Price Point 034: Hollywood’s Turn Away From Ambitious Film and TV
Can we live on an all popcorn diet?
I canceled Netflix yesterday. Queen Cleopatra, Meghan Markle and an Anna Nicole Smith biopic plus endless true crime … Their progress toward building the People Magazine of television is now nearly complete.
TV and film, in the hands of our corporate overlords, are in general becoming less artistically ambitious, without the affordances that have cured it of this fault in the past.
The trend in TV has been toward mass market programming. I mean, TV is a mass medium to begin with, I get it, but there is Haagen Dazs mass and there is Baskin-Robbins. As the services grow, the subscription target for each company becomes bigger. Smallish gains, such as one might get from a Fleabag or even Curb Your Enthusiasm, that can collectively build a brand proposition around quality, can start to seem non-strategic, like small change, a distraction. Therefore, networks are giving the cold shoulder to projects that are more specific and original, what are sometimes called “prestige” tv shows and films, and betting on high octane tentpole franchises. Amazon has Rings of Power and Citadel and will have shows based on the games Fallout and Warhammer. Warner Bros has its own Lord of the Rings coming up (movies in this case), plus Harry Potter plus a rejuvenated DC led by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy). Not only that, apparently HBO’s associations with prestige TV have become so off-putting that WBD has renamed the entire service just “Max.” It’s not TV, it’s not even HBO, it’s just Max, apparently. The key is to be mainstream or rather, not to be prestige or elite.
Can we live on an all popcorn diet?
And I will make a comment on these high octane franchises, which is that there is something about them that feels repetitive and not new. Many of them are sequels, of course, or they are in a “universe,” so they are borrowing heavily, but stylistically there is something very unoriginal happening. Which is why I think Everything Everywhere struck a chord. It felt energetically imaginative and fresh.
In parallel to the marketing department’s expanded audience targets, there was a slightly earlier, strictly cultural shift in Hollywood, around 2017-2018, largely to similar effect, cutting against anything too “smart” or “1%” or funny. Though there are (were?) pockets of resistance at Apple and HBO (so a gem like White Lotus could sneak through), there has been a very limited market for years now for the next The Sopranos, Billions, Breaking Bad, South Park (if you had a “new” South Park), Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, BoJack Horseman, The Shield, The Wire, Fleabag, Mad Men, or other prestige or hard comedy shows of their ilk. This was not fan-driven. It was just executives deciding on a new vibe — middle brow shows, teen shows, reboots, true crime. (They say comedy doesn’t travel by the way but Big Bang Theory was our top show for years in Germany so I am not sure this is supported by evidence.)
Both of these trends have been bad for film and TV.
The number of new, fictional recurring shows rated 8+ on IMDb launched by US networks from 2018-2021 was down 52% vs. the preceding four years from 74 to 35. So we — and the world — are missing 39 shows we might have loved but that didn’t fit the new mandate.
Imagine if the J.D. Power auto ratings declined by 50% in four years. That would be a national emergency. This should be a cultural emergency! Yet few complain because cultural mediocrity is hard to see and easy to accept. Have there been some good new shows? Of course. Does that make it ok that very strong shows declined by 50% and that a large part of the audience appears to be underserved? No??
Moreover, of the Emmy best series candidates nominated in 2022 that premiered in 2018 or before, the average IMDb rating was 8.7. The more recently launched nominees had an average IMDb rating of 8.3. (This does not count Yellowstone, which was not nominated, would have counted in the older bracket, and which has an 8.7 IMDb rating.) Which is not nothing for a metric that 99% of the time is between 6.8 and 8.7. Emmy viewership has meanwhile declined from 11.4MM in 2017 to 5.9MM in 2022, a 48% drop.
Along the same lines, at the box office, comedy dropped from 20% of the box office to 6%, and that is including many family films as “comedies.”
The people do not seem to be thrilled. Netflix is not growing in the US and it spent $2.5B on marketing in 2022 to acquire 9MM customers globally. Except for Netflix, none of the other subscription video competitors are cash flow positive. It is hard to argue that the tone shift in the business is going that well.
I understand saying that if our goal is 70MM US homes, intimate, specific, very well-written shows like Transparent can’t be our obsession. But The Hangover? Sopranos? Those are big titles. This doesn’t feel market-driven to me. Mad Men would get 5MM viewers per episode, which is a lot.
This kind of non-market decision can only be carried out because executives in the subscription video era are relatively insulated from the results of their shows and films. As discussed here, Hollywood used to get its report card every day in the form of hard numbers. Suddenly, hard numbers in terms of viewership and who has a hit are harder to come by and this has made job security and prestige for entertainment execs dependent on internal social cohesion instead of hit-making, so people can just act on preferences. Unfortunately, breakout shows do not typically come from social cohesion. They are typically rule breakers.
In film also, for a moment in 2015-17, there was a scramble for prestige, authored films. But, again, as the only win in SVOD has become the big win, indie darlings like Roma or Manchester by the Sea, always more complicated to distribute, have lost priority. At the same time, the awards shows have lost most of their viewers.
Winning an award gives you about 65% less publicity than it might have in 2014, when people watched awards shows. Moreover, with the new Academy rules, presumably many movies will simply be excluded (can we make a holocaust movie? I guess not!). So every possible force is conspiring against the prestige category.
Today, many high quality indie pictures either don’t get made at all or they wind up under-budgeted and then scattered piecemeal across all the streaming services so that it is very hard for a fan to stay in touch with the space. That saps energy from what should be the leading, most energetic sector where we can break new ground and try new things.
Is it then just inevitable that we will be deprived of comedy and innovative, indie film?
As Lenin asked: what is to be done?
What is needed is a cultural counter-revolution in favor of smart, highly authored work, and in favor also, simply, of things that are quite amusing. The people would appreciate it.
But what is needed as a practical matter is a platform that supports these categories. Can you create a brand that combines comedy and specialty film? Is there an audience for the two on one plate? I think so. No one wants to watch the same thing all the time and both of these things are missing from the world.
Where do cultural counter-revolutions come from? Where could change come from? They are usually driven by underdogs who oppose the establishment. Death Row Records and hip hop. SST Records and punk. So the first thing that has to come together is the people, in a self-conscious way. The right people with the right intent.
But for a platform you need builders, too – tech people – and you need capital. I don’t think there is capital to do this – build a platform – from zero with all original content. What I could see on the other hand is that smaller content entities could get spun up, mini-studios and prodco’s like an A24 or Neon or an Ealing Studios. These could form small islands of value and of distinctive taste. They eventually could come together as a continent. However, this is quite a long, five to ten year, path.
The better, faster, cheaper alternative would be to get away from the massive, centralized media company model to begin with and shift to an open, global, crypto-powered, marketplace for funding films and media projects of all types and then have a decentralized global streamer with a subscription where revenues are divided amongst producers by smart contract so that people can monetize films and TV. This would work more like bittorrent (but legal) in that it would just be a neutral platform.
Such a shift would make individual creators, producers and production companies entrepreneurs again with real upside (not just cost plus employees). It would restore upside to writers. Instead of four or five big P&L’s spanning the industry and bearing its entire weight, the industry would be driven by hundred’s of risk bearing P&L’s. And I think that hundreds or thousands of producers, creators and financiers would be more entrepreneurial and more aligned with the audience than a few huge consensus-driven companies.
It won’t be easy, but, one way or the other, it must occur.
RP
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.
Insightful and forward-thinking as usual!