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Slate Money
The Hollywood Edition
00:49:38
Slate Money on the future of movies, today’s movie stars, and inclusion riders.
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- [00:00]
A
The following podcast contains explicit language. Hello, and welcome to the Hollywood edition of Slate and Money, your guide to the business and finance news of Hollywood. I guess this week. All right, guess what, people. Ben Fritz is here.
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B
What?
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A
Ben Fritz is here.
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B
Where?
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A
Anna? Ben Fritz is here. We are in the studio with the one and only Ben Fritz. Ben, introduce yourself.
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B
I am Ben Fritz. I am a Wall Street Journal reporter where I cover the entertainment industry. And I am the author of the new book, the Big the Fight for the Future of Movies.
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A
And so this is our excuse to spend an entire episode geeking out on the economics of Hollywood, which are absolutely fascinating. And we've talked about Hollywood economics like en passant. Yes, occasionally. And we haven't really delved in. We've done super deep dives into the music industry, but not the movie industry. And so now we get to do this with the help of Ben, who has literally written the book on this subject. And I'm going to dive right in, because the one thing I know about Hollywood, the one thing that everyone knows about Hollywood, is that nobody knows everything. Anything. This is like the one quote that everyone knows. William Goldman, what was that, like, 50 years ago? Something like that, wrote this famous thing where he says, nobody knows everything. And now you have come along and you've like. And you're like, actually, that's a little bit out of date. Now we actually know.
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B
Yes. Somebody finally figured out something about the movie business, which is that if you have branded franchises where the movies connect to each other, ideally in a cinematic universe, people like to come back to them over and over. And while obviously nothing is flop proof, you can get a fair amount of reliability and predictability in the movie business when you keep making Marvel movies or Fast and Furious movies and so on.
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A
And like, somehow it took Hollywood a few decades to work this out, but they got there in the end and now they have their formula and they can punch out their franchise movies. And that is now what Hollywood does.
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B
Yes. And now it's not that easy, obviously, it's not that easy to get started and create a great franchise and get audiences to come out. We smell cynicism and. And easier and easier every day because there's so many of these wannabe Marvel Studios franchises. But when they are successful, when they connect to an audience, it's almost like a TV show that you've gotten to know and you keep tuning into. Right. And people keep coming out for again, the latest Marvel. They trust these brands the same way. Another way to look at it, you're an Apple Fan, let's say. And you like to buy the latest iPhone. You trust them as your technology company. People come to trust their favorite movie brands and they love them and there's prestige associated with them and they go out and see it over and over. And these, you know, Marvel is, you know, the prototypical example. It seems that they are flop proof. People. People thought it was impossible that a movie company could produce 18 films in a row with essentially zero flops. And that's what Marvel's done.
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C
So in your book you tell a really interesting story about how this has come to be. About how like using Sony first to see like how the movie industry used to work and then now how it's changed and then also specifically looking at Marvel and Disney as well as Amazon. So I'm curious, do you think it's more audiences have changed, technology has changed, distribution has changed, the global audience has changed. What do you think are the most important elements?
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A
Well, has nothing changed and we just worked it out?
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B
No, I think that's a fair question. But some, I think it's a mix. I mean, definitely they finally worked something out that they could have worked out a long time ago. But on the other hand, the global audience, as you said, is a key thing, right? They're now appealing. Not when you're appealing to just Americans. You can create sort of culturally specific stories. When you're trying to reach a global audience, then they need to essentially be very simple and accessible stories that rely in large part on spectacular visual effects and fighting and so on. That's something that connects, that connects to people in Beijing and people in Moscow and people in Rio and people in New York. And the other big thing that's affected this, right, is the rise of peak tv, the golden age of tv. People are interested in these kind of movies because it's one of the few things that doesn't work on tv. You can't get a fantastic visual spectacle that relies on the best, the best projection and the best sound in your home or on your iPad. But pretty much every other kind of, let's call it, visual content is perfectly acceptable on any Internet connected device. And remember, TV used to be the idiot box, right? It was where you just watch kind of crappy procedurals and sitcoms and movies were where you watched anything interesting or high quality. But now we've got so much high quality stuff on our TVs from streaming platforms and cable and so on. And because their economics have changed as well, which I'm happy to go into that we've got it all at home. So what's the one thing that movies can do great that give us a good reason to get off our butts and spend the money is these great branded visual spectacles.
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A
So at some point you talk about the decline of like the $70 million period pre piece movie, but the fact is the $17 million period piece exists. It's called the Crown, it's on Netflix.
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B
Exactly right.
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A
It is moved to tv.
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B
Exactly right. I mean, I think that in many ways the correct way to understand a series like the Crown, right, it has an eight or 10 episod because it's essentially one long story. Right. That's what a movie does, is tell one big story. Right. TV used to be episodic, unless it was a soap opera. Pretty much every episode was different. But now it's one long story that goes through the season and that is what a movie would do. And the correct way to understand Marvel, I think, is as a TV show, right? It has its core show and it has its spin offs. And Black Panther, I think correctly understood, is the pilot for a new show that is a spinoff of Avengers. That's what it is. This is Black Panther one and we're getting episodes two and three and God knows how many going down the road. And people tune in to see their favorite characters. They don't tune in, they go to the theater and buy their ticket.
