Who is disgraced? And who should be? If we are going to maintain a disgraced label in journalism, how should it be applied?

“Disgraced” is part of the new journalism where we will not only tell you what happened, we will also tell you how to think about it and generally whom to have grudges against — not in some feckless opinion section, but right in the news stories in line with the facts. So now we label people, and we also editorialize by saying things like “the claim that x is true, which is a damnable lie….” It’s the new way.

If we are going to label people, we can probably agree that people with repeated, deliberate patterns of abuse should be first in line.

But if we generally want to pepper news stories with signposts telling readers where their sympathies should lie, why stop with “disgraced”? There are, after all, many ways to be a disappointing person. What if you carelessly lose a billion dollars? What if you ran a major entertainment company and you were very slow to see the importance of the internet and, later, streaming? (Plenty of those.) What about people who just have terrible judgement, or bad taste, or who are late on their car payment? We could use labels beyond “disgraced,” such as nefarious, boorish, feckless, jejune, portly, short-sighted, or maladroit. Everyone probably lives up to some label.

But this only works well if we have a high level of confidence that our labels are accurate.

How Rigorous is the MeToo Process?

I will use my own story because that is the one with which I am most familiar.

In 2004, I was the first employee on Amazon Video. I drew up the plans, launched the product (with a robust and talented team, of course), then convinced everyone, over much opposition, that we would need original content, created Amazon Studios from zero, hired up the Amazon Studios team, and led it to success. In 2015, I was the Head of Global Content at Amazon Video and the Head of Amazon Studios. We had recently won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy for Transparent, the first Best Series award that went to a streamer. Our plan was coming together. We were growing globally.

The Hollywood Reporter’s “disgraced” label, as applied to me, stems from a brief moment eleven years ago at the 2015 Comic-Con with Isa Dick Hackett, a producer on one of our shows. I had never met her before and, frankly, I did not think of her as an “employee” since she works at her own company in San Francisco.

We had been at a large dinner after the premiere of the pilot for The Man in the High Castle, a TV show based on a novel that Hackett’s father had written. Afterwards, I got an Uber to go to a party a few blocks away. Two people hopped in: an Amazon exec and Isa Dick Hackett. There was party banter on the way that was in line with typical party banter, including some joking about the title of a show we had in development called I Love Dick (it was in active development; the pilot was announced in February 2016).

After the Uber ride, Hackett approached my colleague and me at the party and asked if we were gay.

If that was her takeaway from the evening, then how spicy was it?

She later complained to Amazon that the banter in the Uber was too spicy.

Amazon investigated this at the time, in 2015, with an outside firm. They interviewed everyone at the party and the dinner. They put together all the information and conferred. Amazon has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment; had they found any, I would have been fired then.

But I was not fired.

And bear in mind, Amazon is the only party ever to have had all of the facts — having interviewed everyone who was at the dinner, in the Uber, or at the party.

Let’s stipulate that she was annoyed. Genuinely annoyed, even. But annoyance is not sexual harassment. Except, apparently, in the right circumstances, it can be. Because that is what happened here: a standard nobody announced, applied after the fact, to conduct that the actual standard had already cleared. That is not a rule being followed. It is a rule being made up to fit a result.

Hackett then brought us her next show, Electric Dreams, which we bought.

She also offered us an overall deal with her production company, which we declined.

At the beginning of 2017, everything was going well. The studio was on a roll. We had won the first Best Series Globe or Emmy for any streaming service. We had won the Golden Globe for best comedy two years of the past three. I had a feeling Marvelous Mrs. Maisel would win us a third (it did). We had won the Annie Award for best animated preschool series three years out of the past three. Fleabag premiered and was very well received (it went on to win the Emmy for best comedy). Catastrophe had received a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. We had just won three Oscars — Screenplay, Actor and Foreign Film —, which were the first Oscars won by a streaming service. We kept winning Best Series Emmys and Annie awards for our animated series such as Tumble Leaf. Every department was winning the top awards in their categories. Our launch and our entry into original content was unquestionably a success and we were on the verge of broadening our selection with The Boys and Jack Ryan.

But then, in October of 2017, just after Harvey Weinstein blew up, Kim Masters interviewed Isa Dick Hackett in The Hollywood Reporter and in this interview, Hackett enhanced her original account with new dialogue. The 2017 article quoted Hackett as saying that I had said “you will love my dick.”

Then I was fired. But that line hadn’t been in the 2015 account, or at least, I hadn’t heard it or been asked about it (and, of course, I would have been).

It was a very bad week to be in the newspapers.

I did not say “you’ll love my dick.” If I had, Amazon would have fired me in 2015. That line does not appear in any 2015 account, nor in the requests for comment Kim Masters submitted earlier in 2017. And our interaction was all witnessed and overheard.

There was never any suggestion that we would ever have sex.

There was never any suggestion that we find a more private moment or that we would ever meet again.

There was microbanter that is typical of parties.

What did I want from her? Nothing. All three times we spoke that evening, she approached me — briefly at the party, getting into my Uber, very briefly at the after party.

I did not make that statement.

To believe that Isa Dick Hackett’s 2017 interview was truthful, and I said “you’ll love my dick,” you have to believe that Amazon would just let the discussion she described slide and then … she herself would do the same, bringing us her next show (Electric Dreams, which we bought) and offering us an overall deal with her company (even though the television world had many well-funded competitors at the time).

To believe my version of events, on the other hand, you have to believe that in the heat of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Isa Dick Hackett and Kim Masters decided to spice up Hackett’s recollection of our dialogue.

If one is undecided, perhaps we should look at whether there is corroborating evidence. It’s not determinative, but if I am so entitled and inappropriate, wouldn’t you expect this or something like this to have happened more than just this one time? There have been many parties, many Uber rides, many lunches and dinners with half of Hollywood. Where are the incidents? I don’t mean “you parked in my space in 1992” peccadilloes. I mean, shouldn’t there be something similar to what is alleged to have happened here? I worked at very established companies — Amazon, Disney, McKinsey — for more than twenty years without any irregularity.

Or at least wouldn’t you expect that I might have some lurid and busy love life?

Or at least I would have some record of being impolite at work?

In a very ambiguous case, shouldn’t there be something corroborating the idea that we’ve got the right guy?

Because none of that corroborating evidence exists.

Is Kim Masters Credible?

Kim Masters’ temperament and standards for truth-telling should raise concerns. In February 2026, she posted the following on Threads:

Several things about this. The story is false. I never received any such gift, nor anything resembling it, from anyone, ever, and I had never heard the claim before she posted it nine years after it supposedly happened.

“I was told.” By whom? On what basis? I presume that this gift was not given to me at my actual birthday party, where there would have been fifty witnesses. So whoever this source is would have to (a) be close enough to me to know what arrives at my home (that could be only one person) and (b) also have been close to Kim Masters in 2017. No such person exists.

Either Masters is fabricating this — which I find completely credible — or her standards for anonymous sourcing are unbelievably loose. Either explanation is disconcerting.

Let me put the challenge directly. Ms. Masters: what color was the frame? Approximately what size was the photograph? When did this alleged gift arrive at my home, and by what means? Did I display it somewhere? Who was the woman in the photograph? Was it a color photo or black and white? Any of these details, if real, should be easy to provide. I will guarantee now, in advance of any response, that no credible evidence in support of this story will ever materialize — because the event never occurred, and nothing remotely resembling it ever occurred. Someone here is telling tall tales.

When Masters shopped her original article about me in 2017, it was rejected by The New York Times and other publications — and initially by The Hollywood Reporter itself — before THR eventually ran it. That is the bar her reporting cleared.

I am not certain that if we were to pick one person to sit in judgement over other people that it would be Kim Masters. She seems to have a particularly strong resentment of men.

In the law, we know that people are flawed. Judges and jurors and prosecutors have substantial responsibilities in the legal system, and since they can be flawed and might occasionally be operating with bad motives, the system has checks and balances. Judges can be overturned on appeal. We have twelve jurors, not just one, and they must come to a unanimous finding (in criminal cases). Litigants can strike jurors who seem biased. Prosecutors must operate within clear rules designed to promote fairness. Defendants are provided with counsel. And the system still fails. People are falsely convicted of crimes and exonerated years later, if ever. But in journalism, we rely on individual journalists working with one editor, typically, to exercise a very similar degree of power over people as our legal system. What if a journalist has a bad day? Or is fundamentally a bad person? Not only do we not have substantial checks in the journalistic process, but many states including California have made libel cases almost impossible to win with what are called anti-SLAPP laws. Our system is very, very loose.

What about The Hollywood Reporter?

Zooming out from Kim Masters, where is the bar for fact-checking at The Hollywood Reporter in general?

Well, let’s look at this article “Roy Price Has a Very Different New Career After Amazon Studios Ouster", on January 4, 2019. The article reported that I had become “an art dealer in Hong Kong.”

I have never in my life been an art dealer, in Hong Kong or elsewhere. I have never sold any work of art to any person or entity. I have never had any sort of retail business, or an art consulting business. I don’t think I have ever spent more than half an hour in an art gallery. And I don’t know much about fine art.

I did have a company called International Art Machine. But that is because I think that movies and television are “art”. I take it that Chris Gardner just guessed based on the name of the company that it was an art gallery.

But guessing is not journalism.

Suffice to say, this story would never have made it into print at the New York Times or The New Yorker because they have diligent fact checkers. But that’s The Hollywood Reporter for you!

