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Continuing our look back at the very best of the very worst of times.
For Part 1, click right here.
The Ankler’s Big Winner of the Year: The Digital Death Cult (DDC) and Its Fabulous Moving Goalposts!
For Hollywood, 2020 will go down as the year that the 100-year-old movie business was finally dismantled, and the industry turned its focus to a new business, sustainability TBD!
For years, the proponents of the brave digital future to the north and east have argued that movies are a foolish business that denies consumers what they want, when they want it. I don’t completely agree, but there’s a serious case to be made there, not to be dismissed out of hand.
Anyhow, the pros and cons of that debate are academic now that it’s been won and the drip of titles to VOD will soon become a flood.
But now that that battle has been won, the DDC has already started shifting the argument. Beneath our feet the Overton Window is moving from “Why won’t you let audiences choose where they want to watch?” to “Why would you put your crown jewels in those dirty old theaters and deprive your beautiful new streaming services!?” Where just a few months ago, we debated whether streaming would cannibalize theatrical, it will now be a question of whether theatrical is cannibalizing streaming, and woe betide the CEO who wastes their crown jewels in musty, data-free theaters instead of devoting them exclusively to the new streaming frontier.
If that goes unchecked, the result will quickly become that theatrical becomes the dumping ground, streaming the A-track, with the foreordained results for theaters.
The Heartwarming Quote of the Year Award
Winner: Kevin Huvane!
In the middle of the plague year, amid mass layoffs of their own employees and uncertainty up and down the ranks of their clients, CAA’s partners decided this was the moment to sit down with the press, for a special section of Variety celebrating, of all the momentous occasions, the 25th anniversary of their promotions to their current jobs.
Lest anyone think Hollywood is self-absorbed!
In the piece, Kevin Huvane dried his tears for those suffering to explain what CAA means to him:
Kevin Huvane: You can’t ask people to trust you unless they see that you practice that kind of trust. That’s where I think the three of us [excel], in that we trust each other. We have disagreements, but we always trust where it’s coming from. I think that filters out to the rest of the company when they see that this is valued. Friendship is valued, and working well together and treating people well is valued. People do see the bond that the three of us have.
To you, it’s this goliath at the center of every tawdry trend in Hollywood, now taking this moment of uncertainty to eliminate vast swaths of their own company. But to them, it’s all about friendship.
Variety didn’t note whether Huvane spoke the word “friendship” with the standard air quotes indicated.
The Deck Chairs Award Winner: AMPAS!
On the other hand, there’s the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
I’ve done this rant a few times, so I’ll try and keep it brief here. (For full rant, click here.) But in normal times, the fact that there were almost no movies widely released this year might be taken as a sign from the gods that this is not the moment for a three-hour celebration of the movies of this year.
We get that AMPAS has bills to pay, that there’s an entire industrial complex that rides on this, that there will never be as good a time to finally give Video City Ted the award he’s paid for many times over. All that’s swell.
But . . . and I can’t say this too plainly: Oscar ratings were in freefall before COVID, while they were still celebrating films that people had at least heard of (if not seen).
Go through with a festival of self-regard at this moment, and The Ankler predicts it will be the moment that Oscar turns away its audience forever, never to return.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Again, our plea: Use this time slot to, for one tiny moment, not make it completely about us. Throw a telethon on behalf of the film people of the world in support of victims of this last year. Look around, I promise you can find some.
This has been a preview of today’s edition of The Ankler, the industry’s secret newsletter. To read it all, subscribe today for just $10 a month and don’t miss out on who’s in the hot seat next!
This has been a preview of today’s special awards edition of The Ankler, the industry’s secret newsletter. To read 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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