What’s the next Barbenheimer?

JANICE MIN: Going to movies now has this expectation, like going to Six Flags. Like you can’t just ride a scary roller coaster. It has to go upside down, and you’re suspended for six seconds. And then you have to go 90 miles an hour down. They sort of created a bar where the experience has to be something that would not be as satisfying on your television in a streaming service. Also, this move towards safety where the expectation of a sequel is that it makes 70 percent of the original. And in this age of studios having so much debt, you’re going to take that bet over an original project.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Janice Min, co-founder and CEO of The Ankler — the new, hot resource for inside Hollywood info. And there is a lot going on in entertainment right now. Last year at this time, Barbenheimer dominated headlines but moviegoers this summer haven’t had much to get excited about. Janice explains the mythic importance of summer in the entertainment cycle, why Inside Out 2 is beating expectations, and what the Paramount/Skydance deal means for studios. Plus, why Netflix keeps dominating the streaming wars, what she sees as the shortsightedness of live sports deals, and more. It’s an action flick with drama too, so let’s get started. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. 

I’m Bob Safian, and I’m here with Janice Min, a co-founder and CEO of The Ankler. Janice, it’s great to see you.

MIN: Good to see you. It’s been a while.

Copy LinkWhere’s the big summer blockbuster this year?

SAFIAN: Last year at this time, we were on the brink of Barbenheimer which juiced the movie industry global phenomenon. This year, I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like there’s quite the same buzz and anticipation for anything. Am I feeling that the right way?

MIN: I think you’re right, Bob. I mean, listen, let me just first establish we’re in a weird period in entertainment. We had the strikes last year, and people thought we’d have some big rebound and that entertainment would come flooding back, but in fact it came sort of limping back and so, what you’re seeing this summer, I’m going to guess a lot of listeners of this podcast are suddenly thinking: ‘Have I been to the movies this summer?’ And the answer very much might be no, unless you have kids, and you took them to Inside Out 2. We have a pipeline problem. Things were not put in production or things that were in production got pushed back because there was a lot of insecurity around when the strike would end. But we’re also in this sort of crisis in Hollywood of franchises, reboots, kind of this retread that though the audiences are telling us often they don’t like it, it keeps getting made.

We had a really grim May at the box office. No one saw Furiosa, which was the Mad Max threequel — the third installment that nobody asked for, and at the same time we had some bombs, as they’re called in Hollywood, some bombs on Netflix, there was Rebel Moon 2 which they put out even though no one really watched Rebel Moon 1.

I mean, the other thing in Hollywood — people tend to also have big, big feelings. There’s lots of emotion around success and failure. And there’s definitely a bias towards negativity.

‘Oh my God, the theatrical is dead.’ And then comes Inside Out 2, which is its own kind of mini Barbenheimer. It already has exceeded a billion dollars. And it kind of revealed this pent-up hunger of people who just a) needed to get into air conditioning, and that’s one of the great things movie theaters provide, but also there has not been a ton of children’s programming out in the theaters in ages. And Despicable Me 4 is doing quite well as well, currently in the theater.

So anyway, that’s the story of the box office, but I am pretty sure no one’s marked in their calendar. ‘Oh, I can’t wait for opening weekend Friday because I am dying to see, you know, XYZ,’ like that kind of monoculture that Hollywood used to drive. It’s not happening right now.

SAFIAN: How important is the summer season in, like, the year’s entertainment cycle, like is it particularly important for the industry?

MIN: Summer has always had this mythic spot in the psyche of entertainment. It was where you were going to put out your biggest swings.

Basically you’re pouring sometimes up to $200-250 million on a movie that’s the vision of maybe one director and one studio executive, and you put it into theaters, and you keep your fingers crossed and hope it’s lightning in a bottle.

And, you know, we grew up doing this. You go to the movies all summer, and it’s kind of fun, and you plan your weekend around it. But that habit has died now. Some of it is because Hollywood let the habit die when they pivoted to streaming, but it’s also, it’s a little bit like, going to movies now has this expectation, like going to Six Flags. Like you can’t just ride a scary roller coaster. It has to go upside down, and you’re suspended for six seconds. And then you have to go 90 miles an hour down. And so the experience has to be something that would not be as satisfying on your television in a streaming service. That has created a very expensive, very high bar. And also this move towards safety where a sequel, the expectation of a sequel, is that it makes 70 percent of the original. And in this age of consolidation and studios having so much debt, you’re going to take that bet over an original project. 

Copy LinkDoes the summer blockbuster matter to streaming platforms?

SAFIAN: You mentioned the streaming platforms, are they looking for summer blockbusters the same way or is that just sort of a reflex? And do we even know when so much of their data is kept internally, like, what moves the needle for them?

MIN: This really is a story about Netflix. Netflix is the one who went into the business of also releasing what would be called summer movies year-round.

And you might recall, like, The Gray Man was an attempt to create sort of a summer-level franchise. I don’t think there’s going to be a Gray Man 2. And so you’ve seen people try to do this sort of ‘eventized’ streaming movie, but they don’t market them. This is something Hollywood still does really well, it is the marketing campaign to get something in your face. 

It’s the billboards, it’s subway ads, it’s the YouTube pre-roll, and they’re very, very good at telling the story of that. And Netflix on the flip side of that is like, ‘if you like it, you’ll find it, or it’ll find you in the algorithm, so good luck.’ And that’s where they’ve been very surprised by certain things that took off like Baby Reindeer, sometimes the audience will tell you what works in a way that is completely unexpected.

Copy LinkInside the Paramount-Skydance deal

SAFIAN: Yeah, the other news I want to ask you about is that the off-again-on-again Paramount-Skydance deal with David Ellison, son of oracle Larry Ellison, now poised to take over the studio. How obsessed is Hollywood about the deal and Ellison? Are you? Is this a big deal?

MIN: This has been the longest, most tortured saga. And I have a friend who once said of Paramount, it’s like Three Mile Island. It’s like, you can try to clean it up, but it will always, there will always be a radioactive residue in the soil. So Paramount is like our other legacy studios that are carrying enormous amounts of debt. They let Netflix eat their lunch because everyone here is a little technophobic, and they waited very long. They also didn’t want to give up these incredibly lucrative business models of cable television, affiliate fees, linear advertising. And so they waited. And they got caught up in playing catch up, and they lost a ton of money. So Sherry got herself in a corner. My understanding is she has a lot of emotion attached to the company because she had this incredibly complicated, toxic relationship with her father, who had complicated and toxic relationships with many people.

And, I think David Ellison is almost uniquely built to be the next owner of Paramount. He loves movies. I mean, you can’t overestimate the role of having, I think, your dad that’s the eighth wealthiest man in the world bankrolling this.

I think you also see this as the inevitability of where Hollywood is headed, where you already have Apple, Amazon, Netflix bringing their tech ethos to Hollywood, and I have a hard time imagining that Larry Ellison sits by the sidelines and lets his son play Paramount CEO alone. And so I think you’ll probably start to see whatever the tech ethos is of Larry Ellison, I don’t think it’s a gentle, kind one, to begin to take shape at Paramount.

SAFIAN: It’s another family legacy though right? It’s like moving from the Redstones to the Ellisons. It’s sort of, you know, another dynasty.

MIN: Every one of these things is a mini succession, and you have to sort of read into the psycho dramas that are going on behind the scenes. It’s hard not to. 

You know, rich people, they don’t dream of owning a packaged goods company.

They dream of being in Hollywood. That gives you a relevance and a juice that is much more fun. And for David Ellison, who was this kid who grew up loving movies, and he, as you can see from his most successful projects, co-financed with Paramount.

These movies like Top Gun and Tom Cruise and sort of this kind of old school version of a hall of Hollywood blockbusters. And that could be great. But they also talked about 2 billion in everyone’s favorite phrase, ‘cost efficiencies,’ which essentially means jobs lost and assets sold. 

Copy LinkThe rise of the independents

SAFIAN: Hearing you talk about this, like, do you feel like the legacy media companies are at an inflection point? Is there a change coming, or have we already seen the change? The streaming services have done it, Netflix has done it, and these legacy companies are just, you know, reacting?

MIN: Some of the smartest people in town have said to me that what we’re going to see in the next few years, this is going to be the rise of the independents. The studio system, it’s like turning around an ocean liner where the engine’s broken, and the nimble upstarts will be able to move much more quickly. I mean, the way someone who had had visibility to Paramount’s books had described to me that, even though you’re seeing thousands of layoffs at Paramount, we’ve seen thousands of people laid off at Disney and Warner Brothers, that still so much more to cut because it’s an infrastructure built for another era, and the fast-moving independents don’t have that burden. 

Copy LinkDo we underestimate YouTube?

SAFIAN: I have to ask you about YouTube. YouTube fascinates me. It remains the most popular streaming platform for younger viewers. Despite efforts by Netflix, Disney, Warner Brothers, Discovery, like none seem to have an answer for YouTube’s dominance. It feels strange to say it but do we still underestimate YouTube?

MIN: We totally underestimate YouTube when you look at the amount of time spent on YouTube versus any other streaming platform, I mean, hands down blows away everything. So they’ve captured the attention economy, as people say. I think it’s hard for Hollywood to think about YouTube as anything more than promotion.

You put your trailers on there, you do an announcement saying how many million views a trailer got. But boy, if you think about the levers that YouTube can switch to turn that into a more premium experience, and I know they tried that, and it didn’t go very well. But they have so much data at their fingertips now. And also you’re seeing this fundamental shift in the creator economy where people used to think that Hollywood was the be-all-end-all, that if you became a really huge creator, you might get a show on Hulu.

SAFIAN: Right? That was the goal, right? That was the pinnacle.

MIN: And now, it’s not increasingly for people. You have Mr. Beast doing his $100 million deal with Amazon, and we’ll see how that goes. But you also have one of the watershed moments for the creator-YouTube-Hollywood relationship. There are these huge YouTube stars named Rhett and Link, and they ended up with a deal with Warner Brothers Discovery to do a reality show.

It came out, but did not do well. They ended up doing basically a 20-minute video rebuttal to Hollywood where they fired Hollywood. And they said, ‘this is what you don’t understand. You don’t understand how to talk to our audience. You gave us really terrible notes. Your process is awful. And we want to have nothing else to do with you. And we are going to just talk directly to our audience now instead of through you,’ and I think that’s the opportunity when we’re talking about the independents. It’s that whole direct-to-consumer fantasy of ‘You don’t need the middleman, and who are these old guy gatekeepers who are trying to tell me how to do my thing?’ And you’re seeing the most successful creators make, like, ungodly amounts of money, in a way that Hollywood probably would not have made possible for them.

SAFIAN: Janice gets right to the heart of the Hollywood drama: that all the efforts to make entertainment more businesslike may actually have made it more vulnerable. As much disruption as the industry has seen, between streaming and strikes, there’s another wave still to come.

After the break, Janice takes us inside those disruptions, from AI to live sports, plus lessons from Dysney’s battle with Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, George Clooney and Taylor Swift as role models, and more. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Ankler Media’s CEO Janice talked about this summer’s weak movie box office and the alarm bells throughout the entertainment industry. Now, Janice shares her concerns about the NBA’s recent TV deal and what Hollywood doesn’t get about AI. Let’s dive back in. 

Copy LinkHow Hollywood is already behind when it comes to AI

I saw that Ashton Kutcher recently made a statement about OpenAI’s text-to-video software Sora, and he said that the future movies in entertainment will be viewers giving prompts to software that’ll create bespoke content just for them. Like those kinds of ideas, do the studios take any of that seriously ?

MIN: Not yet. And, I think if you are at Disney, you are using AI, but not necessarily calling it AI in special effects. And there is a movie that’s coming out in November that’s directed by Bob Zemeckis, that stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright Penn, and it’s called Here, and it uses AI technology to present them as 20. I think they’re in their 20s or 30s, and they’ve released a trailer recently, and it’s pretty convincing. But AI, it still feels like the future, and I think what isn’t fully processed is that it’s here.

The tools are here. And it’s one of these funny things about Hollywood where people, a lot of people are using AI, but it’s like a shameful secret. And Bob, you’ve talked to people who are on the AI side in Silicon Valley, and like, they are rapacious. I mean, they’re not waiting for Hollywood to give them permission.

SAFIAN: They are moving, and all of it is moving really fast. And if you don’t start experimenting with it and at least understanding what’s going on or trying to, you know, the catch up, as you use the phrase before, it just gets deeper and deeper.

MIN: I would say Hollywood’s already, you know, in the hole with AI and doesn’t realize it. So the climbing out process will be super challenging. Our writer of the Real AI newsletter, Eric Barmack, he utilized the one text-make-a-film, like through one text prompt, he made a film, and it was only like a 60-second film, but we know how quickly this technology moves. By the end of the year, can you make a 30-minute film? You know, can you make a two-hour film? To think that’s going to be ‘Oh my god our kids are going to be making AI films,’ no it’s going to be you, you will be making a film as early as next year. Like that’s the crazy part of it.

Copy LinkThe gamble behind the NBA deal

SAFIAN: The NBA just agreed to a new 11-year, $76 billion deal with NBC, Amazon Prime, and ABC-ESPN — huge increase. This value of live sports keeps climbing. Can the entertainment business model support that money and still make money on it?

MIN: No! The entertainment business absolutely cannot. And we are living under this delusion that people are just obsessed with mid-season NBA games, and it’s going to drive so much viewership and streaming subscription. 

There is this thing happening, and again, this is one of the things Hollywood is susceptible towards is big solutions. And so you’re looking at, ‘Oh my god, we thought we were going to pivot to streaming, but we’ve run out of streaming subscribers, and it turns out people just want to subscribe to Netflix, and maybe if they have money in their household, one more service. So oops, we spent all that money. We’re losing 435 million a quarter.’ ‘Oh, my God. The silver bullet is sports. People love live. People love sports.’ And so I think they’re looking for anything that keeps people from churning out of their subscription. 

Every day, these streaming services are fighting to have you not cancel, but the flip side of this, they’re going to spend so much money, record numbers on the NBA.

Where players are getting 51 percent of the money. And so you’re seeing their salaries increased to, you know, 50 million deals, crazy amounts, but guess who’s going to pay for that? The consumer. So that’s why you’re seeing, also, these increases in streaming services in price and anyone who is following, or has been to the grocery store, knows that people do not want to spend more on anything right now. 

So it feels a little bit like a perfect storm coming, and it’s also kind of rebuilding the cable idea: That you’re going to assume that people are going to pay, there are enough people who are going to pay for a particular part of your service that only appeals to a small number of those people.

And that’s, you know, the old cable model where you’re going to get Fox News because you can’t live without your Fox News or ESPN because you can’t live without it. And now they are taking a big gamble that people can’t live without their NBA.

Copy LinkJanice Min on the opportunity of leading the Ankler

SAFIAN: As you mentioned sort of ‘nichefying,’ audience I was thinking about your personal career journey. Like you remade the magazine Us Weekly, leaning into celebrity culture for the broadest mass market, and then you remade business-focused coverage, leading Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, and now at Ankler, you’re going even deeper on the business of entertainment. But this was like a transition from serving a mass market to a more targeted market. How purposeful was that for you, was that just where sort of the opportunity of the possibility was?

MIN: I would say it was both. Us Weekly, for those who lived through the Us Weekly era as adults or near adulthood, that was like a mass hysteria in America around, like, Bob, you probably had an opinion about, you know, JLo and Ben the first round, or you might have had an opinion about Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, and Brad Pitt. These were like very smart people who were under the spell of this celebrity culture in a way that just disappeared. And so this was, you know, pre-social media. And so a publication like Us Weekly could become one of the biggest publications in America, feeding this sort of voracious desire for celebrity, and that was reaching, I mean, you know, 14 million people a week, I believe. 

