The Hot Blog Archive for August, 2010
Born To Blu – Baz's Double Dip Is About As Hi-Def As You Want
Fox continues to Blu up its library for its 75th birthday, this time going in for the Baz Luhrman pair… and it’s hard to imagine too many other films that are more meant for Blu. Visual feasts, bigger, brighter, betterer.
I’m looking forward to Oct 19.
Trying To Build The Next Bubble
It always makes me a little queasy to read pieces like Nat Worden’s WSJ story, Studios Seek Out Backup to DVDs , which manage to be both old news and to project insanely into a future that history teaches us does not exist.
Of course, there is the media-glutton, Richard Greenfield of BTIG, stirring the pot, even when he is missing the point. His last media grab is still resonating as media still throws out rising ticket prices as a serious issue when they are 3D driven and a tiny blip on the radar of a much bigger series of issues facing the movie business.
But the most breathtaking quote of all was: from Viacom Inc. Chief Operating Officer Tom Dooley in regard to the Netflix deal. “The deal clearly demonstrated that these new players are going to represent significant revenue streams to studios,” said Mr. Dooley. “There is a new market developing that’s beginning to replace the physical DVD business. This may not be as elegant a transition as some of the industry’s previous transitions because consumer technologies move so quickly these days, but it will happen.”
I hardly know where to start when there are this many dangerously false notions offered by an important executive in one quote.
He starts with something that is clearly true – “The deal clearly demonstrated that these new players are going to represent significant revenue streams to studios.”
New players… yes. New players often overpay to break into a business area.
But, “There is a new market developing that’s beginning to replace the physical DVD business.”
Uh… kinda… but in the context of the quote, it sounds a lot like Mr. Dooley, like others, has convinced himself against all logic that the “new market” will replace the revenues of the DVD sell-thru bubble of the last decade.
Thing is, it’s not actually a new market… it’s the same market with a wider variety of delivery systems with a lower price point per unit.
“This may not be as elegant a transition as some of the industry’s previous transitions because consumer technologies move so quickly these days, but it will happen.”
Actually, this is very similar to the transition as the industry had from VHS to DVD, in that the VHS market was coming down from its peak and with a clearly superior new technology, the industry scrambled to figure out how to handle the transition. It has nothing to do with the speed of consumer technology, as the issues being faced are still much the same as they were 3 years ago… the main difference is that the studios are opening their vaults, not that the technology has stormed the gates.
What is also significantly different in that last transition is that The Industry decided to make DVD a sell-thru business and not a rental business. The reason for this was to create a price point that was higher than rental, that they had to share less of with brick & mortar, and that was still seen as a bargain for consumers. HUGE win… until the business matured. That’s when the industry pathetically started giving up on price point, chasing the ghost of DVD sell-thru. That is when pay-TV really got out of the movie premiere business. And the bottom fell out of all pricing, making the possibility of a $10 (or in their dreams, a $40) home digital delivery price point attractive.
What we are seeing now is a change – digital delivery – with only one point of increased value, but a number of ongoing issues with decreased value. That is to say, the new value proposition is all-access… the downside is still delivery. Cable/Satellite HD is inferior to Blu-ray as well. But as good as streaming is, it still has glitches and vulnerability to the whims of wireless.
The Big Question… the difference between this being a “new market” and just an extension of the current market… is price point. Can studios get the price point back up with digital delivery?
The answer seems to be “no.” And as a result, we are seeing serious reconsiderations of The Model.
In the meanwhile, you have Netflix trying not to become the next Blockbuster, throwing 30% – 40% more than pay-tv for content. As I have pointed out repeatedly, this is not a business model, this is a gamble on a significant business expansion based on this new kind of content availability. The goal is to solidify Netflix’s position so that, in five years, they can start negotiating lower fees that will allow the business to be profitable. (In the meanwhile, don’t be shocked when Netflix eliminates DVD rentals or charges a premium for DVD rentals in 2012. It will not signal the end of DVD, but the model being a drain on the new Netflix model when they need to cut costs to the bone as they evolve through this transition.)
My point is… Netflix’s current spending spree is a blip, not a new model. The strategy may work for Netflix, but if The Industry sees that as The Next Thing, it will be creating another bubble, not a reliable future for revenues. At the same time, as so often happens, a certain carelessness about opportunity costs being expended is involved.