There Were Two MeToo Movements

There were really two MeToos. The original was the work of journalists who upheld evidentiary standards — Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at The New York Times. Their reporting on Harvey Weinstein was meticulous, sourced, and verified.

As they say, “never let a crisis go to waste.” And as Anne Applebaum explained from a more general point of view in an essay on MeToo and the New Puritanism, “Once it becomes clear that attention and praise can be garnered from organizing an attack on someone’s reputation, plenty of people discover that they have an interest in doing so.”

Out of the legitimate version of MeToo a shadow movement emerged, the corrupt twin of the original. Shadow MeToo borrowed legitimacy from evidentiary journalism but abandoned its standards. I don’t think it is unfair to say that Shadow MeToo was a power grab. TimesUp, in fact, had explicit job goals.

To capture as many high level jobs as possible, the corrupt version of MeToo needed evidentiary standards to be low and it needed every story to be believed. Jaywalking needed to be treated like murder.

These are not standards that people will naturally embrace, so to get people to toe the line, the leaders of the movement severely punished anyone who questioned the new methods. In 2017, Lena Dunham expressed support for a colleague she knew well, against an accusation she had reason to doubt. Within days, she was attacked, forced to recant, and was semi-cancelled. The lesson was unmistakable: the corrupted MeToo required its participants to suppress their own judgment when that judgment did not align. Some bad things had to be done. People had to be taught not to speak up.

Obviously, I was a target because I had built and was running global content at one of the two largest streaming services in the world. The other was Netflix. Both had been created by men, and both were being run by men. To some, it was important to change that, and MeToo was the available tool.

Don’t take it from me. Hackett herself, in the 2017 interview, framed her motivation in exactly these terms: she called for “an infusion of new and diverse leadership, not just including women but gay people, people of color, people with disabilities.” In her telling, her account and the broader project were not two separate things.

You can have the legitimate MeToo without the shadow MeToo. But you cannot have the shadow MeToo without the legitimacy conferred by the legitimate MeToo. It is not necessary to take them both as a piece.

“But Still, It Had to be Done”

Some people will go along with most of this and still land on: yeah, but. Yeah, but it still needed to happen. Yeah, but the good outweighed the bad. Yeah, but if a few people got hit who didn’t deserve it, that’s the cost of fixing something.

Imagine a district attorney. Say she won four hundred convictions last year. Great year. But she knows that 100 of those people didn’t do it — and she’s fine with that, because she doesn’t much like the type of person she indicts. Nobody would call that a good year. People would call it a scandal. The convictions aren’t the story. The system and the corruption are the story.

When people think that despite its flaws, MeToo was on the whole worth it, they are usually thinking one of three things.

At least it cleaned house. The argument here is that whether the accused did what they were accused of or not, it got rid of a lot of bad people. I’d push back on that quite a bit. Many of Hollywood’s worst and most malevolent people are still thriving and even benefited from MeToo, so at best the system was wildly inconsistent at accomplishing this mission. And meanwhile, perfectly normal people got caught up in it. This is a very mixed bag.

At least it centered women. Let me just speak to what I know best, which is Amazon Studios. The theory is that the old Hollywood was holding women down and the correction set them loose. But the studio I built didn’t need correcting on this. It already was the thing everybody said they wanted. Half the Amazon Studios team was women. Most of our overall deals were with women. We required half our comedy directors to be women when the industry was sitting around seventeen percent — and we won the Best Comedy Director Emmy four years out of five. Our highest-paid producer ran a company whose actual slogan was “topple the patriarchy.” Transparent, Mrs. Maisel, Fleabag, Catastrophe, One Mississippi, Good Girls Revolt — those weren’t shows that happened to have women in them. They were shows with a point to make, and they won. If there was a more feminist studio running in those years, I’d honestly love to know which one it was. So the story where the movement shows up to free that studio by removing the guy who built it — that story doesn’t survive five minutes with the actual record. Over the next eight years the studio won a lot less, stood out a lot less, and didn’t get visibly more diverse in terms of who was running the shows.

At least it was good for women on the whole. Regular Metoo was good for women on the whole. But to say the same of Shadow MeToo is not an easy case to make. The weak MeToo cases sent the message that being in 1:1’s with a woman — or in any context where you could plausibly have said something — is high risk. Most businesses, unlike entertainment and publishing, are not dominated by women. So look at the whole economy, not just Hollywood: the senior male now weighing whether to mentor a junior female, or put her on the big project, runs a calculation he didn’t run in 2016. On the whole, unless you limit your view to showbiz, I doubt that Shadow MeToo will prove to have been professionally helpful to women.

Am I saying that MeToo as a whole should be cancelled? No. The original MeToo, or Core MeToo — the real reporting, sourced and checked, that took down people who actually did what they were accused of — works and suffices. I’m saying that the Shadow MeToo should be abandoned. It imposes heavy costs and gets little that couldn’t have been had by following the rules.

The Fork in the Road

With respect to me, I am not asking anyone to let anything slide. I don’t want anyone to let anything slide. My argument is that (a) I did not in fact do this thing at all, and (b) despite the temptation to do so, in ambiguous cases, and especially in doubtful cases, we should not proceed to guilty verdicts.

Often we look back in wonder at the various ridiculous things people believed in distant times. Sometimes I wonder what mistaken belief or convention from our time will baffle future observers. And I think one such belief is this system: that we should accept all accusations as being 100% true, that we should accept no testimony from the accused, and that we should have no cross-examination, and yet we should have severe consequences associated with this extra-judicial process.

In my view, Kim Masters and Isa Dick Hackett should be “disgraced” for bearing false witness.

I, on the other hand, told an awkward joke at a party once eleven years ago.

Is this the standard we want?

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Roy Price founded Amazon Studios and Amazon Video. His shows have won 14 Emmys and Golden Globes for Best Series. He holds 16 patents. Previously at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He is currently building N1BW.

Paramount-WBD maintains robust output. Many are making what I think is an inapt comparison on Paramount-WBD, saying that Disney acquired Fox and reduced its film output, therefore that will happen in this case. But these are not the same. Disney operates around a concentrated slate of giant branded franchises; Fox was valuable to them largely for its library and select major IP like Avatar. Warner Bros. and Paramount both make franchise films, but both are also in the broader movie business — releasing originals like Sinners and Weapons across multiple genres and budget levels. Volume itself is strategically important to them.

The only version of a Paramount-WBD merger that makes strategic sense is one that maintains substantial film and television output. Barring a calamity, that is what they are likely to do. That should be good for filmmakers, theaters, and audiences alike.

In the AI writing race, Paul Bunyan wins. One hears the concern that AI will take over all screenwriting. I think that is extremely unlikely. Some things are hard, and this is one of them. In drama and comedy writing, AI will asymptotically approach human quality — which is to say it may never quite get there at the professional level.

The people who should feel most secure in their jobs in the AI era are probably comedy writers, masseurs, and telephone linemen.

This is not to say AI will have no role in screenwriting. If your character is in Chicago and has to get to Wrigley Field, AI can tell you how that would likely happen — easier than flying out and figuring it out yourself. But that kind of assistance should not worry anyone.

AI allows early testing of ideas. Filmmakers already use look books, sizzle reels, and rip-o-matics when pitching. AI-generated trailers, proof-of-concept scenes, and AI pilots are the natural next step. They will become normal and expected.

The big consequence is that Hollywood development becomes testable earlier. Traditionally, studios spent millions before learning whether audiences cared about a premise, character, or package. I expect dedicated platforms to emerge that pair AI with recruited online panels — standing digital proving grounds for the industry. Creators themselves or studios could upload trailers, premises, casting ideas, posters, scripts, or AI pilots, and get feedback. Projects start arriving at studios with real signal already attached. We did a version of this at Amazon with something I launched called Amazon Preview, and an industry-wide platform is overdue.

Is this good? Mostly, yes. If you have a strong idea, these systems will help democratize access to financing — a creator without connections can demonstrate real audience interest. The limitation is that some projects depend on intangible execution. You could not meaningfully test Borat without Sacha Baron Cohen actually performing Borat. The industry will learn to account for that.

Open film financing. Few processes are more opaque than the current bespoke, face-to-face film financing process. It would be surprising if a platform did not emerge where creators can raise money for creative projects — a TikTok, a movie, a game, an album, a virtual influencer — from an army of global fan-investors excited by creative ideas.

Creators could get real data by testing their ideas online (see above), then bring the data to a global marketplace of fun ideas and get funded. This decreases the cost of capital for creators, unlocks opportunities for the excluded, and gives more control to creators. Why would Kevin Hart let a major studio finance his next film if he could get the same money from a global marketplace for much cheaper? He won’t.

Unlike Kickstarter, this platform will give investors actual financial upside, which means these will be securities. Currently that means investors have to be “accredited.” I personally think that restriction should be lifted. If we are going to let people bet on sports, why stop them from investing in media projects?

The opportunities here: (a) start building your IP now or (b) build the platform.

A new studio emerges to fill important content gaps. There are only so many movies a single organization can successfully produce internally. Once a company tries to make 50+ films under one roof, the wheels tend to come off. We have seen this recently at Netflix and, many years ago, at Disney. There is just something about the movie business that is handmade, demands high standards, and creates a real diseconomy of scale. Film development is creative, subjective, and unusually dependent on taste. Very large slates are hard to manage well.

