was the mistake of a lifetime, a deal that could have made Sony billions of dollars and potentially turned it into the juggernaut that Marvel’s current owner, Disney, is today.
Then they asked the kids which ones they would most like to play with as a toy. The overwhelming answer, to the surprise of many at Marvel, was Iron Man. “That’s what brought Iron Man to the front of the line,” said a person who helped to decide which movie Marvel would self-produce first.
What happened? Audiences’ loyalties shifted. Not to other stars, but to franchises. Today, no person has the box-office track record that Cruise once did, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone will again. But Marvel Studios does. Harry Potter does. Fast & Furious does. Moviegoers looking for the consistent, predictable satisfaction they used to get from their favorite stars now turn to cinematic universes. Any movie with “Jurassic” in the title is sure to feature family-friendly adventures on an island full of dinosaurs, no matter who plays the human roles.
If Netflix couldn’t count on Hollywood to provide the content it needed, it would start producing content itself. But, Sarandos reasoned, its selection process should be entirely different. Rather than rely on focus groups, subjective comparisons to similar content, and executives’ gut feeling, Netflix used data. House of Cards was an early and compelling example of how well this approach would work.
When Netflix started as a DVD service in the late 1990s, 80 percent of the content subscribers watched was movies. As it became more of a television company, that number dropped dramatically, until by the 2010s only one-third of total content viewing was movies. The surprising thing about that statistic is that it wasn’t lower. Nearly all of Netflix’s movies were a year old or more, and by the time they showed up on the streaming service, they had already been in theaters, on DVD, and available to rent from iTunes. Most TV shows, by contrast, were either original or available to watch for the first time after airing on traditional TV. But no matter what happened to Netflix’s content mix, movies never fell below one-third of what its users chose to watch.
Sully, La La Land, Hidden Figures, and Arrival were the only mid-budget dramas to gross more than $100 million. And that was considered a surprisingly high number because only two comparable films had grossed that much in 2015. In 2000, even though average ticket prices were 38 percent lower than they are today, nine mid-budget dramas grossed more than $100 million.
But Disney proved that it’s possible to create release slates on which almost every movie is a hit, generating profits beyond anything seen in Hollywood before. It has done that with one word: branding. Nearly all of Disney’s films fit into a narrowly defined brand that supports big-budget franchises, such as Marvel superheroes, Star Wars space adventures, Pixar and Disney animated family films, or live-action remakes of animated classics.
Disney approaches movies much like Apple approaches consumer products. Nobody blames Apple for not coming out with a groundbreaking new gadget every year, and nobody blames it for coming out with new versions of its smartphone and tablet until consumers get sick of them. Microsoft for years tried being the “everything for everybody” company, and that didn’t work out well. So if Disney has abandoned whole categories of films that used to be part of every studio’s slates and certain people bemoan the loss, well, that’s simply not its problem.
There used to be well over a dozen A-list directors working in Hollywood at any given time who could get most any movie they wanted greenlit at any studio where they chose to work. Today there are only three: Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Christopher Nolan.
In 2005, the highest-grossing Hollywood movie in China, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, grossed $11.7 million. In 2017, the eighth Fast & Furious film grossed $392 million there. Total box-office sales skyrocketed from $248 million in 2005 to $6.6 billion in 2016. It was already the number two movie market in the world, and experts predicted that sometime before 2020, it would surpass the United States to become number one.
The United States had already proved the power of pop culture to help establish a nation’s global dominance. Now China wanted to do the same. The Beijing government considered art and culture to be a form of “soft power,” whereby it could extend influence around the world without the use of weapons.