If, let’s say, the Netflix buy is $200m per studio per year… and let’s say that IS the model. It seems like a LOT to studios that have been squeezed down by pay-tv in recent years. But it doesn’t start to match the revenues of the DVD boom. What AREN’T studios doing to build the future numbers because they are being paid to stream on Netflix? Hmmm…
Disney, for instance, seems to be moving forward with testing of anything/anywhere On Demand for their family library at a price slightly lower than Netflix’s monthly price. What happens when/if the two services compete using the same library? How much value does Netflix deliver if they only have a window for limited Disney product, which starts later and ends sooner and costs more, if your family TV is dominated by your kids? And is this a viable $200m annual investment for Netflix?
Anyway…
Dooley is right, the transition will happen. But I get very nervous when I read someone powerful being quoted with this kind of, “We have it under control” kind of quote. They don’t.
Right now, you cannot add up all of the pieces, including Netflix buys, and match the revenue stream of just 3 years ago. The genius of the DVD play was that it replaced VHS by being a sell-thru system.
What it appears we are moving into is a no sell-thru future. The two models are subscription and rental. Rental will be dominant for a while… and then fall to subscription, in my view. And that fall will come when subscription becomes ubiquitous. Not 20 million or 30 million units, but 100 million… cable/satellite level penetration.
Even then, if the cost of delivering to all formats is, say, 10% and the price for a monthly subscription is $10, the return to the studio on 100 million subscribers is still “just” $1.08 billion a year… which still doesn’t match post-theatrical revenues of an entire studio slate from the height of the DVD boom. (Note: I don’t think that, say, Lionsgate, will be able to charge monthly the same way that, say, Sony can. As they are now, on a number of projects, they will probably team up for subscription models… so while a billion would be a lot for them, as it would not for the majors, they probably won’t be able to see that whole figure.)
And this is why Hollywood is darkening its shorts right now. No one can see what The Solution is… because there is no solution other than spending less on making movies so these reduced revenues will still make for profitable businesses.
There is a What’s Next… but it’s not WHAT’S NEXT… it’s a place where consumers get more for less… and The Industry has no one to blame but itself and its infantile attraction to bubbles.
DP/30 – The Tillman Story, director Amir Bar-Lev
AFI Film Fest Guest Artistic Director David Lynch's Fest Poster Art
Trailer – Inside Job
Charles Ferguson has taken the best of what Michael Moore does, the best of what Alex Gibney does, mixed in a handful of Errol Morris, and put is all in a package as beautifully shot as any travel documentary, The result is Inside Job, a dogma light, fact-loaded doc the goes down easy until it starts sticking in your gullet and you realize that you are not choking on Ferguson’s movie, but a lifetime of your own passive acquiescence to people who would literally sell your mother up the river and not even bother to realize they had done it.
The Thing People Don't Get: Episode 27
The media gets sucked into The New Thing in technology all the time. This year, it’s internet video delivery.
Technology doesn’t change consumer habits. New ideas that use tech can… but only if the consumer wanted it but didn’t know it or didn’t think it was possible before.
No one – NO ONE – cares how the video is delivered, so long as it looks good and gets there when it’s wanted.
Internet delivery is not a threat to cable/satellite… it is a threat to cable/satellite not having to make much of an effort because in every market they have a monopoly.
The content is the content is the content. When consumers realize, for instance, that they are paying Starz twice to see Disney movies – once through their cable company and once through Netflix – it isn’t HBO that will get turned off, it’s one of the two ways they are paying for Starz. Of course, the wet dream is that people will pay for both. People, once the bloom is off the rose, will not.
The threat to cable/satellite is obstinacy… same as it was/is to Traditional Media. If the financial model changes – and it probably is in the early stages of doing so – it still doesn’t matter to people how they get what they want. They want it where they want it… and they want to pay the least possible amount to have it.
Everyone who keeps pushing VOD seems to forget that PPV has never been a smash hit. Denial is not healthy.
Netflix Streaming and Hulu are new products… which are endangered by trying to be competitive with the old products.
Conversely, old products like cable/satellite, could commit suicide by trying to emulate the new products. Eventually, the right to control streaming will be sold as a separate item in an deals. When that worm turns, cable/satellite could find itself as the low bidder, having changed the value proposition people see in their product. And whoever is the high bidder will be in danger of going bankrupt, overpaying for rights that cannot be monetized at the level of the fees without significant price hikes…. for things people might like, but mostly don’t need.
DP/30 – Edward James Olmos, founder Los Angeles Latino Internaitonal Film festival
On the occasion of the 14th edition of the festival…
mp3 of the conversation
The Hot Button's 13th Birthday
Thrteen years ago today, I went daily.
Roughcut.com was still a one page daily. “Blogs” did not yet exist. Army Archerd was the only writer committed to daily output about film in print.
So much has changed… including me putting the daily column – which went from 200 words to 500 to 1000 to 2000 a day in that first year – in mothballs.