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C
And I think this is interesting because when people talk about the film industry right now, it's very easy to say like, oh, it's all superhero films and spinoffs. It's so horrible. But I thought it was interesting that you didn't paint a depressing picture of entertainment right now. I actually thought you were just showing that it's become more specialized that now you have like Disney that says, we're not going to make that many films, but they're all, we want to make sure that they're all good. We only make one type. They're going to be for a large audience, but we want to make them good. And then you have other, other large studios that are going to make these types of films that are going to appeal to a larger audience, but then you're going to have the more interesting work being done at Netflix being done at Amazon. So it's not that we aren't getting interesting content, we're getting all types of content.
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B
Absolutely. I mean, I came out of the book a lot more positive than I say I felt going into it. Because I mean, the most important thing you would really say, I think any reasonable person would say, if you step back, is that we're getting great visual storytelling, we're getting great visual content, and it's a. You know, it's a golden age for it. And now we're getting, you know, we're getting more and more movies on Netflix and Amazon. And, you know, there's limited series and there's TV shows like the Crown, and then, you know, and then there's TV shows that go on for many, many seasons, produce 100 episodes. There's everything on a spectrum. And so, yeah, we're getting all this great stuff. The thing that we're losing is just that we're not, you know, we're not seeing all these kind of stories in the movie theater anymore. And to a certain extent, that's a loss. On the other hand, you know, if we're looking at this rationally, and it's like we're finally looking at the movie this rationally. It was such an irrational business for so long. There was so much romanticism associated with it. Even with the people who ran the studios, it's finally being run rationally. And what are movie theaters great at? What is their comparative advantage? Clearly, it's the big visual spectacle. That's what its advantage is.
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A
There was a period a few years ago when I felt that there was just a huge amount of sort of cultural discussion around TV shows and HBO shows in particular, that you would have the Wire or Girls or Sopranos, and that would be like a lot of people would be talking about TV shows in a way that in the past couple of years, I feel is happening much less. And you instead have people talking about Black Panther and Wonder Woman and get out. Is there actually more sort of cultural vibrations coming out of movies now than tv?
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B
It's interesting. I think there is a little bit more now, and this is more theorizing, but I think the reason for it now is even in the age of the Wire, let's say there were. There weren't that many great TV shows on now, and we were still. Even if you had a dvr, let's say you were still watching it fairly soon after it came out. Now there are so many good TV shows, and on streaming, you know, I don't know about you guys, sometimes I don't get around to watching a good show until a year or two after it comes out because there's so much good stuff. So it's hard to have a cultural conversation when we're not seeing the same thing at the same time at all. Right. That's but the one thing movies still have, and the one great advantage is whether it's a small movie like get out or a big movie like Black Panther is it's only in the theater for a month or two and we are all seeing it around the same time. And so therefore we're all talking about it around the same time, you know, and so that lets it affect our popular culture and have a real impact in a meaningful way that I think television can't do anymore.
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C
I'm also wondering if the quality of television is rubbing off on some of these films, because it seems like it used to be that you could make a more generic superhero film and people would go see it and like it, but now people are expecting a little bit more. And also, if you're rebooting the same material, you kind of need to do something different. And I think that's causing people to make films like Wonder Woman or like Black Panther that are actually doing something different.
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B
Yes, there is. There absolutely is. I mean, the audience can smell cynicism and there's so much stuff to pick from. I mean, if as a Wall Street Journal reporter, of course, I have no opinions on anything, but some, some people think that Transformers sequel after sequel didn't have a lot of new ideas to.
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C
Bring to the table, including the actors in it.
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B
Yes or yes. And Transformers has lost Steam. The last, I think it was number five this past summer did significantly poorly compared to the last few. And even the last Star wars lost a little bit of momentum compared to the prior one. I mean, the brilliant thing that Marvel has done is the sort of balance this. On the one hand, you go to see a Marvel movie, you kind of know what you're going to get. It's going to be PG13 rated.
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It's be going to.
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B
It's gonna have a little bit of comedy in it, it's gonna have a lot of action. It's gonna tie into this bigger story. But then Black Panther deals with colonialism and for African superhero, and then you can have something like Captain America can be more of a spy movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, sci fi comedy. So they bring in these different elements to it, but to keep it kind of fresh. But it's still, it's the brand. You still kind of know what you're gonna get.
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A
So to what degree are you telling us a Marvel specific story? Because it does seem to me that Disney did something very smart and special and difficult when they acquired Marvel with its slate of not particularly well known superheroes and turned it into the greatest franchise in the history of entertainment. And no one else has really managed to do that and certainly not anyone else outside Disney. Is there something which Disney is especially good at, which other people still haven't really worked out?
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B
Disney is without a doubt the best at it. I mean, Disney is now a collection of cinematic brands which are, which range from very to extremely successful. I would disagree that nobody else has done it. I mean, I think the Fast and Furious movies are consistently, massively successful around the globe. And the X Men movies and their spin offs have been, which are made by Fox, even though they're Marvel licensed characters have been soon to become part of Disney. Soon to become part of Disney. Indeed. Right. But they have been very successful. And look at the reboot, whatever relaunch of Jurassic. Look at animation at Despicable Me. So Universal is there. The Lego movies have been very successful. So there are others who have done it, but Marvel is the prototypical example. So it's the one I often go back to. But I don't want to imply that nobody else has done it, but it's very hard to do. So everybody else in Hollywood either has done it, but not quite that level of success, or they're trying to do it and they haven't succeeded at it yet. And they're trying to do it because they're all owned by big parent companies that are like, hey, why are you not making these kind of profits? Disney is.
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A
So that gives me an opportunity to segue straight into the whole question of the movie star, which it seems to me that for a long time in the era of movie stars, once you created a brand, the stars would then start extracting rents, basically, and they would be like, my name is Arnold Schwarzenegger and if you want an Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie, you're gonna have to pay me so much money that you're barely gonna make money at the end. I'm going to make a fortune. And the franchises have kind of stopped that economics. Now the rent extraction is all going to Disney.
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B
Right? It's going to the IP owner. That's exactly right. Which if the studio entirely owns the ip, which Disney does with Marvel, let's say, and Star wars and all their Pixar brands, they get it all. So that's. That's exactly right. And back, back in the day when you went to see the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie or the Will Smith movie, then they would demand huge cuts of the gross revenue before there was any profits.
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C
So it seems amazing that they would, that studios would offer that yes, well.
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B
They, I mean that they were, they were, I mean A, a lot of them were bad business people and B, you know, you never underestimate that in Hollywood. And B, they just didn't have the negotiating power. The stars are the reason you went to the movie theater. And there's a great example I use in the book, as you mentioned, there's a lot of Sony stuff because of the hack in the book, so I have a lot of access to their financials. Is the movie men in Black 3, which is a franchise, but it's a star driven franchise. You have to have Will Smith in it and Steven Spielberg is attached as a producer and they all have deals that still exist from Men in Black 1, which is back in, I think the late 90s. So Men in Black 3 grossed $625 million, which I think anybody would say is pretty good number these days. Sony's profit on it was zero. Nothing. They broke even on the film because they gave everything away to Will Smith and Steven Spielberg and Tommy Lee Jones.
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A
And how much did Will Smith make from men in black 3?
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B
You know, I don't know what his final pay was. I think it's in the book. I believe it's there. I don't remember the exact number, but you know, it's, I mean, well over $20 million. Well over, I mean, tens and tens of millions of dollars.
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C
And this does raise the question if this shift is actually a bad thing. If the power that stars and star directors had was actually good for creating better content.
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B
It certainly was not better for creating content that people wanted to go see. It's not like all of a sudden, you know, box office has fallen off a cliff or something. Right. People love these branded films. So I don't think anyone, I mean, I think one could argue that, you know, back when filmmakers had more control that more interesting stuff was happening. If you hold aside what's happening in TV now, you could argue that for films it's debatable or creative point. But I think it's pretty hard to argue that the age of the movie star when stars had all the power was, was, was, was a better creative time.
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A
So the stars today, there are fewer of them and they can't really open films anymore. We, we've, we're recently coming off a relatively disappointing opening, I would say for Red Sparrow with. Is it fair to say that Jennifer Lawrence is the biggest movie star in the world right now?
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B
No, she's certainly not.
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A
Is it the rock?
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B
It is the rock.
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A
Is he going to be the next President of the United States, if anybody.
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B
Well, if it's not, it's not gonna be Oprah now. So it seems like he's the next best. He's our next best choice, maybe our last hope. Yeah, I mean, he is perhaps the only person right now in Hollywood who can open a movie on the strength of his charisma, on the strength of his presence in it. He, you know, he can even open, you know, he can make a huge difference in films that have no brand or have a really weak brand. Like, you know, Jumanji hasn't been around for 20 something years. You know, that was barely a brand. That's not a meaningful brand. Most people in the world. And it's grossed almost a billion dollars now. And a big part of that is Dwayne Johnson. And to your point, Felix, about rents, he's the only one who can extract those old fashioned rents from the studios. I had to set a story in the Journal about how he did a deal for an original film coming up. It's called Red Notice. And they went in, the filmmaker and the person from his production company went out to pitch it to studios. They spent like 30 or 40 minutes. Every studio came in and bid for it. And Universal who ended up getting it, they're paying him 22, at least $22 million. 21 for him and a million dollars for his company to do social media work, which is another part of the rent extraction these days. And that's against 30% of the profits from the film. So I know, I believe it's hard to take that back. That's in addition to 30% of the profits of the film. So if the film makes profits, which it should, you know, he'll make tens.
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C
Of millions more and have the numbers from his previous films. Do they justify that?
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B
They certainly seem to. I mean he, you know, he's been in the Fast and Furious films, obviously he was a big part of the revival of those. You know, to go from, you know, a relatively small franchise to the massive global blockbusters they are today. Jumanji certainly made a huge difference using this movie, Central Intelligence with Kevin Hart, that was mid budget comedy and yet grossed 300 something million dollars, I believe worldwide. And you know, he's got two massive movies coming out this year. You know, he, the numbers do seem to justify. The only flop he's had when it comes to bigger budget films is Baywatch. And I think if you saw one could argue, you know, Baywatch, like didn't make much money, but it wasn't A massive flop. And I think one could easily argue without him, it would have been a massive flop.
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A
Is there in this kind of a auction situation? Normally in auction situations you run across the winner's curse. Right. If everyone is bidding, as much as makes sense, and the person who wins is likely to be the person who miscalculates and reckons and is probably overpaying, is that happening here?
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B
It's very possible. You know, I mean, we'll see, of course, but I think that seems quite possible. But I think what Universal might argue, they might not say this publicly, but they might. It's not even if, let's say, they've paid so much, they don't make much or any money on the film. They've also. They're essentially in Dwayne Johnson's good graces. It's easier to work with him. And they make Fast and Furious. And by making this movie, they also get control of his schedule, which is actually a big deal in Hollywood. Someone like him, they can only make certain two or three movies per year. And. And they want to make sure that Fast and Furious spinoff gets made even before this film gets made. And so if they're the ones making it, they can say, okay, you know, we're going to make Red Notice, but that's going to be after Fast and Furious, so you're going to do that first. And that's a big deal to them.