Meanwhile streamers and theaters need substantial supply, and there are obvious gaps. Comedy output has collapsed. Mid-budget action is arguably under-served. Faith-based films keep outperforming relative to how little Hollywood invests in them.

That creates an opening. The most likely solution is one or more new production entities with a strong creative point of view emerging to serve the market in a focused, bespoke, brand-specific way.

It is hard to start a new studio. In some ways it resembles starting a new national insurance company. But historically, where genuine audience demand exists for long enough, capital eventually follows. Start smallish.

Audience tastes will change — suddenly. Hollywood sometimes gets tripped up because people assume the audience of tomorrow will be the audience of yesterday. But things evolve. Nobody knows exactly how taste will evolve. But it will, and those people who anticipate it will do well.

AI lowers production costs. More movies get made. More weird movies get made. Lower average floor for “worth attempting” drops, so genres and formats that couldn’t pencil out before suddenly can.

Microdramas evolve beyond romance. Microdramas — short vertical paid episodes, à la ReelShort — are a fast-growing global business. But the format is almost entirely soap opera aimed at women 40+. The opportunity is everything else: action for young men, comedy, horror, faith. Whoever cracks the second genre will look obvious in retrospect. (Disclosure: I am working on this at n1bw.com.)

Congress reinstates finsyn. Finsyn — the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, in effect from 1970 to 1995 — prohibited networks from owning their own shows. This was obviously good for creators and studios.

I don’t think you can make the case that any individual streamer is a monopoly, but there is no question Hollywood is now a tightly concentrated oligopoly. A ridiculously small number of people control what America and the world get to see, and they often move with a certain groupthink. The need for a more open, fair, and diverse production environment is clear.

The argument for limiting the percentage of new original shows and movies on streamers that are owned by that streamer is strong and getting stronger. Will Congress act? They should.

Federal regulation of filming incentives. I would not be surprised to see a federal statute aimed at the internecine interstate competition around production incentives. I also would not be surprised to see a “made in the USA” designation emerge for films, with penalties for streamers whose share of made-in-USA films falls too low. Per-film incentives would not work as well.

This will not increase the total number of films made — it effectively removes a subsidy — but it should be good for Los Angeles.

AI handles 85% of contract negotiations. When you land a deal at a studio, it is a great day. But when can you actually start work and get paid? Six months? Nine months? It can absolutely take that long. Why can’t agencies and studios let AI agents — the Negotiator 5000 — handle the back-and-forth within established parameters, using market performance data to make reasonable decisions? Expect something like this to radically compress the delays that currently plague development.

Net effect: less stress, less waiting.

Interesting films will gain ground again. In a highly competitive market, it becomes all the more important to be unique and special. There will always be a market for distinctive and great.

Part of the issue in this category is temporary. Over the past 8-9 years, the indie market has been hit by the exit of a lot of the people who greenlit the best interesting films of the prior couple of decades — some retired (Searchlight), some had other issues.

Executives and producers do matter, actually, because there is a difference between being able to say “this gives me indie film vibes” and being able to pick the one indie idea in 100 that could grab the public’s attention — which is often counterintuitive. There have never been more than a few people in the business who can do this consistently.

This will be solved before too long. The opportunity is to be there with a great indie film when the tide turns, or to be the next leader who revitalizes the category.

Every day shows. Streamers need recurring viewership. The perfect asset is a show that runs every day and everyone wants to watch — a Jeopardy, a General Hospital, a SportsCenter. Whoever cracks the daily-engagement format for streaming gets paid accordingly. It is strange that nobody has really tried.

China. We never used to use any Chinese software or watch any Chinese entertainment. Now we have TikTok, Hailuo, Kling, DeepSeek, CapCut, and other major Chinese products that people use every day. American audiences consume microdramas from ReelShort and DramaBox. American films sometimes thrive in China but are more often disallowed. This is a complex relationship, most of which is beyond my scope here, but is there a path where instead of starting World War III we somehow reconcile and have more open trade with China? It could make a real difference.

I am a little pessimistic. China is very determined to protect its home market, and there are bigger issues at stake than Hollywood’s interest in China. But something could warm up, and it would be significant if it did.

The common thread is that Hollywood is becoming simultaneously more technological and more decentralized. Large corporations will remain powerful as distribution entities, but creators are going to have more leverage, more data, more financing options, and more direct relationships with audiences than ever. This brings a new golden age and you will be sorry you ever thought Hollywood was going to hell in a handbasket!

The new Hollywood will not look like the old Hollywood. But it never does.

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Roy Price founded Amazon Studios and Amazon Video. His shows have won 14 Emmys and Golden Globes for Best Series. He holds 16 patents. Previously at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He is a very nice guy. He is currently building N1BW.

I would like there to be a place where:

• We can be a bit more experimental with story ideas and genres and have some unbridled fun outside of Hollywood’s recent constraints

• Where people can popularize, test and make money from their new ideas

• People who aren’t really into soap operas can nevertheless get some fun micro series to watch on their phone

That place doesn’t really exist yet.

So we’re building it.

N1bw.com — The Number One Best Website.

N1BW is building two things at the same time.

First, a collaborative studio where writers, creators, and AI filmmakers can find each other and build series together under a clear, pre-defined economic structure.

Second, a direct-to-consumer platform where those series are released, monetized, and scaled with an audience.

The goal is simple: make it possible to create a show, find an audience, and make money from it—without going through the traditional system.

N1BW is designed for serialized, short-form fiction. Episodes are typically 60–120 seconds and are built to drive continuation from one episode to the next. The format rewards pace, clarity, and strong cliffhangers.

On the studio side, a project typically starts with a creator who has a concept—a world, a tone, or a pilot idea. That creator acts as showrunner and builds a small team. Writers help break the story and draft episodes. AI filmmakers produce those episodes using a mix of tools and shared assets. Work happens collaboratively, often across geographies, and moves quickly.

We are not just providing a place to talk. We are providing structure.

Every project operates under a standard participation model. Roles are defined. Revenue is pre-allocated. Everyone understands the terms before they start.

If you create a project, you keep your movie and television rights. You are the owner of the underlying IP.

If you contribute to someone else’s project, you do not own the IP, but you participate in the revenue generated by the series.

Revenue from the platform is split as follows:

20% to the original creator (showrunner)
30% to the episode producer (AI filmmaker)
10% to the episode writer
5% to additional writers of the bible
5% to music
30% to the platform

At this stage, there is no upfront pay. The model is participation in the upside. The bet is that if a series works, everyone involved benefits.

We are early. Right now this is being run through Discord with a very small number of initial projects and collaborators. The purpose of this phase is to prove that the model works in practice.

If it does, this becomes a new way to build new things.

So we’re doing something simple to align incentives early.

For the first two years, we are allocating 10% of the platform’s share of revenue to a Founding Cohort.

The Founding Cohort will consist of the first 50 people who are selected as contributors on projects—creators, writers, and AI filmmakers who actually deliver work that is used.

Each member receives an equal share of this pool.

This is not for joining a Discord or following along. It is for people who step in and help build the first shows.

If nothing works, it won’t matter.

If something does work, the people who built it should participate in that outcome.

FAQ

What are we trying to learn in this initial phase?

• Can a group of writers come together quickly and produce a coherent, compelling serialized story?

• Can we attract strong AI filmmakers to a revenue-share model?

• How hard is it to create a meaningful cliffhanger every 60–120 seconds?

• Will audiences engage with and return to AI-assisted fictional content?

• Will viewers pay to continue a story?

• Can a series move from concept to 20–30 episodes in weeks rather than months?

If the answer to these questions is yes, the model works.

Why no upfront pay?

Because this is an early-stage experiment. The goal is to create something that generates real audience and real revenue, and then share that revenue among participants.

What do I get out of participating?

You help build a series from the ground up, earn a share of any revenue it generates, and build credits and work that can extend beyond the platform.

If you originate a project, you keep the underlying IP, including film and television rights.

Is this only for AI video?

No. AI is a tool that makes this model possible, but hybrid approaches are encouraged.

Join

If you want to build something or just hang out, join the Discord. (But don’t expect too much, I just set it up today.)

https://discord.gg/NXFrveJxx

In Hollywood, hiring is very subjective. People want to be liked. They therefore want to go with the flow. People conform. And it can be hard to know when it’s okay to think something new.

These are the worst ideas that people have but shouldn’t.

Technology is scary and bad

Hollywood exists because of technological innovation. But it is also a haven for non-technical people who nevertheless want a shot at a Montecito house with three Lhasa Apsos.

No surprise, then, that every major shift — sound, television, home video, streaming — has at first been treated as the enemy.

AI is the current version of this. There are legitimate complexities around rights and licenses, but we have two options: ignore AI until courts and negotiations settle everything, or assume that AI is here to stay and get smart about its capabilities. I’m in the latter camp. Griping about the technical origins of AI’s capabilities is, I suspect, not time well spent, and, at the end of the day, resolving the financial arrangements that will undergird AI is not up to us, but it will get done.

The benefits are obvious. AI makes space operas cheaper and more realistic on a Burbank stage, or even in your backyard.

But perhaps more importantly, it could be a very helpful tool for writers. Even producers. If you have a great idea, why not generate a quick visual proof-of-concept, post it on TikTok, and test it? It won’t look like a Denis Villeneuve film, but it’s good enough to gather real data quickly.

Here is a teaser I created:

LAPD: Demon Division got 23% likes on TikTok on 7,696 views, which is a very high like rate. That won’t get you a greenlight in itself, but it is real-life customer data.