It would have been smart to launch the new version of MCN today. Who can remember all these anniversaries? But what is striking, for me, is going from that one-page site, thirteen years ago, to a new site with 10s of thousands of archived pages and links to and rss feeds from literally hundreds of other sites… a remarkable community… of which I am proud to be a part.
I wish I could say that entertainment coverage has gotten better. In some ways, it has. But mostly, it’s changed. Amazingly, the sycophantic nature of The Trades (and often, The LA Times) has become a leading ambition for new sites, more so than reaching for more. Ironically, The LA Times and The Hollywood Reporter are doing better work lately, while the ambitions of much of The New get lower and lower.
Things will shake out eventually, but as we all know, journalists who care are fighting an uphill battle against the dominance of publicity, whether about movies or the business of movies. The “other side” isn’t evil or even wrong. They are just doing their jobs. And “we” need to remember, every day, what our job is… or is meant to be. In the end, they are only movies. But how great would it be for everyone on every side of it to wake up each morning, look in the mirror, and know we have done our best. That’s my little prayer.
Thanks for putting up with me all these years.
Weekend Estimates by Nanny McKlady Switched To 3D
What is left to say. 5 movies opening to over $8 million each seems like too many movies, each of which had some audience.
Piranha 3D went nuts with publicity – like piranha swarming the marketplace, if you will – but didn’t quite get past the core base. Vampires Suck did nothing but advertise, in part because it was a no name cast and the whole thing is a gimmick, and got almost 10% of Twilight’s audience to come laugh at itself. Lottery Ticket did pretty well, but not Barbershop well. much as many of us enjoy the hell out of Jason Bateman, Jen Aniston without a strong drawing male lead is about an $8 million opener. And the first Nanny McPhee was, like a smaller Bean, was much stronger overseas, as this one will be, and had a much better opening date than this sequel, so while someone surely was hoping for a post-theatrical driven opening for this one, this number isn’t really too bad.
In other words, maybe it wasn’t “too many movies,” so much as it is five movies opening as kids are already back in school in many places, doing about what they could ever expect to do when only appealing to a very specific base.
Meanwhile The Expendables did about exactly what you expect in its second weekend. Lionsgate and some analysts are trying to sell this movie as a major event pointing to the future of the company. But it is very much the same kind of event Lionsgate has been in the business of for a long time… they picked up a movie… exactly the business that Carl Icahn wanted them to be in. This one, however, may be their second $100m domestic grosser in the company’s history, behind only Fahrenheit 9/11. So… well done, Tim Palen and Sarah Greenberg… good on ya… good for everyone… but if you guys spend $40 million on the sequel and that’s half the budget, you’re moving in the wrong direction.
Industry Gossip, Done Well
I bitch here a lot about bad journalism.
So I think it’s worth pointing it out when a story is, basically, a gossipy “insider” piece that is done really well.
Revenge of the TV Writers has a lot of stories that start out as something you might expect to read on an industry-focused blog, but instead of turning each story into a rousing f-you to one side or the other, this WSj writer offers both sides when possible and best of all, a bit of perspective on how silly and self-serious all this stuff can be.
It’s not the greatest journalism ever written. That is not the standard I crave. But it understand what it is, who the players are, why the players behave the way they do, and it doesn’t try to make itself a more important story than the stories it tells.
Good.
Friday Estimates by The Still Expendable Klady
Once again, a second weekend at #1 is determined by the failure of other movies to step up and not a unique situation with the top film. Not that a $12m second weekend for The Expendables is anything but a happy event for Stallone and Lionsgate. This is the first weekend of the summer, aside from the first Iron Man 2 weekend that had nothing serious to compete with, with the #2 movie grossing less than $17.6 million. So the standard is low.
Vampires Suck softened their weekend with a Wednesday opening. The 5-day will be around $18m, which for a cheap knock-off parody isn’t to bad. And the DVD should be strong. No idea how cheap or not cheap the movie actually is, so hard to judge bottom line here, but that is what needs judging, as it’s nothing but a piece of business.
Lottery Ticket will do around $10m for the weekend, it looks like… a little better than Just Wright or Our Family Wedding. With no crossover stars, a la Death at a Funera, this seems about right for a programmer.
Eat, Pray, Love was bloodied. It’s not a disaster.. but it’s not great. The film I have been holding out as a comparative, Julie & Julia, was off about 43% from first Friday to the second Friday. Another 14% off is not good news.
Piranha 3D revved up the hype every which way it could. But the release date ending up against Vampires Suck looks like bad timing. It was never going to be a world beater, but the hope was to do about double what it’s going to do.