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C
So how does his story fit in with the larger story you're telling? Because he seems to kind of go against a lot of the trends.
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B
Well, he certainly is. You know, he does go against that big franchise trend. And, you know, as with all trends, it's like it's not. There's not no movie stars. There's a fewer of them. Right. I mean, he's really the last major one standing. But one thing that does fit in is a big part of his appeal is he is truly an international movie star. He is popular around the world, including in the very important market of China. And that kind of appeal, brand appeal, in his case, is very rare for movie stars. It's very rare to find someone who's broadly popular around the world. And in that sense, it does fit in because, of course, it's more important to studios now that a movie works internationally than it is that it works.
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A
In the US it's still a massive export industry. Right. I mean, the movies which we import, the movies made outside the US which open in the US to great acclaim and go on to make hundreds of millions of dollars in The United States are basically zero still. Is that going to change?
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B
There's a lot of people who really want that to change. I mean, mainly from China. Right. China really, really wants to make globally popular films who exert their soft power, as they call it, but they have totally failed at doing it so far. And there's lots of theories why, but so far, yeah, you know, Americans love American movies and people around the world love American movies, but Americans don't like any other kind of film. It just hasn't happened. And there was that example of the Wolf Warrior, the Great Wall. Well, Wolf Warrior was a very popular movie in China, which then didn't work here at all. But that was a purely Chinese film. The Great Wall was made, you know, it's in English. It was made to be, you know, a co production that would be work in China and in the west and ended up working nowhere, you know, and they put Matt Damon and a bunch of Chinese stars together.
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A
Can Matt Damon open the movie? Is he a movie star?
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B
Matt Damon is in the category of Jennifer Lawrence and everybody else except Wayne Johnson, which is in certain films. Right. You know, and Matt Damon. But there's plenty of Matt Damon movies that, you know, don't open it very much. Just like Jennifer Lawrence in the Hunger Games everybody goes to see, and Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, but. But they don't want to see them no matter what they're doing. And that's true for Matt Damon as well. He just sent this movie, Suburbicon, which I think opened to like $2 million. That's a stunning, stunning number. Huh?
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C
Well, well, I guess maybe just last thing, because I thought, I thought it was also interesting how you pointed out that films can be bigger flops now than they ever used to be.
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B
Yes.
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C
And so that may make studios, like, less likely to want to take a chance on a actor's pet project than they would have been in the past. Because if it's a small film that's not tied to a franchise, it won't just make a small amount of money. It can make like no money, nothing.
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B
Yeah, I mean, it used to be in Hollywood that if you spent your marketing dollars, if you spent 20, 30, $40 million on marketing, which is what you have to spend in the US to open a film you were going to open to something you could buy and open, you could get people to come out and you'd open to at least, let's say, 10 or 15 million dollars. It seemed impossible that you couldn't. But now, as I quote, I think Tom Rothman who runs Sony Pictures now, I quote him in the book. There is no bottom. It seems like there's no number too low. I mean, there was a Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie film by the sea a couple of years ago that grossed in total less than $1 million. Two major stars, right. Nobody came to see them. Suburbicon, as you mentioned, opened nationwide to like two or three million dollars. These movie stars, in that sense, don't matter. And marketing, for all the reasons I'm sure you guys know, it's hard to break through. It's hard to get people's attention. And of course, it's hard to say there's nobody left or very few people left who are like, well, I'm going to go see something this weekend. I'm going to go out of the house and go check out a movie, which is what a lot of people used to do. Now they don't have a reason to do that. So you can have a movie with all the resources of a major studio behind it and major stars come out, and it's like it essentially never existed.
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A
So now we are going to talk about inclusion writers. Yes. Because this is obviously all that anyone can talk about after that.
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C
Frances McDormand told us.
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A
So. Frances McDormand told us to pay attention to these things, which I think I'm fair in saying, like, no one had heard of before the Oscars, pretty much. And so now we've all become instant experts on these things. You are actually the guy who writes about this. So how many of these things have ever been seen in the Wild? Is this actually a thing?
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B
This is. This is just becoming a thing for the first time. Right. This is, There's. I'm not aware of it on any major studio movie, certainly ever being used before. Even now it hasn't. What's just starting to happen now is some. Some stars and producers like, like Paul Feig, who directed Ghostbusters, and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and Michael B. Jordan are saying any movies that they're involved in should use these. And the big agency, William Morris Endeavor, is saying that they are advising clients to at least consider it seriously on everything they do.
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A
So, but because no one's used one yet, it's not like there's any kind of standard boilerplate right now. We're still in the process of trying to work out what on earth this thing might say.
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B
Yes. And it's not even. And it's. I mean, there are, there are, there are, there are professors who have been talking about this for A few years, but yeah. How.
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C
Usc?
- [24:18]
B
Yes. Right. At usc, where they've done a lot of work on diversity in Hollywood. But how is this going to be applied? And even still, there's different models. Are you going to say, let's talk. What does it mean? I mean, essentially, it means that the person, the diverse writer. Right. Goes in your contract and you're saying, you're Frances McDormand. You cast me as a writer. I'm saying you have to have this level of diversity. But it could just be diversity in the supporting cast and background actors in the film. It could say the crew. You could base diversity on the entire nation, on the setting where the film takes place, on where you're shooting it. You know, is it going to apply to. You know, there's a lot of unionized jobs in Hollywood, obviously. Are you going to tell the Teamsters that they, you know, that they need to have this percentage of women or people of color doing the jobs they do? There's all sorts of ways you can interpret it and apply it. And obviously, the broader and more. The broader sort of application and the more specific. In terms of definition you make it. On the one hand, you could say that's going to get results. On the other hand, you know, then all of a sudden you've got to really enforce that and it becomes complicated.