I do not understand why a lookbook or a rip-o-matic is okay but an AI teaser is not.

And I’m sure you can come up with much more revolutionary ideas that will come out of AI.

Technology is your friend. Or, if it isn’t yet, you should definitely invite it over.

Complaining is helpful

When you are complaining, you are not being creative in the present moment. You are not building. It does not position you to take advantage of what is actually happening.

Only doing is helpful.

Hip, avant-garde cultural ideas are universal truths

A set of niche academic positions somehow came to be treated in Hollywood as broadly held truths, or at least truths we should force everyone to accept. That has never been the path to success.

In theory, you’re in this business because you have an accurate read on the audience and you have a good, original feel for film or TV. Represent reality. If you don’t, people sense the confabulation and they disengage. We are here to make great films and TV for today’s audience — live in the world that exists.

You’re in the know

Hollywood people hate to admit ignorance. Having inside information or unique personal access is currency. People will often drop names or even make things up from whole cloth to make it sound like they are in the loop. Very often, they will accompany these statements with a chuckle that you can either interpret as knowing or sociopathic.

In tech, people readily say “I don’t know” because that admission creates space to learn.

You already know plenty. Stay curious and admit gaps openly.

Comedy is bad

Name one actually funny movie from the past ten years that audiences rejected. You can’t. Yet a consensus formed that “comedy doesn’t work anymore.” There is zero evidence audiences have lost their appetite for laughter. This was a top-down imposition by people who don’t get comedy, and it cost the industry real money.

Comedy is good. Welcome to the era of fun.

You should be friendly and go to more parties

A lot of people feel that if only they were “in the mix,” things would be happening for them. They should be going to more parties, or more prestigious parties, like in Bel-Air.

You’re not missing much. I’ve done many deals and attended many parties. I can’t remember one deal that came out of a party. Social media, Substack, YouTube, and TikTok probably matter more these days as drivers of attention and opportunity.

Anyway, parties are risky these days. I used to wonder why major executives often seemed somewhat robotic. Now I get it. Hollywood is a hotbed of narcissism, desperation, insecurity, and dark triad personalities. In today’s environment, being outgoing is not worth the risk.

Don’t worry about parties. And, when at a party, don’t be unpleasant, but don’t be too casual either.

Ownership doesn’t matter

Your personal money will not figure itself out on its own. What matters in the end is that you own something. A movie, a kids’ cartoon character, a book, an apartment building, Sinners, 20% of Amazon.com — it doesn’t matter what, as long as it has value and preferably generates cash on a regular basis.

There was a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I didn’t read it, but I know what it should have said: wealthy parents teach their kids to think about ownership, not just wages. Not everyone gets there, but that is the target. Hollywood people don’t think about it enough.

If your long-term goal is “stay on the payroll,” pivot to “own something.” Start small if you have to.

The company’s money will figure itself out

For a while, Hollywood execs operated as if money was secondary. Hollywood was America’s profligate, wastrel child with inchoate political aspirations. Many decisions were made because they “felt right.” Capital was abundant. Consequences were delayed.

Well now the consequences are here.

Spendthrift progeny are invariably brought to heel. The companies now running most of Hollywood have been laser-focused on creating value. Hollywood, to a significant extent, has not been. By consequence, Hollywood is now literally the property of the people who focused on creating value.

It’s called show “business” for a reason.

You should do something commercial

On the one hand, of course. But if you think about the movies that have stood out the most, very often they were rulebreakers, and very often there was skepticism. It is actually hard to get a middle-of-the-road, right-down-the-fairway script made, because it is a very busy and competitive zone.

People will do better for themselves if they focus on their most interesting ideas, not the ones that seem the most conventional.

Indies are dead

The appetite for interesting movies for grownups has not died. We have just gone through a period of uninteresting culture. But people will always appreciate truly interesting films. Interesting movies are not a dead category. They are an opportunity.

Do not ask what is bad. Ask what is good. Find a way to make everything benefit you, personally. The next decade belongs to the creators who refuse to waste time on groupthink and treat change as opportunity. That can be you.

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Roy Price founded Amazon Studios and Amazon Video. His shows have won 14 Emmys and Golden Globes for Best Series. He holds 16 patents. Previously at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He is very handsome. He is currently building N1BW.

This deal is going to happen.1 Paramount and Warner Bros. will become one. But is this going to work out? Our question today is whether this will work and what will determine whether it works.

Tolstoy said “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I think this is similar: there are many ways this could fail; there is one way it can succeed.

Brand

To date, the studio SVOD services have been largely undifferentiated in terms of brand. Disney does have a brand, HBO has a brand (but MAX doesn’t), and I would say that Netflix has a brand. But most of the studio subscription video on demand (SVOD) services (Peacock, Max/HBO, and Paramount) never really developed distinctive identities. That drives churn (cancellations) up, because if you don’t have a distinctive identity, customers don’t know what they’re subscribing to.

Right now, Paramount has multiple important trademarks – – HBO, Max, Paramount, and CBS. But I am not sure that it has an overall brand.

In the future, there must be one product, it must have one name, and it has to have a distinct personality that people care about. Paramount will have the Yellowstone universe, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC, Mission Impossible, Top Gun, South Park (with some complications), The Pitt, and many others. I think there is a vibe there. If the service winds up leaning toward big adventure IP, dramas that skew a little red state (Yellowstone, all of CBS, Star Trek), some prestige from HBO, and filling the massive gap in comedy that I’ve discussed before, that would both build on the assets they have and comprise a differentiated product.

No one walks around with a Paramount tote bag or t-shirt.

If they did, who would it be? And what should it mean to them? That question needs to be answered for 2031. (More on brand here.)

One World

Neither HBO nor Paramount are strong in terms of international SVOD. It is easy to overlook international if you are struggling domestically. However, if your competitors operate profitably in markets A, B, and C and you are only in A, that is a serious problem for you.

Can the company allocate resources to shore up international?

Team

Team is of course critical. Whatever your assets and strategies, if you don’t have the team, with correct incentives and correct organization, you’re not going to get there.

If you’re going to have some kind of coherent brand, even a fairly big tent brand, then the whole of the creative output must be managed deliberately. Someone has to be the global head of content. It will not work to have a head of Paramount and head of Warner Brothers and a head of HBO and a head of CBS and every other little thing and they’re all doing their own thing.

Everyone has to be pulling in one direction. And that direction should be SVOD success.

So there are two options. Either this global head of content is David Ellison himself, or David Ellison is the CEO and there is a global head of content who reports to him. It could work either way, (typically, though, these roles would be divided, even if they work together closely).

There has been some notion circulating that certain people won’t report to other people in the merged org. That is, if you have gained a certain amount of prestige and you have become a Hollywood personage of some note, perhaps it is beneath you to report to anyone but the CEO.

I would suggest that in the new Hollywood, one must be a bit more flexible. The modern organizations are large. Not everyone, even very valued and brilliant employees, can report to the CEO. When I was running all global content at Amazon, I did not report to the CEO of Amazon. I reported to a guy who oversaw multiple businesses who then reported to the CEO. That’s just going to be the way it is in the modern era.

Gone are the days when anyone who was anyone at Columbia reported to Harry Cohn!

Key Cultural Changes

Part of the issue is strategic — what we should do —, part is people — who should lead it —, but part is cultural — what must everyone in the org believe?

There are very likely a few high leverage cultural improvement opportunities.

Innovate

In Hollywood, the default attitude toward anything technical is hostility. This is not helpful.

So far in the history of SVOD, technical innovation has not been a hugely visible factor but going forward, services will — and will have to — step up their game in this regard. Multiple relevant and exciting technologies have become available; experiences can now be enabled within an SVOD service, such as enhanced community, amongst others, that would enhance stickiness and improve performance.

What would happen if you could make the service a daily habit, not just something people go to when they want to watch something in particular? It would make a big difference.

You cannot lag here.

Moreover, are there not new programming formats that could build daily engagement?

It will be necessary to have a CTO who owns the entire tech org and has a demonstrated record of innovating at scale, and it will be important to create a pro-innovation culture in general.

Contrarianism

Hollywood has a strong tendency toward conformity and group think. This is dangerous and unhelpful. Most ideas that are very good are initially interpreted by the average Hollywood denizen as being bad. And ideas that are interpreted by everyone as being good are often mediocre. Therefore, it is actively unhelpful to try to be the most popular kid in school who agrees with everyone. It will be essential to assemble an agglomeration of contrarians who are quite indifferent to the views of the Hollywood consensus.

There are people who, when it is time to make an important decision, want to get everyone’s opinion, make sure everyone is heard, and arrive at some conclusion that roughly represents the mean of all of the opinions in the room.

Needless to say, that is not how winners win.

There should be many actively funded ideas in the company that are viewed from the outside as radical, disconcerting, bad, or flat out insane. If this is not the case, are you really ahead of the curve?

Bias for Action

One of the differences between technology companies and traditional media companies has been speed. Hollywood organizations often move slowly, with decisions passing through multiple committees and layers of approval. That culture might have made sense at one point (but frankly, I doubt it) but it doesn’t work today.

Speed compounds. If an organization moves 40 percent faster than its competitors across hundreds of decisions every day — development, marketing, technology, partnerships — the advantage gradually becomes insurmountable.

Media companies struggle with this.

The combined Paramount–Warner organization will be large and complex, which makes the risk of bureaucratic drift great. Establishing a culture that values speed, ownership, and decisive action will therefore be critical.

