Continuing The Ankler’s Year-End, Studio-By-Studio Report Card, this time with our friends from Culver City. Take it away Sony:
If you want to witness the meltdown of the old Hollywood order, there’s no place to see it up close like at the Sony lot today.
In the Sony year that was, you’ve got a bit of everything: bombastic chieftains, terrified jockeying lieutenants, clueless overlords, and everything on the spectrum from brain-dead development to outrageous runaway success—at one studio in one year.
Put that all against the backdrop of how no one even knows whether Sony will be a studio a year from now, and you’ve got a great recipe to drive everyone involved to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
To start with, the big picture: This is the year that Sony affirmed its position as odd man out in the Great Entertainment Semi-Finals. While the rest of the legacy studios have been girding their loins and preparing to go into battle in varying degrees of corporate misguidedness, Sony has been content to sit on the sidelines—ostensibly, clearly, for sale, but in the meantime, just letting the future pass it by. What streaming wars? Pssst, buddy, wanna buy a Seinfeld?
It might just be the best strategy in the end. Who knows?! If you were going to bet on the plans being pursued by the non-Disney studios, you’d have to bet that most (if not all) of them will fail, and potentially fail so big that they sink the entire Magilla. So in the meantime, Sony isn’t spending untold billions doing that and can pocket its share of the half-billion-dollar Seinfeld sale, and keep selling shows into the heat of a white-hot bidding war.
The long-term problem with the studio-for-hire plan is that these streaming deals for original shows buy up all the rights, in toto, for all of perpetuity. So you’re a studio that is not accruing any properties or back-end or giant paydays down the line. You aren’t filling a vault with IP and a back catalog. You are just taking a paycheck to do a job at the end of which, there’s nothing there. Every year that Sony doesn’t sell or fully get in the game, the vault gets a little less impressive and a sale gets that much harder.
As it is, every month sees another rumor of some company about to buy it (lately it’s usually Apple.)
The sad part is, the company actually has a streaming device that could be the golden ticket to the inner circle of the streaming war. The Sony PlayStation doesn’t just put a potential streaming platform into over 50 million households worldwide, but with a young userbase, it puts it in front of precisely the audiences who are fleeing traditional entertainment. But Sony Corp seems determined to disprove theories of corporate synergy by steadfastly refusing to build on this device; in all likelihood for fear of letting the entertainment group get too entangled with the rest of the company, lest a buyer come knocking who wants to hitch up the studio to the back of its RV and drive it off the lot that night. Gotta have a dream or how you gonna have a dream come true?
Last year, Sony’s new Chairman gave the Entertainment group a couple of years to get its profit margin in line with the rest of the company—or else! Face being sold! No more free Walkmen for you people! That time is coming due shortly. So how are they doing?
Well, with not much to work with and perhaps the most difficult leadership situation of any studio, Sony’s studio is improbably doing not bad. Maybe better than Sony has done since . . . pre-Coca-Cola?
Let’s talk about the crazy leadership situation. At the top of it you’ve got Big Tony Vinciquerra. (A lifetime subscription to anyone who can explain to me what he does for a living.) In this chaotic time of enormous transition, has there ever been a studio honcho with less to say about . . . anything? A more invisible presence in Hollywood, and beyond. He’s the head of one of the major studios, and you can go months without seeing his name anywhere. A decent and competent man who knows the nuts and bolts, I’m sure, but it’s amazing how that has become the job requirement at a time when we’ve never needed leadership more.
Below that, on the film side, we, of course, have America’s Most Beloved Entertainment Executive himself, now appearing in year three of his worldwide revenge tour. Tom is as Tom does and as Tom always has, and so he continues to. Reports continue to emerge about his eternal micromanaging, the fights with the creatives, the habitual penny-pinching. He’s empowered a deputy in Sanford Panitch who seems determined to be AMBEE’s AMBEE, micro-managing and annoying the staff and presiding in fear of his master’s wrath. This year saw Panitch and Marketing Chief Josh Greenstein solidified in their roles and named Co-Heads of the Studio and heirs apparent; this despite a track record with some real highs, but overall one that can fairly be called wildly uneven.
In the face of all this, the studio has seen a steady flood of departures. The general decimation of the producer ranks was capped this year by Amy Pascal herself leaving her near-lifelong home to take up residence at Universal. Cutting so many of these deals no doubt saved a lot of overhead money—and helped with that profit margin—but makes one wonder who is going to be out there scaring up the new projects, particularly as AMBEE himself remains a no-fly zone for much of the industry’s talent, a problem made more acute by how many of the more competent and well-liked members of the executive leadership continue to decamp at a record pace. It’s amazing that after all the departures that there still are people left to leave, but they keep flying out the door.
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