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C
And that's what I wonder. Because I think we can all agree that the IDE behind the inclusion rider is great. But I wonder, how do you actually enforce that? Because you need to come in with a lot of data before you can enforce it. Because if you're going to know that the people you're hiring are diverse in terms of whether it be gender, you know, race, lgbtq, some of those you don't know unless people tell you.
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B
Yeah, absolutely.
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C
So then you're gonna have to change a lot of your employment practices as well. I've seen this with some financial firms now that want to increase different types of diversity. Any job you apply to, they make you list all of these protected categories. And I don't think that is something yet that they do in Hollywood. So I wonder, like, it's. You can't just use an inclusion rider and have you. If you haven't done that work beforehand.
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B
Yes, right. Yeah. You have to know that beforehand. And then, geez. I mean, and don't forget, of course, for some of these jobs, you have to already be in the union. Right. And how many people in the union. Right. Already fall into these categories? Or do they know stuff? Yes. They have to get this, they have to. When you think about casting, when you think about writing the script as you have to, I mean, some people I've talked to have said, well, when you write it, you should specifically say this person is a woman or this person's African American so that you make a point of having a divorce. Some people have said, no, the opposite. Write the characters broadly. So then you can, then you're not just saying, well, I'm only auditioning white men for this role, I'm only auditioning women, because it could be anyone, you could go either way. But yeah, there's so much stuff Hollywood would have to know and have to find out and have to figure out how to apply they haven't done. On the other hand, what I would say is, even for anybody who's against quotas, one of the reasons Hollywood has been had such a poor track record on diversity, in my opinion, even though so many people there are ostensibly liberal, is that the decision making process in a creative business is so subjective. And to say that person's right for the role, that person's wrong, that person has the right vision to direct it, or that person has the right eye as a dp, let's say, or something, it's subjective and it's very hard for me to criticize and say, oh, you're making that decision because you're biased. Right. And it's very easy to apply an unconscious bias, of course, when you're thinking, that person gets what I'm talking about, that person understands my project. If it's somebody who thinks the way you do, which means they more likely have the same background you do, you're more likely to connect and have that good meeting and therefore want to hire them or cast them.
- [27:30]
C
Going back to what we were saying previously about the declining power of movie stars. I wonder how useful is this going to be? Because you have someone like Frances McDormand, who we all love her, she's great. She's not going to be starring in the types of films where, you know, the studios are going to be making a tremendous amount of money. So if she comes and says, okay, if you cast me, you need to do all of this, could people just say, okay, then we're not going to cast you unless you're the Rock. I mean, if the Rock did this.
- [27:56]
B
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's certainly true. Well, first of all, don't forget people like Frances McDormand. Every movie star now does a lot of TV, right? And so TV is the biggest business in Hollywood. Bigger than movies. And of course if the diversity writers are going there, that can make a big difference in the entertainment industry. But yeah, if you wanted to work in movies more and more in the franchise era, you have to have the companies get behind it. What if, if again, if Marvel was behind this or if Dwayne Johnson said, well, Fast and Furious franchise is going to have to do this from now on, then that would start to make a significant difference.
- [28:31]
A
Specifically when it comes to giving more women more lines, this seems to be something which Hollywood has been unbelievably bad at for decades. I guess two questions. It's why are they so bad at this? And is there any hope that an inclusion writer could help turn that around?
- [28:55]
B
Why are they so bad at it? I mean, there's no other explanation behind just old fashioned sexism and unconscious bias, right? I mean nobody, there's no good reason for it, right? And the best, the only time I've ever heard anybody even try to justify things like this is to say something like there's kind of this theory which I, I don't think there's any real evidence behind that, like that women will go with their boyfriends or husbands to see a guy's movie, but that guys won't go with their girlfriend or wife to see a chick flick, so to speak. I mean that's, you know, men saw Wonder Woman, men saw Bridesmaids. I mean that's clearly not true. It's clearly an old sexist trope. But people have done this just with the kind of unconscious bias that is so easy to apply again in a creative business. And I think, you know, is this going to make a difference? You one would think that having more women involved at all levels is going to make either, either their voices are going to be heard more or at minimum it's going to be a lot more uncomfortable, you know, essentially to be giving men all the best lines when there's a lot more women on the.
- [30:00]
C
Set or any lines. And I think, but my concern is that if you have this idea that like, okay, we're just going to try to increase the lines that women speak by a certain percent, which, okay, but then like, what are those lines going to be? And the reason I say that is because I think like the Bechdel test is, you know, the famous test about, you know, the I you, whether you have two named female characters that have one conversation that's not about a man. And then sometimes people use them, they'll say like, oh well, this, this film passes the bechdel test. So it must be a film that is great for women. And then often a lot of the films that. I mean, not many films, but some that do. I mean, it. It's such a low bar. And I'm wondering, yes, of course we need to have women have more speaking roles, but that is such an incredibly low bar.
- [30:42]
B
Yeah, I would agree. But yet I think given Hollywood's problems, you might just need to start with that low bar. You know, let's pass that low bar and then let's have sort of the debates we were talking about. But if it's like, if we can't even pass the Bechdel test, for example, then, you know, what else matter? You know, it's like they can't even do that in so many films and TV shows. It's really, you know, it's really sad, and it happens so commonly.