Over time the company may formalize this culture through leadership principles or other mechanisms. But the most important step is simply to begin operating that way immediately. And the new culture must be built into the daily life of the company.

Conclusion

The task of making this work will be one of the more interesting endeavors, I was going to say of late, but I realize it will be one of the most challenging endeavors in the history of Hollywood.

However, it’s not like Paramount is walking into the future on a wing and a prayer. I think there is a fairly clear opportunity that would differentiate them from Disney and Netflix, transform the culture of the company, and pave the road to success.

At the end of the day, it really will come down to the team. As Bezos once said, and I paraphrase: “in the beginning of your career, the question is ‘how’: how do we do this? Later the question is ‘what’: what should we do now? But finally, the question is ‘who’ – – who should be leading us?”

If the merged company gets the team, culture, and strategy right, it has every chance to succeed.

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Would we conclude that people no longer like to eat?

Of course not.

We would conclude that we are not running the supermarket very well.

That is roughly where the theatrical business finds itself today.

Weekend 50 analysis

This past weekend’s domestic box office was $76.4M — down 19% vs 2024, 35% vs 2019, and 37% vs 2018.

But where exactly is that shortfall?

Start with where the box office shortfall really is.

Year: top 5/top 10/total box office:

2025 vs 2019

• Overall -41.4

• Top ten: -41.4 (100% of difference)

• Top five: -36.7 (89% of difference)

• Top One: -33.4 (81% of difference)

2025 vs 2018

• Overall: -44.1

• Top ten: -32.6 (74% of difference)

• Top five: -21.9 (50% of difference)

• Top One: -9.5 (22% of difference)

Films outside the top ten are not meaningfully underperforming.

The problem sits in the top ten.

Some other relevant numbers.

New movies in the top ten:

• 2025: 1

• 2024: 3

• 2019: 3

• 2018: 3

Total releases:

• 2025: 68

• 2024: 71

• 2019: 100

• 2018: 100

243 films — 122 per year — have been released in 2024-2025 with budgets over $15M. 433 such films were released in 2017-2019, 144 per year. So there has been a decline of 20 major films per year, or 15%.

Moreover, those films are not the same. Comedy and romance have declined almost to zero. This narrowing didn’t happen accidentally. It reflects what I’ll call the “Erewhon Consensus” — a set of assumptions about what kinds of movies are acceptable to make.

If Hollywood were making as many movies as before, of the same type, reduced performance would be more disconcerting. But if we were making as many movies as before, would we be making as much money as before? Let’s get into it.

The math of what’s missing

Some year-to-year variation is randomness. One year you get Jumanji or Avengers. Another year you don’t. Normalize for that variance for a year like 2019 and the structural gap to close is closer to $20M per weekend, not $40M.

Now look at outcomes.

Since 2017, 31.4% of films with budgets over $15M have grossed at least $45M domestically. I’m going to call that the observed “hit rate.”

If the industry produced 20 additional commercially oriented films per year:

• About 6 would be expected to become clear hits

• The other 14 would still generate real theatrical revenue

If just three of those incremental films landed in December — and one was a hit — the math closes the box office gap. One hit contributes $12–18M. Two non-hits add $6–10M. That’s roughly $20M.

No miracle required.

So essentially: yes box office is down. But the decline is 100% explained by the decline in theatrical releases.

What’s on?

Let’s do a practical test. You’re a reasonably normal adult in Los Angeles deciding what to see this weekend. You click on the AMC Century City listings.

Let’s look at this through an “adult” prism because horror has actually been pretty well served over the past few years and Hollywood has been fairly attentive to teen girls with titles like Barbie and Wicked (and I liked Barbie too!). But what’s on for everyone else now?

• Ella McCay: I love James L. Brooks but this has not been well-received. Older target demo. Opened to $2M and a $808 per screen average. Tough times.

• Rosemead: Well received but heavy Lucy Liu family drama in its second week platforming at one theatre.

• Eternity: Miles Teller + Elizabeth Olsen romantic comedy. Averaged $858 in week 3 so it is just about done at $13M.

• Hamnet: Well received but heavy 17th century drama maxing out in week three with $6.9M total domestic (per screen average <$2,000).

• Merrily We Roll Along (limited): Staged Sondheim musical. Maxing out at $2.2M after two weeks with a $715 per screen.

• Rental Family (limited): Charming drama set in Japan petering out at $10M domestic.

• Now You See Me Now You Don’t (limited): Week 5. $59M domestic so far. Sequel.

• One Battle After Another (limited): Week 12. Leveling off at $71M domestic. End of run.

Now ask:

• What’s the best action movie?

• The best romance?

• The funniest movie?

• Which poster would you hang in your dorm room?

The answer is basically: none of them.

This is the supermarket with bare shelves.

The theory that has never predicted anything

There is a cultural theory guiding Hollywood right now: audiences no longer want romance or comedy. People say that the audience has “moved on.”

But this cultural theory has never produced a confirming hit and it has no proof points of good comedies and romantic comedies (or regular romances) that failed to demonstrate that this “moving on” has taken place.

If this view were correct, it would have yielded its own Easy Rider — a breakout that proved the audience had changed. Instead, it has produced a string of failures. Films positioned as the new model did not replace the old system. They just bit the dust.

You do not prove a theory by failing.

Meanwhile, when a movie that violates this worldview appears and succeeds — Anyone But You, Top Gun: Maverick — the industry acts surprised.

This has been an error. Comedy is perhaps the best example. There hasn’t been a broadly funny theatrical comedy released in years.

Humans do not abandon entire categories of consumption spontaneously and for no reason. If audiences truly rejected comedy, releasing comedies would produce evidence of rejection. Instead, the industry stopped supplying them — and then interpreted weak box office as proof of changing taste.

The purpose of a system is what it does

Studio decision-making is now more insulated from box office outcomes than at any point in the modern era. Committees, streaming metrics, corporate structures, and post-hoc analysis all buffer individual decisions from theatrical results. When films underperform, responsibility is diffuse.

At the executive level, incentives are fairly indirect. Career progression depends heavily on internal alignment, peer evaluations, and managerial consensus than on whether a given slate succeeds commercially. Many studios sit inside conglomerates whose primary profits are generated elsewhere.

In this environment, it is rational — not malicious — to prioritize projects that are defensible internally over those that are risky but potentially popular. Over time, this produces what we see: fewer movies, narrower appeal, a hollowed-out middle.

In the independent space, the number of people who have shown an ability to consistently back films that are both ambitious and broadly popular is quite small. Outside of A24, it may be zero. What happens often is concierge greenlighting: filmmaker X gets a movie because they are filmmaker X. The absence of pushback and discernment has not helped anyone — including strong filmmakers, some of whom have recently made their weakest films.

New supply

The conventional narrative is that the audience has changed or disappeared. (I’ve read so many stories by 50-year-olds about how great their TVs and couches are!). But I don’t see how the numbers support this view.

People still want to see good movies.

My conclusion is that there is room for a new studio. Not only one that will make the movies that aren’t being made, but one necessarily that sits outside the Erewhon Consensus, the bien pensant view that has been limiting film now for some years.

Why does this require a new studio? Why isn’t the solution simply that the existing studios make more movies?

The honest answer is: they haven’t. And there is no evidence that they are about to. If the existing studios were going to fix this problem, they would have done so already.

There’s an old saying in Washington: personnel is policy. It applies here too. The people currently running the studios believe what they believe about culture, about audiences, and about risk. Those beliefs are reflected in what gets greenlit—and just as importantly, what doesn’t. Absent a change in who is making those decisions, we should not expect a different outcome.

That leaves only one realistic path: an independent minded firm that operates outside the establishment. If the industry needs more movies from a different point of view then it likely needs a new studio to do that.

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Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.

Let me take the other side. I will argue that Hollywood’s problems are solvable and nothing that unusual has to be done to solve them. And if we try slightly harder than that, things could be good.

So, what is troubling people? Let’s at least deal with TV volume and movie box office. (We will perhaps leave AI and production leaving LA to another day.)

PROBLEM 1: TV PRODUCTION IS DOWN

Is it though?

I mean. Here’s the chart:

Is 481 down from 600? Yes. Is it up from 2016’s 455? Yes. And was that up quite a lot from 2011’s 266? Absolutely. It was inevitable that series production would overshoot and then find its level. 600 may have been unrealistically high. In all probability, it will cycle around from here as competition waxes and wanes and as various corporate plans for total television dominance are implemented and/or quietly walked back.

If you take even a slightly medium-term view, I am not sure we have a right to complain about total TV volume.

PROBLEM 2: BOX OFFICE IS DOWN

Fair enough. The numbers are indeed down and the winnings are slightly more concentrated than in 2018-2019. The top 10 films in 2025 captured 39.3% of the total box office (so far) versus 2018’s 32.6% (-670 bps) and 2019’s 38.5% (-80 bps). So the market now is very slightly more concentrated than 2019 and more concentrated than 2018. But people often say that that it’s a “winner-take-all” market now (whereas it was not in the past). That does not appear to be true, or at least not by much.

That said, good movies are putting up good numbers: Zootopia. Minecraft. Wicked. The #10 movie of 2025 so far, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, grossed $197M. Last years #10, Kung Fu Panda IV, grossed $194M. In the halcyon year of 2019, the #10 movie grossed $212M. But after Avatar comes out, I suspect this year’s number ten will be in the same zone.