And no better luck for Scott Pilgrim this weekend. With the entire media concentration this week being on “what went wrong,” it didn’t have much of a chance to leg it out. Some movies, deservedly or not (almost never deservedly, really), get the stench of failure attached to them by the media and the emdia forgets the part where some people legitimately LOVE the movie… or at least, in other cases, don’t dislike it as the coverage might suggest… they just haven’t seen it. Sigh…
BYOB Friday
Apologies.
Last 10 days before the MCN site (& this biog with it) relaunches with a new design. Plus TIFF stuff… plus normal life stuff…
The Tillman Story is worth seeing and The Switch is… okay. It’s exactly what you probably expect from the ads with more of Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis than you would expect as The Wacky Best Friends.
I would probably enjoy Piranha 3D as “fun crap” if I had the time to care.
What are your plans for this thrilling movie weekend?
Screenplay Security: The Conversation
It was interesting to read Steve Pond’s take on screenplay security, spurred on by Mike Fleming’s take on Deadline. (Note: Is Fleming using more and more on Nikki’s catch phrases… or is it my imagination?)
Starting with the surface read, there is Fleming speaking for the agents, as Deadline tends to, and Pond seeming to sell a company called Scenechronize’s services as The Solution. You had to get to Page 2 (aka more than 500 words in) to get the sales pitch on the watermarking service. And you had to get to graph 3 of the 4 graph Fleming story to get to the real issue in “script security,” aka the agencies are the source of the leaks, they have done nothing about them for more than a decade, and now, those same agencies are complaining about studio paranoia.
I have always believed that the underground screenplay world, which has manifested on the web for a long time now, is a kind of theft. Others disagree… strongly. But these scripts were not meant to be made public while production was going on. The old argument used to be that pundits – mostly geek pundits – could help the studios see the error of their ways. But that has not proven out to be true. Mostly, it’s turned out to be a hassle for studios and filmmakers… another leak to plug.
On the other hand, there is no indication that a single movie has lost a single dime to a script floating around the web. I am even loathe to say “leaked script” because it makes it sound so cloak and dagger. It’s not.
But Hollywood is a town of egos and every leak is the end of the world to someone, somewhere. I have always argued that information about process belongs to the studio and filmmakers… that it is not something for a bunch of excited people to make public and obsess on just because the information isn’t being treated like it’s in a bank vault.
It reminds me a lot of the tabloid game. 90% of the material is in the public eye because the powers that be want it there. The other 10% is the stuff that sells magazines… and that material is too valuable to treat respectfully… or ever honestly. So you end up with four magazine covers, each with a different version of the Brad and Angelina story, every week, even if nothing has really changed in their lives. And Jennifer Aniston and reality show idiots and the kids from Twilight and The Kardashians, etc.
I would say that publicists spend 90% of their time on the 10% that is out of control. But unlike tabloid junk, in the film business, they get an actual product to sell in the end. A movie. And it will be marketed. And it won’t really matter what happened on the web or anywhere else in the 2 years prior. But again… egos are easily bruised. Anything negative that comes up, from any shithole or from any major outlet, can get magnified and becomes “a problem” that requires a lot of handling/hand holding.
Anyway, I found the aforementioned third graph of the Fleming story to be very instructive:
It’s no mystery why this is happening: security. Producers and studio executives claim that if they email or messenger even one copy to an agency, it goes into that tenpercentery’s library — and then becomes fodder for low-level employees who trade the content of those scripts like currency. Suddenly, that copyrighted document is on the Internet. Disturbing but not illegal is having the script picked apart in a forum, or presented as a blog scoop that gives away story reveals. “I doubt a blogger with 60 readers will ruin a movie even if they publish a script or rip it apart,” said one dealmaker who considers the increased secrecy “ridiculous” but acknowledges the bigger problem. “What is more important is the number of movies that are being leaked onto the internet before they are released.”
I don’t like grabbing a full graph of any story, but he wrote this one to perfection. It is tight and every sentence is loaded with informational goodness.
1. The screenplays are coming, almost always, from agencies. Mostly from assistants and temps.
2. The shoulder shrug about a “blogger with 60 readers” is not factually inaccurate, but seems to intentionally miss the point. If the owner of the material – the organization that paid for its existence – doesn’t want it to be a public document, the ultimate significance of the breech is not the point. Your lack of care and disrespect for someone else’s property is the point.
3. “What is more important is the number of movies that are being leaked onto the internet before they are released.” Utter bullshit. A con artist’s argument. There has not been a studio movie on the web before release in over a year. Piracy is a real issue. But that does not make other bad behavior irrelevant.
I have – forever, it feels like – said that the idea that information is somehow public domain just because someone can get their hands on it is not an issue of free speech, it’s an issue of respect and the balance of human nature. And I am a First Amendment absolutist.
