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There are times when the changing of a studio boss can feel like switching flavors of vanilla. But this one feels like more than that; like we’re approaching the end of the end of something.
There’s little in Hollywood to rattle the cages like the announcement of a new king, with all the attendant potential consequences filtering down through the system.
And so let’s let the consequence filtering begin! Here on this day to remember, The Gianopulos Takes, hot off the shelf:
• And so the old guard, the old lions, shuffles or get shuffled along.
There are now very few grandees of studios left whose tenures date to when Film was the unquestioned king.
And just about every overlord of the legacy studios comes from a background in television. Ann Sarnoff – BBC America. Jason Kilar – Hulu. Jeff Shell – Fox Cable. Tony Vinciquerra – Fox Cable.
• The exception of course is Bob II, who comes from a background in parks and a bunch of other corporate stuff. But he succeeded the man whom one could say now, became the template for the visionary former Weatherman/TV Exec conquering hero – Bob I of ABC.
• All the same, the fact that of that list, there’s not a lot of people who ever greenlit anything and had to live with the consequences of those decisions – and maybe even learn from it. That’s a matter of at least a little interest.
• So Gentleman Jim G was a man from another era the day he arrived, beloved though he may have been. It is being widely noted today how he took the studio from a desperate shambles to actual profitability.
Which would’ve been an amazing accomplishment in 2007. But today in the shadow of throw-everything-on-the-fire for the Great Streaming Wars, living by the tech world’s anti-matter math, what does profitability mean anymore? What does success mean anymore, even in the sector that has for a hundred years been the engine to fuel the entire studio? Listen, idiots – Wall Street wants a STREAMING PLAN! Even if Netflix-style, you end up carrying $15 billion in debt to get there. Take that, bean counters!
• That said, it’s not Jim Gianopulos’ fault that Paramount Plus is a distant, late arriving, underfunded, also-ran in the streaming war. And changing the releases of a couple films isn’t going to change that. The wheels had been set in motion long ago. An Ankler friend often refers to the Philippe Dauman-Brad Grey grift as the Hollywood financial equivalent of Baby Doc on his way out of Haiti.
• The most important way to view today’s news is through the prism of Paramount and Viacom circa the last few decades, which is to say: it’s very possible the place is cursed.
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