Clearly, the audience knows where the theaters are and they go to movies they want to see.

THE DISNEY OUTLIER ISSUE

One thing people forget about the box office decline is that Disney was on a once-in-a-generation tear in the late 2010s. In 2019 they had a 33% market share and did $3.7B domestic. That was not normal. Disney was playing out of their minds.

For context: in 2014 they did $1.6B. Five years later they were +131%, an extra $2.1B. That spike was essentially a Haley’s Comet — peak Marvel, peak Pixar, peak Star Wars, and live-action remakes, all hitting at the same time.

Since then, Disney’s box office has fallen back to earth: $1.8B in 2024 (21% share) and $1.8B so far in 2025 (23%). They’re down roughly $1.9B from peak.

2019 total U.S. box was $11.4B. 2025 is $7.7B so far, projected to be $8.6B. If Disney were still delivering their 2019 number, total 2025 domestic would wind up at $10.5B — which is only 6.2% below 2019.

In other words: the problem isn’t that audiences vanished. It’s that the late teens were an unusual period driven by an unsustainably hot Disney slate. We should not expect — or demand — to match it every year.1

ORIGINALS

You say that there aren’t enough rewards going to indie or original films?

What about Sinners? Sinners was a 100% original, based on nothing, period film with a lot of jazz music and it grossed $280M domestic.

What about Weapons? A solid horror film made in the $30Ms that grossed $152M domestic. Does that sound like an unhealthy market?

Demon Slayer. $134M domestic.

King of Kings, an indie animated faith film, grossed $60M.

Last year, Longlegs did $75M, Boys in the Boat pulled in $31M. Poor Things did $24M. Anora did $60M global. Cocaine Bear did $65M in 2023. Not bad considering.

I kind of feel like good movies are finding an audience.

You might ask: well, where are films like Terms of Endearment or On Golden Pond or Network? Where are our original dramas? Where is Five Easy Pieces? Or Boogie Nights!

Hey, I’m not saying that movies have on the whole gotten better. And I’m not saying we live in a perfect world. But what movie do you think really underperformed in 2025? Are there great movies going begging for an audience? I have to say, I can’t think of one.

Note that my definition of “great” includes being in step with the times. It’s not “great” to make a 1965 musical in 1969. And some great indie dramas that you could make money on in 2015 won’t work in 2025. That’s life. Times change.

2026

To match 2019’s box office, 2026 will have to be up about 15% from our beloved 2025. Is that so impossible?

It’s too late now, but, in time, here are some problems Hollywood can solve to help make it possible.

BE FUN

As I argued previously, the mode of the moment is fun. What do all the movies that have been doing well have in common? Well, most of them have been somehow fun.

GIVE PEOPLE WHAT PEOPLE WANT

There are several ingredients to successful movies, to a successful slate. Two of these ingredients are comedy and romance. For years, both have been mostly disallowed. But then when they occasionally appear, like some sort of samizdat underground film, people respond. You don’t have to use comedy and romance to your benefit, but someone is going to. And they will do well. If every restaurant in town goes vegan, all you have to do is open up a steakhouse to win.

GENERALLY: MAKE BETTER MOVIES

Implicit in all of the above is that an important part of the opportunity now is to simply make better films that are in touch with the moment. No, I do not think this has been happening, or it has not been happening to the extent it should. And, no, I do not even think it has been the top priority at most studios/networks. There is considerable room for improvement here. As I have said before, it is hard to make excellent movies or TV shows; to do so, you have to have only one goal, which is to make excellent movies or TV shows.

FINALLY: EXPECT CHANGE

One final thought. It may sound like I’m encouraging people to try to play more to the middle of the fairway. And yes, I am encouraging people to make movies that people might like. But at the same time, just as things have changed to lead us to this moment, things will continue to change. And it remains true that the people who create new eras and lead change and do best are always on the edge doing something new. As I’ve said: always do the daring thing.

RP

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The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

—Wallace Stevens

I was in an Uber this morning and my driver GUSTAVO, 22, got to talking about movies. Gustavo was disappointed that films now are just not as fun as they used to be, that their purity as artistic works had been impinged upon by messages, and that themes, when he was younger (citing Toy Story and Aladdin in particular) were of universal interest (e.g., “find your strengths — they are in you!”) whereas today the theme is too often just “climate change bad!” (or whatever). Gustavo would like to go to the movies more but he has been bored too many times.

We cannot afford to lose Gustavo.

To succeed in film, recently you have needed your opening weekend to be about 40% of your budget (unless you’re platforming). So if your budget is $20M, you would like to open at $8M or more. This is a rule of thumb and there are always exceptions of course.

Let’s look at some recent films.

As always, please don’t take this as a personal criticism. I love everyone.

One Battle After Another

Budget: $130M

Opening weekend domestic: $22M (17%)

The Materialists

Budget: $20M

Opening weekend (domestic): $11M (55%)

The Smashing Machine

Budget: $40M

Opening weekend (domestic): $5.8M (15%)

Kiss of the Spider Woman

Budget: n/a

Opening weekend (domestic): $919K (n/a%)

It’s harder to tell what’s profitable these days because the most important lever is the deal with the streamer, which is not public. But as a general matter, those deals are based on box office and the 40% rule is still a good rule of thumb. What can we conclude from some of the recent box office disappointments?

My suggestion is that they aren’t fun enough. Fun is not core to their spirit.

Another message is that making your movie for $20M is much safer than $40M or $80M. Materialists wasn’t amazing but it should be profitable.

Here is the basic map:

You want to be where the red star is. If you’re not fun, you’d better be a masterpiece, and that’s a bad bet. I thought The Brutalist was pretty great, but people didn’t think it looked fun. Making a non-fun masterpiece is hard. Making something fun is easier. It’s climbing downhill.

Before we go further, let me briefly suggest a definition of fun in the context of movies. The elements of fun include:

• Humor

• Romance

• Aesthetics, including music

• Action

• Some kind of novelty (eg a lot of people went to Avatar to see the impressive animation).

(You don’t have to have them all.)

And if those are not on the trailer or on the poster, it doesn’t count.

Times change

The nation’s mood changes. I think that fun is more important than it was say ten years ago. People want to know they’re going to have a good time. They’ve been burned. They have no time for your turgid and contentious screed or your pretentious mood piece. Don’t shoot the messenger.

One Battle After Another doesn’t look fun. DiCaprio looks unglamorous and unhappy. And the other person featured in marketing is a pregnant woman shooting a machine gun, which seems disconcerting. It does not appear that there is a romance. It’s not funny. They look like they need a shower. It’s an uphill climb. We want a downhill climb.

The Smashing Machine looks very serious. It has the Rock but he isn’t smiling and doesn’t look like himself. It’s not funny. I didn’t see a romance in the promotional materials. It looks kind of like The Wrestler, which grossed $26M in 2008.

Kiss of the Spider Woman. This has never been fun.

We’ve been subjected to a long run of unfun movies. For many years, Gustavo and I have been frustrated.

People have this idea that in the old days you could just do whatever artsy movie and it would do well if it was artistically good. This is not really true. Look at Room With a View. Beautiful film. Big romance. Shakespeare in Love. Fun. Big romance. The English Patient. Not for me but it did have a big romance.

The Master. No romance, not funny, not fun.($16M.)

You like There Will Be Blood? You think it was better than the English Patient? Well English Patient grossed $79M in the US and Canada. There Will be Blood grossed $40M, half as much. Out of Africa grossed $87M in 1985 ($261M today). There Will be Blood didn’t have a romance, wasn’t funny, and was basically all guys. I liked it very much subjectively, but it just didn’t have enough core fun elements.

4 Trends

This brings me to four trends I would bet on for the next five years:

• Asia

• Religion

• Comedy

• Hotness

I’m not saying this is what I want. I’m saying this is what I anticipate.

In ten years, we’ll be able to check back and see how it played out.

More Asia

No brainer. Look at Kpop Demon Hunters. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle just had a huge $70M US opening. Talk about fun (aesthetics + action). Not to mention Squid Game. CapCut. Hailuo. TikTok. You should be long Asia culture.

More Religion

When Nietzsche said God is dead, he may have spoken too soon. Religion appears to be growing. Every society needs a story. Are Adam Smith, John Locke and Instagram enough? I think these faith films will continue to do well.

More Comedy

There are certain people who dislike comedy. They don’t get it. They can’t write it. They can’t develop it. They tried to stop it. But the audience likes to laugh, so it’s coming back.

More Hotness

We’ve spent a few years pretending beauty doesn’t matter. That’s not sustainable. People like looking at attractive people — it’s human nature. So hotness is coming back. And with it, actual style. We’ve been in a visual slump — everything shot in the same flat, TV-ish way after peaks like Neon Demon or The Great Beauty. The aesthetic doldrums are ending.

You know what has a lot of fun — comedy, romance, aesthetics, hot people and good music? James Bond. Barbie. Star Wars. Wolf of Wall Street. And: movies like Napoleon Dynamite. It doesn’t have to be huge. It just has to be fun.

So it’s a new time. It’s like 1982 again. It’s the “boom boom era”. It’s like going from silents to sound. Don’t be stuck in the past.

A haiku:

People like to watch

Hot people blowing stuff up

That’s Hollywood, man

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Roy Price is the Kent A. Dorfman Professor of Fun Studies at Yale University and the author of The Fun Manifesto. He had a small part in Revenge of the Nerds (1984).

