Bland New World: The Case for a Cultural Rebellion

The battle royale for our cultural future

Mar 13, 2025

There was this whole era from Larry Sanders to Pulp Fiction to Sopranos to Mad Men to Sexy Beast or Fleabag or A Bigger Splash, Closer, Maisel, Lost in Translation, Breaking Bad, Veep or Succession… you will have your own list, but it was a pretty amazing time and now it is gone except for the occasional Shogun that makes you think, oh yeah, remember when we were smart?

On streaming, indie films are hard to find because they are spread across too many services.

“High end” TV shows, like Curb or White Lotus, have been deprioritized.

Sad times indeed for anyone who favors “good” film and television. It’s like Hollywood’s IQ dropped twenty points in ten years. It takes a bit of the sheen off the whole Hollywood project for me; that is, it used to be that a lot of boring and unimaginative things were made, but we could all be proud of the many things that were truly good. But now the good things are so rare. It’s like we used to excel at oil painting and now we only do finger painting and the occasional Pinterest mood board and somehow no one has noticed this or comments on this change. Is there lead in the water in West LA? I hear that’s what did in the Romans.

Some time ago, I wrote about how helpful it would be to start a new streaming service that, among other things, would be a great, united home for indie films (The Coolest Film Brand in the World). Basically, the suggestion was to merge A24 and Neon, add some capital, and there you go — we would have a new, great service. I stand by what I said about needing a new service. The “indie” or “prestige” category, in film, is not well-served by being spread thinly and unpredictably across every streaming service.

Is this indie film segment a commercial category? It is certainly neglected. Well, Manchester by the Sea grossed $48M in the US. Juno made $143M. Parasite, in Korean, grossed $54M in the US. Shakespeare in Love, Black Swan, Slumdog Millionaire, and La La Land all grossed over $100M. Breaking Bad and The Sopranos — and for that matter Mad Men, Maisel, Downton Abbey and Fleabag, too — all (won awards and) were also significant shows. The Artist grossed $45M in the US — and it was a black and white silent film! There is an audience out there for these movies. It may not be 100M homes in the US, but it isn’t “non commercial.”

So if we had a subscription video (SVOD) service for this audience and this kind of film and show, how big are we talking? I would say that the new entity would have to have a library plus 24 original films per year plus at least 12 original series (so, one per month). You could put together a strong lineup within those constraints with about $3B in annual content costs. I think it is reasonable to believe that there is a subscription audience of 30 or 40 million people in the US for this product we are discussing and about the same outside the US, which would promise us about $9 billion in revenue per year, which is nothing compared to Netflix, but is more than enough to support the business we are discussing.

The last plan involved merging some entities that may have no interest in merging, which is a bit of a flaw. You can’t magically make people merge. So, having agreed on the “what,” perhaps today we can revisit the “how” of reinvigorating the Golden or Platinum Age of Hollywood.

But, for now, we aren’t going to merge with or acquire anyone. And assume we are not going to raise $1 billion out of the gate. So we need a way to get this going without too much money or any existing assets to build on. What does one do?

Look at Wal-Mart. How did Sam Walton start Wal-Mart? He started with one store. Once that was working, there was a second store. And then they grew. That is essentially what must happen here. There is a slight problem — Sam Walton’s stores could be individually profitable while he built subsequent stores. There is no analogy to this in an online subscription video service. It is just one big store. There is no pocket of profitability that can finance growth. But nevertheless the principle is that it has to start small and grow one step at a time. In time, it can add more movies or series.

So in this incrementalist vision, one needs to begin with something. We want an island that we are going to grow into a continent (or at least an archipelago). If we have the patience to let it grow over time, it can almost start as anything that has fans and that has to do with content. That is, it could be akin to a digital “magazine,” where “magazine” just means any “online digital content brand.”

If you have a subscription and you have a subscriber base who are interested in film, that’s a genuine start. You can grow it one step at a time from there. This year we are going to have one film. Next year we will have three. Etc.

But to get this going, to build a following, you have to serve a gap in the market. There has to be something that customers aren’t getting now that you can give them. Because, of course, there has to be some demand for your new thing. So is there a gap in the market?

THE BRAND AND THE BLANDWAGON

Happily, there is a gap in the market. A big part of Hollywood’s problem over the past 8 years or so is that a new culture took over the executive staff. I call it “the Blandwagon.” This culture has been opposed to “elite” feeling shows like Succession or Billions; opposed to anything too hard to write, like Mad Men; opposed to taking chances; and opposed to comedy.

The open space in our culture is basically everything the Blandwagon is not. So we have our core category of “ambitious and smart” film and TV, and we add comedy. This is significant because whatever you may think of indie film, comedy is pretty big.

So what could be the key starting point for a brand? Well, here is my pitch. We start with a (digital) magazine/online brand. Think Spy when it was good meets Rolling Stone when it was good — but aligned not with our establishment culture, but with the anti-Blandwagon emerging smart and fun “New Culture.”

FUN MAGAZINE

There aren’t any funny magazines in the US that I know of. I mean, I guess there is McSweeney’s. And there is Shalom Auslander’s substack. But that’s it. So what if we combined culture talk (music, movies, TV, etc.) with comedy in a new cultural voice that is quite different from everything in the marketplace, but which is very in step with the actual culture that is out there in the world. There is this culture happening now that is kind of in a Joe Rogan-Shane Gillis zone that is completely invisible in mainstream media but that in real life is huge. It’s an important culture gap.

Some headline ideas:

How to Handle Notes with Aplomb™ Pepper Spray
10 Federal Prisons: Which Has the Hottest Dating Scene?
What’s it Like to be a Major Media Exec with No Taste? We ask Amazon’s Jen Salke (or whoever — no offense)
Ask a Crip (Personal Advice column)
Beverly Hills Drinks Party: Post #metoo Does Anyone Still Have Fun?
Out of Style, Out of Mind: Can We Save the Mill on the Floss?
America’s Machine Gun Festivals Rated
Big Enough to Tour, Too Small to Pay for Netflix: Today’s Band Economics
The Smoking Balcony: Interviews with Anonymized Bigwigs
Centerfold: Milton Friedman

(Note: we will only make fun of those who deserve it.)

You know, one time I met with a corporate communication consultant and she asked me, “Roy, why do you tell a lot of jokes?”

I responded that “People like jokes. Everyone likes jokes.”

She looked like she had sucked a lemon and informed me that: “Roy, not everyone likes jokes.”

Too true, Madame. Boy, she was a card carrying member of the Blandwagon. And that’s our establishment culture right there in a nutshell. But the thing is, there are plenty of people who do like jokes. Someone once said “don’t start a startup, start a movement.” Our people — people who like jokes and machine gun festivals — are a movement. We would start by coalescing that movement.

In the sequence of events for FUN, we start with the brand, the philosophy and hopefully pull together the movement. Later there would be many options.

I actually started this in a minor way by creating a different Substack and doing the first entry, the FUN Manifesto.

Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.