And then going to the Hollywood Reporter, that was definitely like, okay, but can you do something special that super serves like an audience, but that also has reached out to the bigger universe? And that worked. I think the addition of programmatic advertising into publishing did not serve anyone well. Kind of turning your fate over to platforms you don’t control. It was problematic. And so with the Ankler: Richard Rushfield, my partner, he had amassed this very specialized, rarefied audience. I would say trade coverage was very late to the impact of the disruption in Hollywood, and Richard was owning it.

He was telling people the truth, and I saw who his subscriber list was, it was unbelievable.

And I said to him, like, ‘would you want to do something more with this?’ And he said ‘yes.’ What we couldn’t have predicted was how much the disruption was going to accelerate, and I joined Richard before Warner Brothers and Discovery merged, before the strikes, before Netflix had its famous stock tank and rebound, and so the disruption has been sort of wilder and bigger, but it still has required speaking this very unvarnished truth to an audience about what’s happening in the business. 

And one of the things, of course, as someone who just loves media, that concerns me, is yes, we’re all going into our corners. We’re serving a really small segment of the audience, but it is a business that works.

It’s profitable. We grow a ton every month. The entertainment business is not just films and television that are being made in Hollywood. And the entertainment business now encompasses so much more.

So we hope to grow along with where entertainment goes, but so far so good.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake for Hollywood?

SAFIAN: So where we are now — what’s at stake for the entertainment business for Hollywood? How should we think about that, looking ahead from here?

MIN: Okay, so one of the things that’s at stake is the future of the legacy studios. And when I say legacy studios, I mean, these sort of brand names that people know. It’s Disney, it’s Warner Brothers Discovery, and it’s Paramount. They all have crushing debt, and they all have streaming services. Disney has done well, everyone else is sort of struggling. And if you’re Disney and you’ve seen your market of children’s programming and children’s films get eaten away by Super Mario Brothers, which was released by Universal, you’re saying, ‘Oh my God, we no longer own the children’s space. That’s not great.’

And Disney has had this long history of being able to create a lifelong partnership from the time you’re a kid, and the brand means something, and you can build this universe. But Disney’s future is in theme parks. And live experiences. And that’s where you’re seeing this big shift in Hollywood. Netflix has started Netflix experiences. Universal has gone big on theme parks. 

So, I would hate to see the industry become an Amazon, Apple, Netflix town.

I don’t think that’s fully healthy, but for anyone who spends their day shopping on Amazon or going to Whole Foods, you can see how they’re just better resourced, have better customer data, and you can kind of see the march continuing.

SAFIAN: You know in some ways it’s a great era to be a consumer, even if you’re not a business because there’s so much content out there. On the other hand if we’re not taking risks with the content we’re creating then maybe you’re getting lots of options of the same flavor.

MIN: Well, Bob, I want to ask you, what shows are people telling you this summer? ‘Oh my gosh, have you checked out this or that?’ Even that sort of era of streaming is blown past us. I’m watching Presumed Innocent on Apple, but no one else in the world I know is watching that. I’m watching The Bear, season three, and some people I know are watching it, but it’s not that whole, like, all-consuming, you’re caught up in the wave, and isn’t that fun, and you can talk about it with people. 

So, yeah, and that’s a bummer.

SAFIAN: Well, Janice, this has been great. Thank you so much for doing it!

MIN: Yeah, no, thanks. This was fun. Glad to do it.

SAFIAN: The entertainment business is so … entertaining. And the work being done is still incredibly creative, whether that’s The Bear, or Presumed Innocent, or Despicable Me 4. 

What Janice’s insights underscore is how dispersed our attention is today, how rare culture-wide moments like Barbenheimer truly are, and why they may stay rare, for business reasons and because of marketplace realities where coarseness keeps winning over compassion. 

It’s never been harder to carve out an audience of scale, but also never more valuable. As we all move faster and take more risks, technologically and creatively, we need to also find ways to connect with each other: to laugh together, to cry together, to be together. That’s the promise of the very best entertainment.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.