With this update, we’re officially out of the slowest, dumbest month of news, August. Here’s my round-up of the “Most Important Story of the Week”, a few days late because of that blasted long weekend. (I’ll save my rants on how much better America would be with more 3 and 4 day weekends for a future article.)
The Most Important Story of the Week – The Fall of Global Road
So I held this story for a week. Coincidentally, I’d been mining some box office data for another project, and had looked into Open Road’s film history. I’ll admit when I first saw Global Road when bankrupt, I thought, “Wait, what is Global Road? Oh, it was Open Road.” Then I thought, “What happened?”
The story has been well covered. Since I spend so much time “reacting” to negative news stories, it’s worth praising when the trades really dig in well. (Hat tip to the Hollywood Reporter and Variety.) That said, I have a theory that the trades usually know the dirt on companies, they just wait to dig in until after an adverse incident (bankruptcy, firing, scandal). I, on the other hand, have no problems calling out what I perceive to be bad strategy.
If I had one single take away from the demise of Global Road, it’s this: “content is hard”. Especially when someone is keeping track. Looking at their slate, Global Road, and Open Road before it, didn’t have a huge blockbuster in the US they could hang their hat on. Without that huge hit–and not owning any IP outright–they couldn’t sustain operations.
Who should we watch out for as possibly being next? Well, a candidate off the top of my head–and note this down for a great future project for the Entertainment Strategy Guy, predicting who could go bankrupt next–is STX Entertainment. I devoured the New Yorker profile of that company, and frankly couldn’t understand their competitive advantage beyond “China money”. Let’s compare Open/Global Road’s US domestic box office performance and STX’s same numbers for the last three and a half years:
In chart form, with each film’s gross as the Y value:
In table form, counting the number of films at various box office levels:
(Source: Box Office Mojo. Open Road. Global Road. STX.)
(I used unadjusted box office gross from Box Office Mojo, going back to 2015 and deleting any films less than $1 million in total box office, which was three films for Open Road.)
Why did I think of STX? Well, Global Road just released the underwhelming AXL and STX released the underwhelming Mile 22 and Happytime Murders. Both are backed by Chinese money and new mini-majors headed by execs with long careers in Hollywood. But looking at the data, we can see for the near term, STX overall has just a higher trajectory. In addition, STX has had a “hit” that spawned a sequel, Bad Moms and A Bad Mom’s Christmas. Now the “hit” wasn’t tremendous ($113 million US) but that’s enough with their supposedly huge line of credit.
Of course, STX may have higher aspirations and may lose more money when you factor in production budgets and P&A spend. Arguably, they shot the highest on with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which only did $41 million in the US with a big marketing spend. It had franchise potential, but didn’t love up to the billing. (It did do $184 million in foreign box office; I don’t know how much STX kept of that.)
You know what is really cool, though? The ability to “keep track” of how well movie studios are doing. You know who I can’t do that for? Television shows that premiere on digital platforms like Netflix, CBS All-Access or Amazon Prime/Video/Studios. Instead, everything is a winner based off buzz. With movies, you still need a good box office performance to justify your existence. Enough flops and you go out of business. (First, Relativity, now Global Road.)
Which also brings us to the “successful” part of both Global Road: their TV business. (Paramount is having the same story right now; STX has moved into TV too.) How is it that a company can’t make enough successful movies to stay in business but they can for TV? Well, because SVOD platforms buy TV shows by the boatload, and pay profit up front, instead of in success. Since every show is renewed–no one fails in streaming–everyone in the TV production business is finding buyers for shows.
Which doesn’t mean people aren’t losing money in TV streaming, it’s just that they can afford to lose money and Global Road couldn’t afford it in movies.
Long Read of the Week – How Hollywood is Racing to Catch Up with Netflix in Variety
I’m going to stop writing on the above topic before it turns into a “Long Read” of the week. Instead, you should head to Variety for this good summary by of the state of “direct-to-consumer” offerings in the marketplace. The most useful part is the summary of each DTC service, it’s pricing and some basic information about the services then the summary of the streaming video players. The most glaring omission is something author Cynthia Littleton doesn’t have: the daily, monthly and annual active users and subscribers by platform. (It is also a little too praising of Netflix for losing billions every year, but isn’t everyone?)
I’ll also say there remains a glaring disconnect between the huge volume Netflix offers and it’s low, low cost compared to all these new DTC options. How is it possible? Well, Netflix loses money and Disney needs to earn a profit, as Littleton points out. This disconnect for me tarnishes the entire Netflix narrative, or at least challenges how disruptive it truly is, but that’s for later articles.
Listen of the Week – Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History on “12 Rules for Life” and Pulling the Goalie
All the development executives of the world should listen to this episode. It argues you should “think the unthinkable” and ignore the responses of fellow humans. For me, the episode illuminated the key challenge of our industry: “relationships”. If you listen to Kim Masters regularly (and you should!), then you can hear her skeptically address outsiders coming into entertainment who don’t understand this is a relationship-driven business.
This is why the hockey coaches in the podcast–not to spoil Malcolm Gladwell too much–won’t pull the goalies. Their relationship with the fans would suffer.
But it’s also why the people who recommend this strategy–pull your goalie! Be unconventional!–work in one of the few fields where you don’t need relationships (or as many), which is hedge funds. They can do their trades automatically via computers…so they don’t really need to worry about pissing off people. In the parts of finance where relationships matter, like investment banking or wealth management, this strategy wouldn’t work. But certain hedge funds can get away with it.