“Hollywood” has had a pretty consistent record in dealing with stuff like this. First it gets angry… then it tries (almost always successfully) to bring the offenders under the tent and to control the situation with honey instead of vinegar. I think what’s changing at the moment is that the “blogger with 60 readers” is ending up in the LA Times or NY Times or NY Mag or whatever Mainstream outlet more and more often. And then, it is perceived as a much bigger problem.
Personally, I blame those outlets for not adhering to their own journalistic standards. They are scraping around in the mud, reducing their values to those of “a blogger with 60 readers” in order to get attention in a media marketplace that has created enormous paranoia.
There is also a new culture of forgetfulness. Getting a story wrong doesn’t seem to matter much to outlets these days… they just print the next version of the story when it comes out and kinda pretend the earlier version never existed. And people let them get away with this. So when a reporter jumps all over a version of a screenplay they got from “somewhere,” and the reporter tries to weave a story around something they perceive as problematic in the screenplay while the film is still in production – see: Sharon Waxman & Kingdom of Heaven – and they get it really wrong, it pisses off a lot of people, many of whom have given years of their lives to a project. And still, in the end, is forgotten by most people… because it wasn’t their blood, sweat, and tears… and because, in the end, it’s the marketing that drives box office..
What studios and individuals don’t want is to be tagged with something – ANYTHING – negative from early on that they then have to explain away in virtually every public conversation until after the movie is released. It doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not. In the end, there will be a movie and that movie will speak for itself. But until then – and the movie really can’t speak for itself until a week or two after release – having that millstone around your neck is no fun. And if you are explaining, some will always take that as “making excuses,” no matter what the truth is. A publicist is not happy if they are responding. They want the media to be responding to them, not the other way around.
Thing is… after a decade of pretending it’s not happening, it’s really hard to secure the perimeter. People will tell you that they agree that “no means no.” But when they are faced with it in action, every small judgment suddenly takes on a different hue. “Well, she said, ‘no,’ but she wore that mini-skirt and you could see her thong and she was drinking shots and she smiled at me in a dirty way and she stuck her tongue down my throat in front of everyone in the bar and she came into the bathroom to snort the coke I offered her… so when she said ‘no’ when I started pulling off the skirt, well, what was she expecting?”
Well, maybe she was expecting to have fun, get kissed, to have her drinks paid for, and to do some coke. Maybe had you not raped her in a bathroom, you could have had great sex in your bedroom. Maybe she wanted what she wanted and you wanted what you wanted and when those two things stopped matching up, you decided that what she wanted didn’t matter anymore because you wanted what you wanted.
In my experience, very few people set out to be rapists… or thieves… or to steal movies on the web… or to upset people by reviewing screenplays (or test screenings) on the web… or to do harm in any way. But we compromise our integrity, bit by bit, and then compromising the integrity of others not only doesn’t seem really wrong, we start to believe that others have it coming, because why should they get away with not compromising when we “had” to.
I don’t think that people who trade scripts or comment on them, online and off, are evil. Many times, they are the most aggressive positive supporters of films.
But simply put, in an old fashioned notion, it’s none of their fucking business.
And I mean this literally and figuratively, because it is too often forgotten that every studio movie is a $100 million or more investment (with P&A) on an individual entity that has its own often-fragile ecosystem. Or maybe it’s not forgotten by some and the lure of being able to have some sense of influence over someone else’s $100m investment without doing anything more than reading a screenplay and crapping out an opinion is just too tempting.
Anyway…
I am completely sympathetic to the agents who are finding themselves unable to fully do their work because of the paranoia that they helped to create by being so inattentive to the privacy wishes of those they share an industry with.
When push comes to shove, everyone just wants to do their damned jobs. No one wants to live in a police state. It’s not fun. It’s not creative. And it should not be necessary.
But the respectful boundaries have become nearly invisible. And We are all to blame. Every time we just shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, that’s just the way the game is played. I didn’t make the rules,” we bury ourselves a little deeper. Every time we indulge what we know to be wrong just because it’s expedient, we bury ourselves a little deeper. Every time we take an action, knowing it’s not right, but also knowing we can get away with it, we bury ourselves a little deeper.
It’s really simple. I’m happy to share my bicycle with you because I know you and you need to go to the store to get some milk so we can all have breakfast tomorrow. But if you give my bike to some stranger instead of giving it back to me or you don’t bother locking up the bike when you go into the store, so it gets stolen (or “borrowed”), I’m not going to be so quick to lend you my bike the next time.
7-year-old stuff.
Can’t we all just pretend to act like grownups?
