He reveals the week’s most watched film (Hustle) and points out it doesn’t come close to Netflix’s most watched movies ever. He counts them down from 10 to reveal:
“1. Finally, the most streamed Netflix movie of all time is Red Notice, which was watched for 364,020,000 hours! Over 4 million more hours than Don’t Look Up. The movie stars Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and the man who is in Netflix’s most streamed movies for THREE different films, Ryan Reynolds. Here’s how Netflix describes it: “An FBI profiler pursuing the world’s most wanted art thief becomes his reluctant partner in crime to catch an elusive crook who’s always one step ahead.” Red Notice has a 36% from critics and 92% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s the highest audience score of any movie on this list, and the largest discrepancy between critics and fans, so it’s worth watching for yourself to form your own opinion!”
Seven of the ten movies came out in 2020 or later so I wonder how difficult it will be for new films to capture even more eyeballs from an increasingly less-captive audience.
My take: with Ryan Reynolds on the list three times and Sandra Bullock on it twice, I wonder if the Netflix Algorithm is calculating how a new movie with both of them would do. Maybe it has to factor in 2009’s The Proposal as well though.
Sandra recently shared a memory (39:37) about shooting the shower scene with Ryan.
“Bigger, better, fewer. That is the refrain inside Netflix that feature film executives, led by division chief Scott Stuber, are grappling to operate under as the digital streaming giant changes course and confronts new realities, such as lagging subscriber growth (it lost 200,000 subs in its latest quarter) and rising competition (Disney’s bundle of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ now has 205 million subs combined, just behind Netflix’s 221 million global subs).”
With its stock price down, Netflix has cut 150 jobs and doubled down on marquee movies.
Borys continues:
“As it moves forward, Netflix wants to focus on making bigger movies, making better movies, and releasing fewer than it previously did at a gluttonous pace. ‘Just a few years ago, we were struggling to out-monetize the market on little art films,’ Netflix co-chief Ted Sarandos told analysts on the company’s April earnings call. ‘Today, we’re releasing some of the most popular and most watched movies in the world. Just over the last few months, things like Don’t Look Up and Red Notice and Adam Project, as examples of that.‘”
My take: C’mon, Netflix. $469 million for Knives Out 2 and 3? That’s almost fifty $10 million movies. And one of those could be mine. Let’s talk! (P.S. Don’t you think the reason your subscriber numbers are down is because you rightly left Russia?)
“The post has gathered up lots of attention online and has already rounded up over 430,000 likes and 47,600 retweets on Twitter. While the original tweet was meant to poke fun at today’s movie poster designs, many users responded with their favourite posters that break away from this format.”
My take: So funny because it’s so true! The problem I have with superhero movie posters is the same one I have with superhero movies: so many characters and so much busyness, but a dearth of ideas and anything I’m actually interested in. I have two suggestions for movie posters: one, make sure to come up with a snappy title and a killer central image while writing the script so that you can begin designing and capture that image during production, and two, put the title on the top half of the image — too often I’ve seen titles in the bottom third get covered up with extraneous material and supers.
“Content is not king. Distribution is king.… If you go back 10 years, the studios had all the power, because they controlled the distribution…. Studios are on their knees. They got no clout at the table because anybody can produce. The whole world is upside down, particularly for the studios.”
His advice:
Team up with producers known to the streamers.
Have a realistic budget.
Sell your film upfront (or finance the contract) to make the movie.
She quotes him:
“Most films lose money. This is a losing business, don’t do it, especially if you don’t have a pre-sale to a streamer. But if you can sell to a streamer, then you get your premium. You’re not going to get a share of the net profits. There is no back-end payment, but you’ll get a significant premium and will walk away with some cash.“
My take: it seems there’s always somebody in between my movie and my audience!
“Private equity, or PE, firms are pumping money into the entertainment content, financing independent production and snatching up companies at a level never seen before in the indie industry…. Some of the biggest players packaging projects and inking deals on the Croisette have backing from private equity groups…. The bet PE investors are making is that the explosive growth in streaming services will lead to a similar demand boom for content. And that the companies that own the IP, the original films and TV shows the streamers need, will be best positioned to benefit.”
He traces this demand squarely back to government policy:
“Many see particularly strong growth potential in Europe, where European Union (EU) content quotas for SVOD platforms — 30 percent of all content on streaming services in Europe must be European-made — has created guaranteed demand for original, home-grown films and series which most streamers will be unable to fill on their own.”
As to Cannes, filmmaker Jeremy Lutter (pictured above) compares this year’s experience with previous ones:
“Cannes is in some ways the same and in some ways different. I would say it’s two thirds the size as previous non-COVID years in terms of events. But, considering the situation, it’s impressive! The crowds are smaller but it’s still busy. As for deals — people are looking — there’s been less movies made recently — everyone is hungry for movies. Oh yeah, instead of a gift bag, this year you get a PPE mask with a logo on it!”
My take: of course, quotas drive national production. We proved that with CanCon and Canadian music; witness the dozens of Canadian superstars, who, as Simu Liu points out about Shawn Mendes, Avril Lavigne and Arcade Fire, “like me have fulfilled the ultimate Canadian dream of making it in America — but to our credit, we always come back!”
“Budnitz, a 54-year-old serial entrepreneur, has built a content studio of zany, multimedia characters designed to thrive in the coming metaverse. The noir-themed world of Superplastic feels more like The Matrix than Wonderland. Its colorful inhabitants have gained millions of their own social media fans. They’ve also made $20 million from selling tens of thousands of NFTs with Christies and others.”
