In most years, The Ankler celebrates the holidays with our beloved annual festival of good feeling, our salute to the 100 Dumbest Decisions of the year just past.
But as you probably noticed, this was not a typical year. For Hollywood, there were no decisions to make apart from dumb ones. Anyway you turned as the world crumbled, anything you tried to do, stood at least an 80% shot at turning out terribly.
So for this one year only, in the spirit of all keeping our heads together during these challenging times, we hereby grant amnesty and full pardon to all dumb decisions and all dumb decision-makers.
Instead, we’re going to look back on the year with a perhaps slightly forced grin, looking for what we’ve had to celebrate, and you’ll find, in The Ankler fashion, it’s all a matter of how you look at things.
Without further ado, our Winners of 2020, lest we forget.
Winners: The Losers
If you had to pick a year to flame out, crash and burn, fail to launch or just plain old underperform, this is it.
However bonkers or out of touch your concept, misguided or lazy your execution, however much you might have botched every benchmark along the way, when people look back at your LinkedIn timeline five years from now, all they’ll see is that final date, 2020, and nod their head in sadness at another company that fell victim to the Plague Year.
Winner: The Status Quo
At the top of this year, blood still running high from their standoff with agents, the writers were hurtling towards a grand showdown when their studio contract ran out, the issues that had been tabled at the last last-minute agreement having only grown more aggravated and acute in the interim. With a burn-it-all-down sentiment ruling the day at the WGA and Hollywood’s new tech masters nursing a congenital taste for union-busting, a violent schism seemed inevitable.
But the COVID shutdown was clearly, to all involved, no time for this sort of thing, providing a timely hostilities off-ramp.
The issues, however, remain much the same and the question of how anyone who is not a Brand Name or entry-level grunt supports themselves in the sort of business that’s under construction today remains unaddressed.
The Golden Parachute Award Winner: Joe Ianniello
Les Moonves’ longtime CFO, the man who wrote whatever checks needed writing, in a position that pays in the low single-digits millions, was handed $70 million U.S. dollars to leave Viacom quietly. Remember: It’s not just who you know, it’s what you know.
Winner: Barbara Broccoli
Other filmmakers may be jerked around willy-nilly these days, but if there were any doubt who is in charge of everything 007 touches, that was cleared up in the very public smackdown of MGM CEO Kevin Ulrich, whom it was revealed, was shopping his share of the Bond franchise without the Broccoli sign-off. The shopping ceased and the date was duly moved after the revelation, leaving Ulrich to try and balance his books on someone else’s IP.
The Chutzpah Award
Winner: Bob Iger!
It’s one thing when you’re heading up a corporation that needs to make a buck to cozy up to a regime in the middle of executing a holocaust against an ethnic minority as well as instituting a new policy of slave labor on a scale unknown in the post-colonial age. It’s another to think that your resume of strenuous abject groveling before murderous dictators is a qualification to represent the U.S. government to that same junta. But being a successful Hollywood mogul means never having to say your sorry, and so, in one of the most amazingly phrased ledes in recent journalism history, the WSJ reported:
Walt Disney Co. executive chairman Robert Iger has told people close to the incoming Biden administration that he would be interested in serving as U.S. ambassador to China, according to people familiar with the matter.
I hope the Biden administration understands the way we do business around here. When we let you know we’re interested in taking a job, we’re not telling you that just to exercise our yaps.
This has been a preview of today’s special end of the year edition of The Ankler, the industry’s secret newsletter. To read the rest and find out all the winners, subscribe today for just $10 a month and don’t miss out on who’s in the hot seat next!
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