Warner Bros. Divorce, Netflix & Never Living in Regret
In this week's Jamboree, I appraise some, shall we say, curious choices
Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly series of takes on the industry’s passing parade.
Well, it’s not quite déjà vu all over again. Maybe it’s a step through the looking glass into Bizarro Hollywood. Or perhaps it’s just: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
In any event, things are starting to look familiar in Hollywood — but with a twist. Like after a long, hard journey, we’re settling back into the place we should never have left. Or maybe we’ve finally gotten to a place so far from the home we left that we can’t even remember what home looked like…
The metaphors abound! Let’s take a look at the signs, and maybe we can do the math and figure out what they all add up to; perhaps indications that our long walkabout might be nearing an end.
1. Netflix Dives into… Television!
It’s being greeted across the media watcher world as another stunning triumph for the Mega-Streamer. Only one service has the boldness, the vision, to stream… a broadcast TV network!
And a French one at that! This really must be the future.
If, however, you want to throw up your hands and have a good cry, you’re entitled. After a decade and a half of the entire industry turned inside out more brutally than we could ever have imagined, here’s where we land. Bringing broadcast television to your home.
If you’re feeling like maybe there are no ideas or innovations or even improvements, and the whole thing was just a big put-on to transfer all of Hollywood to new and fewer owners, well, I can understand why you very well might feel that way.
2. A Special, Off-Camera Oscar for Tom Cruise
Since the '30s, the special awards were a staple of each year’s Oscar ceremony, usually presented to some musty old grandee whom, for one reason or another, had been neglected in the regular awards to the point where it was getting embarrassing. The Academy often wanted to put one in the Great Man’s (always a man’s) hands before he shuffled off to the great beyond.
For cineastes, the special awards were one of the ceremony’s high points, featuring tributes to legends like Pandro S. Berman or Mervyn LeRoy, who’d make their way to the stage, often for what would be their final curtain call.
Back in 2009, however, it was decided that honoring these stuffy old people was slowing down the big night, and it was pushed offstage to a special, off-screen event: the annual Governor’s Awards. For myself, the event was always bittersweet. On the one hand, although I haven’t been for more than a few years, it has typically been one of the great events on the Hollywood calendar, honoring some of the industry’s true giants. On the other hand, it always rankled that they were doing this offscreen and not saluting these folks on the big show itself.
Well, this year’s honorees have been announced, and the group is led by that musty old warhorse, too decayed to be allowed on stage on The Big Night: Tom Cruise.
We create this offscreen event to honor people who would be too stuffy and out of it to talk about on live television, and we give it to one of the biggest stars in film. Which we do in fact have to do, because stars like that would never win an actual Oscar, not even after giving himself to Stanley Kubrick for three years and working with the complete list of great directors of our time.
Can’t imagine why this ceremony is having ratings troubles.
3. Warner Bros. to Become Warner Bros.
Five years and countless beats of disruption later, since the Warners Discovery merger loaded down the company with mountains of debt because only the scale of the studio and the networks, combined with Discovery’s networks, could allow it to compete in today’s world… the studio and the one prestige network will go it alone, getting rid of all that other stuff.
On the one hand, fine, bowing to the inevitable. At this point, what else could be done?
On the other hand, so what the hell have the last five years and countless rounds of layoffs been about?
Can we get an “oops” here? Maybe, “yeah, sorry we misjudged” — on the way to cashing some robber baron-sized paychecks? Or even just a, “My bad”?