These two appeals raised over $1 Million, from over 6,700 backers!
In a fascinating presentation from October 2018, Budnitz summarizes his life and credo and, at 28:30, outlines the Superplastic strategy for the next five years:
“Superplastic… we have a secret plan… we’re not really making another toy kind of streetwear company. What we’re doing is we’re… making all these characters. We are making toys, but they’re just sort of an excuse because they’re awesome. What we’re really doing is we’re making these characters. Then we’re animating them in 3D but then putting them in the real world. Like, there could be one sitting right there in that empty seat, right? But you would only see it on Instagram. Then we take a picture of it; then we 3D model it and then render it and then put it on Instagram. And then we turn these characters into celebrities (we haven’t done this yet but we’re doing it — we’re in the process) and we make them celebrities. And then, they can, like, we can do cartoons and I can make movies again. We can make movies and then we can make more toys and all that kind of stuff.”
I’m not even going to go into the whole NFT side of the Superplastic Global Entertainment Brand.
My take: this is a hard one for me. My problem is that I’m such a bad consumer! I don’t collect toys or anything, and don’t buy much. I tend to use things until they wear out. Sure, I’m frugal but I also value sustainability.
I get it; we have the technology so why not “update” black and white footage into colour? I can think of three good reasons.
First, especially for analogue movies, the filmmaker chose to shoot black and white stock for a reason. Most probably for money: colour film stock and developing costs a lot more. To colourize an old movie is a decision that should be left to the original director.
Second, the choice of black and white may be very deliberate. In this short film, I made an aesthetic choice to mimic German Expressionism.This was actually shot in colour but finished as a black and white film.
Third, colour demands more attention to art direction, wardrobe, etc. If you’re shooting a short film in a day, you can make your life much easier if you decide it’s going to be in black and white. Plus, it makes it stand out from all the other films shot that day!
For these reasons, I think black and white films should be left as is. Unless the director is part of the project.
Seeing a fractured socio-political landscape, he blames this unintended consequence squarely on Facebook and social media in general:
“In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans. “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” he wrote in a letter to investors. Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.” In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.”
He says the Like, Share and Retweet buttons and the algorithms capitalizing on these behaviours allowed posts to go viral for the first time in history:
“This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.””
Jonathan says that, effectively, “from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” Lamentably, “when our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.”
“The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.”
His conclusion? “American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.”
His prescription? “We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.”
Other takeaways:
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
Social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.
Nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.
Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.
America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding.
My take: I noticed this change at Facebook. Once upon a time, it was a great, fun place to stay in touch with people and build community over shared interests. Then the news feed and group pages changed. It’s so much harder now to actually communicate with your friends. I wonder if “fragmenting” myself into multiple accounts might help?
As filmmakers, we make films for our audiences. But in our digital age, how are those folks supposed to find our movies among the other million movies out there?
Once upon a time, pre-Internet times, you found a distributor who specialized in your type of film and could deliver it to the audience for those films. In other words, a curator curated a collection for their congregation.
In the digital age, the platforms are in charge. Their algorithms determine what folks will see. The videos above and below from Veritasium discuss the YouTube algorithm:
Derek Muller has approached the discoverability difficulty scientifically. He posits this plan:
Keep making high-quality videos.
Choose topics that are more clickable.
Use clickbaity titles and thumbnails.
How does this relate to filmmaking?
I think we have to realize that all streaming platforms and most if not all video aggregation sites have replaced curation with algorithms. My suggestion for discoverable movies:
Quality films.
Provocative subjects.
Click-worthy titles and central images plus logos.
It’s about applying Marketing at the conceptualization stage and not after the movie has been made.
My take: I’m not even sure my Number 1 (Quality films) is necessary. Think of Roger Corman, the King of the B-Movie. Elliot Grove claims Corman started with the title and artwork: “Roger is a morning guy. He would meet me in my London office with the morning British papers. Over a cup of coffee, he would tear out keywords and mash them up on the table. When he saw a good movie title he would hand-write it down and I would fax it to his office in Los Angeles. This is how he came up with titles for some of his 750+ features. Titles like: Grand Theft Auto, Death Race 2000, Rock ‘N Roll High School, Slumber Party Massacre, and The Fast And The Furious. When he saw a title in his mash-up he would hand write it down, and I would fax it to LA in the days of the flimsy paper fax machines. Roger would leave my humble Soho office and do what independent film geniuses do, and return about 6 pm. LA would be awake and through my fax would come a very lo-res poster with nothing more than the image and the title. If Roger liked it, he would tear it off, stuff it in his pocket and in the evening mingle with the great and the good of the London film scene. And acquisition executives of course. He’d tell me the next morning, if enough people liked his film he would hire a screenwriter to write the script suggested by his poster. Reverse engineering.”
“Canada’s Cineflix Media has acquired Toronto-based production company Back Alley Film Productions and its library of IP. With the acquisition, co-founders Adrienne Mitchell and Janis Lundman will leave the company to “pursue new horizons.” Cineflix said it will absorb Back Alley Films’ operations and acquire its programming assets.”
That intellectual property and those programming assets are very impressive:
Best wishes to Janis and Adrienne for their next chapters!
My take: I remember both Adrienne and Janis from my time in Toronto “back in the day;” Adrienne through Ryerson and Bruce McDonald, and Janis through LIFT (I was Employee 1!) I recall reviewing the Canada Council funding application and adding, “We need to roll more cameras!” Lol, yes, those were the days when indie film meant actual tactile, analogue, very expensive “film” — video was not yet digital and relegated to television. A photo of mine from those times:
