Rushfield: 19 Days to Go - Who Will Move this Industry Forward?
The writers search for order amidst the chaos
This story originally appeared in The Ankler.
The days dwindle down to a precious few here at AbyssWatch 2023 HQ. (Nineteen days until the deadline if you're keeping track.)
The two sides are still talking, which is good — that is, if it’s real-talking and not just fake-talking so they can say that they talked.
Here's the problem with working to change the writers' basic lot right now, said from the perspective of one who feels deeply that the writers should and must make a stand right now:
The problem isn’t that they're negotiating with studios that are impoverished, but rather studios that are deeply confused. Whichever way this worm turns: we've got an industry that is flailing, befuddled and backwards-looking at this moment. If the writers aren't going to settle for more than some half-measure reversion to antediluvian pre-history, there has got to be a vision of a better world ahead here in someone's head.
And at the moment in this industry, no one seems capable of dreaming such dreams. Who among our industry leaders, riddled with their own issues and anxieties, is going to stick their neck out to get this thing done?
So the difficulty is the writers are trying to create a just, stable corner in a business where there's no stability.
Consider a few pieces of evidence to emerge in the past week:
I. The Family Fiasco
The smash success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie brought attention to the total disappearance of family films from theaters. Our Sean McNulty outlined the problems and the causes yesterday, but the big number for me: it's been four months since the last family film (Puss in Boots) was released. And there's not going to be another one until Little Mermaid at the end of May.
To put that another way, there will be only two (!) family films released in the first half of this year.
To put that one more way, of the many studios running around these days, Universal will be the only one with family films on screens in the first half of this year. Not even Disney. Which is like… Kellogg’s not manufacturing any breakfast cereals for six months.
That is an astounding systematic failure on the part of the industry and Covid-catch-up is not an adequate explanation. We're not saying, “There hasn't been a roller-skating musical released since 1980.” This is family films — as close to the core mission of industrialized entertainment as you can get, and Super Mario shows what the payoff of it can be.
To put that a little deeper, what do you suppose the value of this film series will be collectively to Illumination, Nintendo and Universal, in their many arms and products over the next decade? Conservatively... several billions? And that’s not a prize that anyone else in this industry wanted to try for?
(Aside: the tantrum of middle-aged critics at the specter of children enjoying themselves at Super Mario has been incredible to watch. David Poland chronicles it beautifully on his Substack. But reading them reinforces again so far the collective critical establishment has traveled up its own nether regions in recent years, taking much of independent film on that journey with them.)
II. Streaming Babylon
Last week an article by Kim Masters chronicled the “confusion and frustration” at Amazon. It's quite a portrait of a studio in this streaming age. But what struck me reading it is that you could change the names, the show titles and a few of the particulars and that portrait of disarray could perfectly describe the situation at every streamer and every streaming division of every studio. There’s not a single one of them that I haven't heard described as in complete disarray by employees and refugees in recent months. All of them.
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power may well have been an historic flop for Amazon. Shall we go company by company and list all their fantastically expensive flops just of the last year?
I mean, we assume they are flops, but to know whether they really are, we’d have to know... what the studios want to get out of their shows, which much of the time, we don’t know that either. For all we know, the shows are just made to beta test the load speed for pages with embedded video.
You’ve got companies with no clear missions, often spending fortunes and years of creative time to make shows and films that they don’t market and — as best we can tell — nobody watches. So why shouldn't that be a smooth, efficient machine?
III. The Grey Area
Last week here on The Ankler, Peter Kiefer laid out in detail the alarming aging at the industry’s upper ranks. Please read the piece in full if you haven’t already, but what is particularly alarming about this — from a survival of the industry perspective — is that at the time of frantic, unprecedented change in viewing habits and mediums, entertainment is presided over by as senior a cohort as has ever ruled. And at this moment, the young people closest to the changes find themselves just about entirely shut out of leadership positions.
Barry Diller, himself chairman of Paramount at the age of 32, was asked about Kiefer’s story last night at the Semafor Media Summit, and if leadership had become calcified in Hollywood. His answer? Yes. “Your instincts over time become cynical and corroded.” (Jump to 8:05.)
IV. The Hangover
In the last half-decade, the leadership of the industry by and large made a big bet — that streaming service revenues would be so enormous that you could do unlimited damage to your other revenue streams and the new services would more than cover the fall off.
They made that bet and they lost, and now the industry is paying the price. Problem is: you can’t just say “oopsie” and turn the calendars back.
For the past five years, the streaming revolution was Plan A. No one has shared yet what Plan B will be.
We are almost at the one-year anniversary of the Great Netflix Correction, the singular event that arguably landed us in this place. We now speak in coded, hushed language, and talk of “reorgs” and “profits” and “India”, without ever uttering the words: maybe this wasn’t such a great idea.
The Road from Here
That's just a little smattering, an amuse bouche of the problems vexing the industry right now. And into that gap steps the Writers Guild of America.
Now if it were just a question of money, the solution would be pretty simple. I mean, everything in a contract is a question of money and protections, and in the end — sooner or later — it will be that simple. But the problem for the studios to wrap their heads around is that the entire premise on which you churn out 1,000 new shows a week to keep your subscribers’ heads spinning is that all the money flows to the top, not to support a vast, comfortable middle. In the case of writers, that means huge deals for the creator/producers, mini-rooms for everyone else (which brings up the uncomfortable fact that the creator/producers are WGA members themselves).
And the problem is, it’s not just paying more to some writers. A month after the writers deadline, the directors are up. A month after that, the actors. Then looming just over the horizon waits IATSE. Start handing out raises and get ready for this to go a long way, and before you’re done, the whole streaming miracle business model is up in smoke.
So to solve this is going to take some creativity and vision — maybe even a great leap towards something resembling a Plan B.
For the writers, the challenge will be not to just attempt to rebuild Showbiz 1999, but to look towards a future that no one can see clearly. Which is why the goal shouldn't be to lock a bunch of new rules into place, but to raise the pay so that whatever the jobs are, they will pay enough that a person can actually live off them for the term of service, plus a fair amount of time to get the next job. Maximum flexibility; maximum livability.
And if there's not enough cash to go around, well, there’s that good old system just sitting there that lets studios defer payment and give profit participation instead for decades and decades. That, of course, requires opening up your data, but hey, nothing’s simple in life.
But to see their way to a menu of possible solutions requires a bit of vision and foresightedness, to see a new kind of industry more sustainable than the demolition derby we've been playing with lately.
What's ironic is that the streamers, the disrupters, the heralds of the digital revolution, the unbound freethinkers, have now become the stodgy old incumbents holding the industry hostage because they can't see past their own dogma.
And what's scary is if they can’t get themselves around to this, once the writers walk out, those directors’ and actors’ deadlines are going to come up awfully fast; with enormously complex issues of their own in talks that haven't even started yet.
Then it will really take a visionary to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.