- [31:06]
A
And I just wonder whether if the economic power is moving away from movie stars and towards studios, if the rents are being extracted now by the studios and not by the stars, then that should be a positive force in terms of diversity, because the studios are the ones who have the ability to really shape the. The casts and the scripts and the diversity of what's on screen and behind the camera in a way that stars, you know, were always incentivized to just maximize their own paycheck. So is it like, now that this is beginning to happen and now that we have studios with more power than they've had in. In decades, is this not a real opportunity that this could happen now in a way that it might not have been able to happen 20 years ago?
- [32:05]
B
I would think it is a good thing when the studios have more power. And these companies are very aware that this is an issue that their consumers care about. And they can be pilloried in the press if they're not taking diversity seriously. So when you're making a movie, it's not just about, well, does Tom Cruise like this cast and crew? It's like, is this going to reflect well on the diversity goals of Comcast, for example, that they're facing? In that sense, you could say it's a good thing. And I think in that sense, you're certainly seeing a lot more initiatives and all sorts of diversity programs and so on happening at the studios. And every executive I talk to, it's just something that they're very aware of in every decision they make. And that if anytime they hire a major new executive or a green light and he made a new film, if it reflects poorly, potentially there's too many white men involved. There's a feeling now that, like, oh, how is this gonna look? They're very aware of that. On the other hand, most of the people running the studios are still white guys. Like, that's still. That's still just a fact.
- [33:01]
C
But it does seem like if you have more people coming out to films because of the brand, that that could actually give more degrees of freedom to the people making the film to say, to actually take chances in casting or in directing. Because if people only care about the brand, then you can put people of color in. You can put more women in.
- [33:19]
A
Yeah, and we have. And every time they've tried, it's worked pretty much right.
- [33:22]
B
Yes.
- [33:23]
C
And this is something I also think is important when we're talking about diversity, because I think when you talk about diversity, people can often think of it as, like, slapping people on the wrist. And, oh, it's. It's just about social justice. And yes, it should be about social justice, but it's also about making better entertainment because when you bring more diverse people in, the. The work is better. Like, if we have a bunch of films that are just, you know, the same kind of tired tropes with the same type of people, it's not going to be good. I mean, the example I always think of, and I know it's not a movie, but is the Daily Show. I think the Daily show right now is better than it's ever been. And it's because it is so diverse. You can tell in the writers and in the people who are on it. And so the type of jokes they come up with are interesting. They're not just the same things that a bunch of guys who all went to Harvard would come up with.
- [34:05]
A
But it's not as popular as it used to be.
- [34:09]
C
That's probably true. Yeah.
- [34:10]
B
But I mean. And the other great thing about movies is, I think even more so than, like, the Daily show is it really matters to people to see people like themselves on screen. People have talked about people who like women of color who never saw themselves reflected on screen. They talk about the rare instances when they have and how meaningful that can be to them. And the audiences come out, will come out in a big way for that. And that's. We're talking about Black Panther now. But I really think the best example is the Fast and Furious movies. They have very diverse casts. And when you look at the audiences who come out for that, it's almost half people of color in the United States at least, and they work hugely around the world. And I think it absolutely makes a difference to a lot of people to feel that this movie is relevant to me because it's showing people like me doing all the cool shit that happens in the Fast and Furious movies. It's not just white guys. That absolutely is why it makes all the economic sense in the world to do it.
- [35:04]
A
All right, let's have a numbers round. Anna.
- [35:07]
C
So my number is directly related to something we were talking about. It's 30.8%. And that's the percent of lines spoken by female characters in animated films, which is only a 0.1% increase from like 10 years ago. And the reason I think this statistic was so galling is that it's like we're talking about animated films. Like, you can't even draw them or create them on a computer. You know, you're not even having to hire that many women. And so I think this speaks to what you were saying, that people don't even realize how deep this problem is, that even when you're creating a film where you're not even talking about humans, we still always default to male.
- [35:49]
B
Yeah, there's so many, like, stereotypical supporting characters where you're like. Like say the gruff shop owner where it just. It's always been a man. And when you're sort of doing this, you know, cliche supporting character, people just envision it as a man and they can't, you know, they don't think differently. And there. I think that's why so many of these, you know, these spoken roles end up being men. You might say, oh, we're gonna. Our main character in Inside out is gonna be, you know, a pre girl rather than a boy. But think of all these different supporting players you're going to have in it. And there's just certain kind of roles that have stereotypically always been male or female, and majority of them have been men. And people have to rethink. To use that example, who is the gruff shop owner going to be? We'd have to re envision it as a woman, let's say, for the first time. And nobody's ever done that. And that takes real creative work, I think, to do that. And nobody's. Nobody's been willing to put that in so far. And you end up. I don't think it's happening intentionally. Just at the end, they're just, you know, you point out the statistic and they're like, wow, I didn't even know I was doing this.
- [36:49]
C
And it does seem where collecting the data now could be Important because just like anything, it's like for trying to lose weight, you have to weigh yourself.
- [36:54]
B
Yes.
- [36:54]
C
If you're trying to improve this, you have to actually get the data and then keep publishing the data to try to keep people honest. And then once people start to recognize it a little bit more, then that's where change occurs.
- [37:05]
B
Yes, absolutely. Which is again, I think the reason something like diversity rider. A good argument for it is that if you don't have really specific targets and goals, then people are not gonna be aware that they're making these mistakes along the way.
- [37:18]
A
I have a number which is four, which is the number of screens that the Death of Stalin opened in the United States. It went a little bit wider the second week. I think it went to like 15 or something like that. I really loved it. I thought it was a great film. Even though it utterly fails to pass the Bechdel test. Can you explain a little bit about this slow rollout strategy thing? And also, you know, in this global era, why does it. What's the reason why you'd like release a movie very slowly six months after it opened in the uk?
- [38:03]
B
To your first question. I mean, the slow rollout has always been for the films. You know, if you're opening a non branded film and a movie that you know has nothing on its face that's going to be appealing to people like you essentially can't market. How are you going to market the Death of Stalin on a billboard?
- [38:19]
C
There's no way I want to see it.
- [38:21]
A
It's a good movie.
- [38:21]
B
I believe you. It's a good. I totally believe it's a good movie. But that movie is entirely word of mouth and review dependent. So what you do is you start out in a few theaters, you get people in the big cities where they're the big media outlets, you get them to start talking about it. There's reviews and there's buzz in person and online and then people have heard about it and then they go out. Then they're more likely to go out and see this movie that has a, let's say, a bizarre title that maybe, you know, that doesn't necessarily sound appealing to a broad swath of people, but the more you're hearing about it, the more you're gonna go just because you've heard about it. And that's why movies, platform as they call it in Hollywood, because they are entirely dependent on word of mouth.
- [38:58]
A
Okay, We've managed to use platform as a verb. We can tick that off our list. And I guess the whole windowing Thing. And the delay is also part of the same thing. Right. That if you manage to get a bunch of people excited about this movie in the uk, it's good to get as many people there, having seen it and excited about it, to try and get a bit of momentum.
- [39:21]
B
Here it is. I don't know the specifics, but I would guess that they weren't maybe even planning to release it in the US and then maybe the response was so strong, the movie so good, that there actually started to be some interest in America and therefore they were willing to. To do it. But that's why it took so long. It's very rare. Certainly for that six month delay is very rare.
- [39:41]
A
Okay. All right. Do you have a number?
- [39:44]
B
I do not have a number prepared. I didn't know I should. But the one that are we allowed to do. You're allowed to do anything we're allowed to do. Unknown for that would be how many people saw Bright on Netflix?
- [39:56]
C
This is. I'm so glad you brought that up.
- [39:58]
A
Okay, wait, what or who is Bright on Netflix?
- [40:01]
B
So bright is the $100 million Will Smith movie that was on Netflix in December and made such a big cultural impact that you've never heard of it. And Netflix claims, you know, that it was their most watched original film. And you know that I forget exactly what they said all these things about how watched it is, and it was really, really popular.
- [40:20]
A
But I feel like a bunch of people I know saw Okja.
- [40:25]
B
Okja, yeah.
- [40:27]
A
And we've all heard of Okja. Maybe we're just in the kind of liberal bubble around here.
- [40:31]
C
We definitely are.
- [40:31]
B
Yeah, you're definitely in a bit of cultural bubbles. The people who are more likely the people you know. And like I saw Mudbound, which is, which is a movie, an Oscar nominated movie that Netflix bought out of Sundance. And probably more people saw Bright on Netflix than that. And a lot of people, some people are watching Adam Sandler movies on Netflix. They renewed his deal. Right. Not many people we know, probably. But the reason I brought up Bright is, you know, they're claiming it's a big success and they greenlit a sequel, but, you know, we have no idea.
- [40:58]
A
Bright too.
- [40:59]
B
Bright too. Yes.
- [41:00]
C
Even brighter. Brighter.
- [41:01]
B
Even brighter, right. I think they'll just call it Brighter is, you know, we've no way to assess it. Obviously. We always have box office numbers for traditionally released films and we don't even know how they're measuring if they, you know, they say it when it was our most watched original film. What does watched mean on Netflix? Does that mean you watched it? Does that mean they started autoplaying it when you turned on the app, does that mean you watched it for 10 minutes and then you turn it off? You know, does that mean you, you, you, you felt you fell asleep in the middle of it?
- [41:29]
A
Isn't there a good reason, I mean, Netflix is a public company. Is there a good reason for them to be this opaque about their metrics and what they're measuring and what causes them to renew some of these things and to make a sequel bright to brighter? Like one would think intuitively that if there's something that they want to maximize, you know, whatever it is, then they would want the filmmakers to know what that is so that the filmmakers could try and provide that.
- [42:05]
B
Yeah, and they do give, I mean, they certainly use their data to give suggestions in terms of like based on prior thing, you know, if there's a sequel or a new season of a TV show, hey, you've got to speed up the third act, you know, or you have to focus on this character more than that character or something. And they definitely give that, but they do not like to give the. Here's how many people people are watching, let's say numbers or, you know, I think just like the traditional networks wish, wish nobody knew that, you know, because then it started.
- [42:32]
C
Sorry to interrupt, but please. Then it allows them to say essentially whatever they want. Like who knows how many people actually watched House of Cards.
- [42:38]
B
Right.
- [42:39]
C
It was something people talked about, but people talked about Mad Men. You didn't actually watch it. We did.
- [42:44]
B
But most people, not a lot of people watched it. Right.
- [42:46]
C
And Netflix, I find it like their valuation is insane. And the way that they, I think, run the company in terms of the financing makes very little sense long term. Like they are spending so much money on new content, which somewhat makes sense, except they're now going to be competing against places like Disney that already have a ton of content, but also generate cash. Netflix does not generate cash. It's not just that they're not profitable. They don't generate free cash flow. And I, I think part of this secrecy is the fact that their financial model doesn't make an inordinate amount of sense because it's not even just secrecy with that they're well known for. They don't do normal investor calls, quarterly calls. They have prerecorded calls with analysts. They've picked, most likely, probably screened all the questions. So I think people should be very suspicious of anything that comes out of Netflix.
- [43:38]
A
But they're good culturally, right? I Mean, they're an amazing cultural force. I have to like if I'm making recommendations here. This has become like Felix's recommendation. Go and see the Death of Sterling, but also go and see Wormwood on Netflix, which is the Errol Morris series which they, you know, quietly got Errol Morris to make this incredibly ambitious eight part series about like this CIA agent who died mysteriously in the 1950s. It's amazing. And like you, they're making stuff which you just like. No one's seen anything like it.
- [44:12]
B
Yeah, I mean look the other, I mean but yeah, nobody's heard of it. I mean the other number I guess I could have used in hindsight is 700. That's how many pieces of original content Netflix is producing this year, combining films, TV shows and stand up specials and so on. It's mind boggling. And you're, I mean Anna, to your point, I think the bet they're making is essentially is the Amazon bet in retail which is if we take every penny we make in revenue and invest it back in what we do in more content. And the more content we get, the more subscribers we get. The more subscribers we get, the more money we have to spend on content. It's this virtuous cycle until they've taken over the entertainment industry and then they're in a position where they can jack up prices on us all whenever they want to. And that's the bet.
- [44:47]
C
Yeah, this my, we can go into the weeds about netfl. My concerns are if you actually look at Netflix numbers, their marketing spend is increasing much faster than their increase in revenue. So they already have a lot of US customers and now it's becoming increasingly more expensive to get new customers. And also because they don't generate cash, they have a tremendous amount of debt which right now they can continue to service it's decent maturity profile but if debt service starts to increase, they're going to have a hard time with that.
- [45:16]
A
Also they have pricing power. Right. They can increase their monthly fee.
- [45:20]
C
They, everybody says that. But let's think, but I, let's think about this. They've existed in a streaming world where they've really been the big dominant player and we're now seeing that I think start to change as both Amazon and especially and Hulu, but then also Disney and a lot of other companies coming in. So I wonder how much pricing power is Netflix going to have when they're competing against companies that have a tremendous amount of money?
- [45:42]
B
Yes, they're going to have less in the future, Hulu, especially after Disney buys Fox, if that happens, is going to be a formidable player. Amazon's investing more and more. Disney's going to also launch their own Family Service. NBCUniversal is going to figure something out. Comcast owns them. There's more and more. And I think to your point, if Wall street gets scared even a tiny bit that they can't serve as a debt or subscriber, growth is slowing. They're going to start to say we need profits. And Netflix is spending on content, which is crazy, not just in overall volume but the amount of money they'll basically, if you go out with a pitch in Hollywood and there's interest in it, Netflix will basically pay you double anybody else will pay you, I mean all the time. Now that's partially because they don't pay profit participations down the royalties and so on down the road. It's partially because they'll just spend more on a piece of content because their business model is not contingent on each individual piece of content is profitable. You know, a studio can't really even studio is not in the business of releasing one money losing movie. Even if they're overall slate they're trying, they want every movie to be profitable. Netflix and Amazon care more that the overall slate is keeping people engaged with their subscriptions and so on.
- [46:47]
A
Which did, I mean HBO has made a lot of money with that model. It is a model which in theory works.
- [46:55]
B
Yes, right. Look at, I mean HBO charges 15 bucks a month more than Netflix for a lot less content. But it's almost all really good, really high quality and really, you know, really well marketed big event programming that people want to see relevant that we start off talking about movies. I should mention if Netflix does start to cut back at all, the first thing you think they're going to do is movies. They're right now getting aggressively into original films on top of TV. And that's, you know, is having a big impact on the movie business. But just to think about it, you know, financially, a two hour movie that costs 60, 80, they're making a Marty Scorsese movie with De Niro, Al Pacino that I think is going to cost like $150 million. Maybe it's three hours. So that's $50 million an hour of content which even an expensive TV show costs 10 or $15 million. So the per hour amount of amount money they're spending on film is so much more than tv. It's probably like, it seems like the least economically defensible investment that they're making right now.
- [47:53]
A
Very much agree okay, well, that was. I think that was. That flew past that episode. Well done, Ben Fritz for an excellent movie episode. We're gonna have to get you back here. Do you talk about anything other than Hollywood and entertainment? Can we talk to you about credit default swaps and stuff like that?
- [48:17]
B
I am happy to talk about just about anything. I obviously have a lot of colleagues at the Wall Street Journal who know more about credit default swaps than I do.
- [48:23]
A
I don't know. We like to talk about movies here. We will get you back at some point. Thank you for coming out. And let's have one more plug for your book. It is called.
- [48:31]
B
It is called the Big the Fight for the Future of Movies. It's available now in hardcover and ebook at your local bookstore on Amazon. And I hope you like it. I think you guys liked it, right?
- [48:41]
A
We did.
- [48:41]
C
I really liked it. I liked it.
- [48:43]
A
It's a well written book. Thank you so. Yes. And thank you all for listening. Do listen also to Working, which is a weekly podcast. It comes out on Sunday afternoons, which is a time when, you know, you have a bit of time to listen to podcasts. And they just interviewed my good friend Neil Gaiman, who's lovely. And you should listen to Working just for that. He is one of the great storytellers. I'm sure he has an incredibly lucrative Netflix deal in his future. All great storytellers do. So check that out@slate.com working. It's hosted by Jacob Rogan. And many thanks to Dan Trader for producing. And we will talk to you next week on Slate Money.