First I looked at how the average IMDb score of films that won their opening weekend varied between 2018-2019 and 2024-2025 (counting only through September 23). My instinct of course was that we would see a decline. And, in fact, we do see a decline. The average movie that won its opening weekend in the earlier period had an imdb score of 6.77. The average winner from 2024-2025 had an imdb score of 6.64. This is a difference of 0.13, which is more notable than it may at first seem because IMDb scores generally only range from ~6.0 to ~8.0.

My instinct was directionally correct, but the difference was not very dramatic. Maybe I am just being a nattering nabob of negativism, as Spiro Agnew once said.

Then I asked: of these films that had won their weekend, what percent had a score of at least 7? In 2018-19, 38.1% of the movies that won their weekend received an IMDb score of 7 or above. In 2024-2025, that number was 35.2%. (If we set the filter to IMDb = 8.0+, the numbers are 7.9% and 5.6% respectively, which is about a ⅓ drop). Again, things do appear to have gone in the expected (not good) direction but maybe not in a life changing way.

I decided, looking at this data, that I might not be asking the right question at all. That is, how people feel about the biggest blockbusters may be quite different from how people feel about films in general. So I decided to see how many films received an IMDb rating of 8.0 or more in these years (with the qualifier that they had to have made at least $5MM at the US box office). Here we saw a more dramatic shift:

So we are down from an average of 143 from 2014-2019 to 102 last year (and 64 so far this year). That’s a 29% decline from the 2014-2019 average to last year’s number. That accords with my subjective impression much better.

It is also interesting that the decline, when measured in this way, is also approximately one third, which correlates to the decline in 8+films at the top of the box office heap (29%).

Then the question becomes: are there fewer truly outstanding movies being made or do we have the same number of great movies except that many of them (perhaps 29%?) are going straight to streaming?

That is more difficult to answer. But I suppose I would ask – do you think there were 40 really excellent films released straight to streaming last year? If you do, then I am obviously watching the wrong streaming networks! I think the number is nowhere near 40. So while I think the decline in very well regarded films can be partly explained by the straight to streaming trend, I very much doubt that accounts for more than half of the observed decline.

How should we interpret this, noting that we have looked at similar numbers in television over similar periods (here)?

I do not think it would be correct to speculate that customers’ appetite for extraordinary films has substantially waned. Why would we believe that?

Or perhaps customers have become more difficult graders on IMDb over the past few years? But why would that be?

Or perhaps the creative members of our society have suddenly become substantially less creative? Again, you never know but that seems unlikely to me.

Bear in mind, these films are not all My Dinner With Andre. There is no upper box office limit on this 8+filter. Avengers: Infinity War! is on the list.

If we have not changed the pipeline of high potential films, and you have the same or a substantially similar pool of talented creators, then why would there be noticeably fewer 8+ films?

You might be saying “it’s the number of films, stupid!” — we make fewer films so there are fewer great films! But wouldn’t you think that the system would tend to prefer more outstanding films and disproportionately choose to make those? That is, if you reduced the number of films you were going to produce overall, do you suppose that you would cut the list down at random? Or would you try to release the best ones? Or do you really have no idea which the best ones are?

It is hard for me not to conclude that we have some sort of executiving problem but here are all the possibilities:

1. The executives are not as good or aren’t getting equally good training.

2. The execs are just as good but they have too many rules and distractions. (This I would believe.)

3. There is a misalignment between Hollywood and the people.

4. It’s harder to launch a star in this social media age, so we don’t have the stars especially younger stars who could launch some of these films. (Maybe? But we do have some younger stars.)

5. Whoever would have been the “Francis Ford Coppola of today” is off writing some substack or trying to be an influencer. Or they work at Google. (Possible but unfortunate because there is less we could do to correct this.)

Have to admit, I am not sure what the answer is. But if our great movies are down by a third, we must investigate and figure it out.1 In the meantime, I think there is room for 20-40 more movies on the market.

Oh, one last thing:

All the best,

Roy Price

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The combined company would have a strong IP portfolio: DC, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Friends, Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Transformers, Star Trek, South Park, the Yellowstone/Taylor Sheridan universe, SpongeBob, Paw Patrol, Looney Tunes, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and the entire CBS library. Few media companies in history have ever had such breadth.

But aa independent companies, Paramount and Warner Bros. have the same problem. They make a lot of money in the traditional television business, but that is declining. They make very little money in streaming. The streaming money has to grow to replace the TV money. But their assets, while considerable, are in both cases not quite enough to achieve critical mass and build a successful business in streaming.  

What to do?

Why This Is Good

Right now, both Paramount and WBD are stuck in the “gulf of death” — spending enough to lose money but not enough to win. Here is the chart I used in December 2023 (“Why Paramount-WBD Makes Sense”) to illustrate this point. Take the X axis to represent how much you spend per year on your service (including licensing your own content), and take the Y as the annual cash flow. As you build a subscription video business, you have to go through this valley where your selection is subscale. Generally that period is not rewarded with massive profits. This is because subscription video is essentially a fixed cost business and you are waiting for your variable revenue to catch up with (and exceed) your fixed costs. To get better results, you need:

• More customers

• Who stick around

• At the same or higher prices

Which is to say that lots of people have to like and value the service. 

Paramount and Warner Bros are basically both in the valley of death. Some people like the services, but not quite enough or not always. At their current scale, it’s just hard to get the customer stickiness that would cause revenue and cash flow to consistently rise and take everyone to the right side of the chart where one wants to be. What we have seen a lot of is services that become barely profitable and then they squeeze every nickel — until the buffaloes jump off, as they say — to stay slightly profitable. This is not great for customers; for the operators, it’s a trap. You can’t cut your way to success. It might avoid embarrassment to be able to say you aren’t losing money on your SVOD service, but people who are stuck in the valley of death and who are incapable of escaping generally don’t do interesting things or create value or escape. They under-invest, avoid bold creative bets, and drift.

A combined Paramount–WBD would escape this trap. It could:

• Invest in premium content and match Netflix, Disney, and Amazon in budget and ambition.

• Experiment with new formats — faster sequel cycles, year-round franchises, hybrid film/TV storytelling. (See “4 New Formats to Expect," here.)

• Build platform-level innovation, from social and interactive features to AI characters and commerce layers, competing not just with other streamers but with TikTok and Facebook for daily attention. (See “Welcome to the SVOD Super App Era,” here.)

Five scale players (Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Apple, Paramount–WBD) will be healthier for Hollywood than three giants and a couple of stragglers.

Oops, I forgot Comcast/Peacock! (But I’m not alone in that, am I?)

Criticisms

Some argue consolidation will reduce output. I would expect the opposite to be true. The whole point is to combine scale, not to merge and then have the same scale as before. 

A strong Paramount–WBD would probably mean:

• More budget for creators.

• The ability to pay top-tier talent competitively.

• A broader slate of better projects.

That’s my basic argument. 

A couple of further observations on the challenges associated with the deal if it goes through — 

Organization

The largest integration challenge is probably not financial but organizational. Who does what? Who owns what?

The merged entity should have a single leader responsible for the platform, or at minimum, a content head and a product/business head. This works for Netflix. It worked for Amazon when I was there. The whole idea of having three CEOs at the old Paramount was not good.

Movie Org

Here the merger is uncomplicated. Paramount Pictures currently lacks a top leader. Warner Bros. can absorb Paramount’s assets and team smoothly, creating one unified film studio.

TV Org

Television presents the opposite challenge: two highly capable leaders, Casey Bloys (HBO) and Cindy Holland (Paramount). One could become global head of content, the other head of global original TV. Done right, this would give the new entity the best TV leadership in the industry. 

Pick a Name 

Branding matters. WBD has lurched from HBO Go to HBO Max to Max. Paramount has its own “+” spinoffs. A merged service needs one clear name.

I think the best choices build on HBO or CBS. HBO carries premium cachet; CBS is broad and accessible. 

Either way, the name of the streaming service should also be the name of the parent company. If the future depends on the consumer platform, that’s the brand employees and customers should rally around. It should be in everyone’s email address and it should be the name of the company. 

Amongst groups within the company, any false sense of autonomy or independent mission is unhelpful. 

Recommendations In Brief

1. Unify Leadership: A single global head of the service (or at minimum, one content head and one product/business head) will ensure clear governance. Avoid “fiefdoms”.

2. Leverage Film Strength: Allow Warner Bros. Pictures’ existing structure to absorb Paramount’s slate and team.

3. Empower Television Leaders: Use the Casey Bloys / Cindy Holland overlap as an opportunity to build the industry’s strongest TV leadership team with complementary roles.

4. Simplify the Brand: Pick a name (HBO or CBS). Apply it company-wide.

5. Serve the Mass Market: Above all, the new HBO/CBS must aim squarely at the broad American audience. Hollywood thrives when it entertains everyone, not when it preaches or narrows itself to one cultural faction. Top Gun, Yellowstone, South Park, SpongeBob — these succeed because they entertain across lines. (See “Cheeseburgers and Fois Gras,” here.) 

6. Pursue Targeted International Acquisitions: it is a weakness that neither Paramount nor WBD have take the opportunity to build much overseas. At this point the combined entity should prioritize acquisitions of subscale SVOD services in markets like India (Alt Balaji), Japan (U-Next, Fuji), and Korea (Wavve). 

The Path Forward

Paramount–WBD could be strong enough to take risks, innovate, and compete for the future alongside Netflix, Disney, Apple, and Amazon. That’s good for creators, good for audiences, and essential for Hollywood’s future. 

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Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from HarvardCollege in 1989.

Would you choose Hollywood today?

I think you’d be nuts to.

In an earlier time, the business was growing. That is where you want to be in general: in a business that is coming up, where new opportunities are being created and it’s not just a fight over a zero sum pie.

Almost no one is making real money anymore. OK, a few people are very well compensated. But try to think of any category where people generally make more than they used to (adjusted for inflation).

Meanwhile, fewer shows and films are being produced than just a few years back. Everyone’s already subscribed to the services. What exactly is driving growth and opportunity around here?

If you’re young you might say “well, people are running around with nice cars and houses. Things must work somehow.” I’ll tell you what works somehow – being rich to begin with works fairly well. That’s what works.

As an executive, you’re much better off in tech. When you’re at a tech company, you have exit opportunities — you could become a VC or start your own company. In Hollywood, similar offramps have largely collapsed. People used to become producers, but it’s much less lucrative today and you have less autonomy. Also, because it is less clear than ever which projects have actually succeeded, you can’t count on success yielding the money and influence that you might imagine. Social cohesion might get you more in the modern Hollywood Deep State than producing the next big film.

The entrepreneurial opportunities in show business do not appear to be vast. Perhaps they never “appear” to be vast, but the business is dominated by huge companies where 99% of people just collect wages, and startup acquisitions are rare. In tech, it’s much easier to start a meaningful new company. It’s even easier in consumer packaged goods (see, Dr. Squatch). This is partly because movies are expensive. If you raise $500,000 from investors, in Hollywood you can pay for lunch; in Silicon Valley, you could spin up Instagram.

The tie between your skills and success has never been looser. New era hiring depends on a million things that have nothing to do with talent. Plus, the odds of career-ending cancel culture complaints are uniquely high in Hollywood -- people get expelled for minor jokes in order to free up jobs. Over thirty years, you're guaranteed to offend someone. Why accept that risk when you could work at Google or Goldman, where you'd have to do something genuinely bad to get fired?

It’s more than the money and security, though. This is my opinion, but I think the actual content is worse than it was even seven short years ago, which makes all of this less creatively or spiritually rewarding. Quality can go up and down, I suppose, and maybe we are on the cusp of a content golden age for some unknown reason, but, despite the occasional exception, in general, movies, TV and animation have been politicized and average-ified over the past six or seven years. At this point, it’s kind of embarrassing to be associated with it in any way.

I mean arguably there is some sort of real competence crisis. Consider how many talented actors are stuck in forgettable content. The indie film sector used to be much healthier. The key to indie success when it was successful wasn't finding unconventional stories – it was finding unconventional stories that got large audiences excited. That’s a skill that appears to have declined.

AI adds a layer of uncertainty. The technology’s impact on entertainment remains unclear. It might eventually create new opportunities or eliminate traditional roles, but the positive possibilities feel years away.

Maybe the optimistic view is that the last eight years were a cultural blip, and we just need to burn some sage and cast out some mistakes. Barry Diller wrote in Who Knew that his best creative runs thrived on open disagreement – arguments about ideas, about what was great. Amazon had that too. The past decade has been defined by niceness, politics, and mediocrity. What if we decided to spend less time being political and decorous and more time being amazing?

Bring back the ’90s, I guess is what I’m saying. Or the ’70s. Or at least the twenty-teens. Bring back daring and chutzpah, naturally aspirated V-8 engines, cigarettes, Stone Temple Pilots, conference-room shouting matches, public report cards, weekend box office as blood sport, and personality. Bring back fun. Because maybe it doesn’t work to run Hollywood – or a growing tech company – like a daycare. You don’t get bold films, or bold companies, or bold ideas that way. You just get more meetings.

Then again, Barry got out. And if I were 25, I’d probably just go to Google.

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Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.

I met Greta Gerwig once and she wasn’t very friendly to me. I’m sure she’s a very nice person in general. Maybe she doesn’t want to deal with execs? Some people are just having a bad night, you know. I don’t like it when famous people aren’t nice to me though. It makes me think people don’t like me. But in fact people do like me. They like me a lot.

I think.

Anyway, here’s the doc.

American Indie

Pilot Program Proposal

The Problem

There is a particular type of film that plays an important role in the market but isn’t getting made nearly as much as it once was: the low-budget character-driven film. This category of film is very much on the wane, which is a problem for the industry. Low-budget character-driven films like Easy Rider, Dazed and Confused, Boyz in the Hood, Bottle Rocket, Napoleon Dybanite, She’s Gotta Have It, Juno, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and Didi have historically served as the crucial stepping stone for many of our best directors. Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson, Greta Gerwig,, John Singleton, Todd Solondz, Sean Wang - they developed their voices and proved their abilities in this space before moving to larger projects.

Without this training ground, the director (and cast, and crew) development pipeline breaks down.

The Solution

American Indie will fund these culturally specific character-driven films to maintain a healthy category. Our mission: support early-career filmmakers telling authentic character-driven stories about specific places and communities, even if the economics aren’t incredibly compelling on paper.

Pilot Program: Two Films

Budget: $8M total

• Production: $4M (2 films × $2M each)

• Marketing: $3.6M (theatrical releases targeting $2.8M average domestic box office)

• Development: $300K

• Operations: $200K

Film Selection Criteria:

• The film is good: genuinely moving, funny, original, etc.

• Genuine character-driven, cultural dispatch from specific American community

• Early-career filmmaker with authentic connection to subject matter

• $2M budget sufficient

Distribution Strategy:

• Theatrical release targeting festival-to-arthouse pipeline

• Non-exclusive streaming licenses (2-year terms) with multiple platforms

• Traditional home entertainment and international sales

• Target economics: we expect to break-even at ~$2.8M average domestic box office

Why This Works

Creative Leadership: Experienced industry leadership will provide credibility with filmmakers and industry partners, ensuring proper curation and filmmaker development. And we will have some very hip interns.

Proven Economics: Recent examples like *Didi* ($4.8M domestic on minimal budget) and *A Real Pain* ($8.3M domestic) demonstrate profitable potential for these films. We think we can average $2.8M domestic and therefore break even on the whole.

Market Need: Streamers need prestige content for awards positioning. Non-exclusive licensing gives them quality films without massive exclusivity costs.

Realistic Scale: Two-film pilot proves concept before larger commitment. Success metrics clear and measurable.

Funding Needs for Phase One

$8M donation for pilot program from industry partners.

Phase Two: Scale to 5 films annually

The Opportunity

This is charity, but it’s strategic cultural investment, too. The industry needs films that matter, and that create opportunities for younger directors, actors and crew. The economics work, the creative leadership is proven, and the market demand exists.

Next Steps

• Identify American Indie team.

• Secure streaming platform commitments for non-exclusive windows

• Finalize funding commitments from industry partners

• Begin filmmaker outreach and project development

• Target first film production: Q4 2026

Why Not Do It?

• Because these films are already getting made - Uhm, not really. The pipeline is clearly broken compared to the 90s/2000s when this category was thriving.

• That’s it, I guess!

Like and subscribe!

RP

PS - Do you think one could effectively run a movie studio from Southern Connecticut? Was there last week and is very, very nice.

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But not quickly – 2025 domestic box office is still likely to be ~17% down from 2019.

There are several reasons for the decline in box office, including fewer US screens, a shorter theatrical window, and habits changing from COVID, but I’m going to suggest two more reasons, which are fixable: Hollywood has a comedy drought and a development problem.

Comedy

Comedy has been 1.9% of box office in 2025. I will be brief on this subject because I have discussed it before. But here is the comedy box office chart. You can see the decline from a steady15% - 20% per year to today’s totally unfunny 1.9%, starting in 2013.

Even the numbers we see above are exaggerated because kids films like Disney’s Haunted Mansion are counted as “comedies.”

Some have said that what’s really happening is that comedies are going to streaming. So there are just as many comedies getting just as much attention as before, but it’s on streaming. But what exactly are they talking about? Name one strong original comedy that was direct to streaming. People are not releasing comedies that are not working. They are just not releasing comedies. If comedy is 1.9% of box office now and it used to be at least 15%, does that mean that we are not serving 13% of demand?

Now, wait. How far down are we from 2019? Did you say 17%? Hmm. Is there a relationship here?

Quality

Here is the other factor – it is essential for this whole thing that we call the business of show to make good movies. Did you see the New York Times Top 100 films thing recently where they determined the top 100 films of the century so far? Well, here is how the top 100 break down by three year groupings:

I didn’t draw that line by the way, Google drew the line, so that’s just math.

Does it seem odd that the periods from 2000 to 2017 average 14 “Top 100” films per three year period and then in 2018-2023, where we would expect 28 films, we get 15 films instead, even though these films are more recent and therefore fresher in mind?

Is it COVID? Is it strikes? Anti-recency bias? Or … worse movies?

My suggestion, and no one is allowed to say this so it’s good that we can chat here, is that the movies are actually worse.

Compare the results in TV. I have discussed this before, but let’s look again at the number of new American series rated 8 or above on IMDb per year by year.

So from 2014-2019, we average 20 x 8+ shows per year. From 2020-2024, we average 10 x 8+ shows per year. Now, I understand there was COVID, but the total number of shows did not go down 50%.

To me it looks like there are multiple factors but something is happening around quality – something bad. And I probably would not have this suspicion if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes (well, ears) that there was a marked change in development around 2017 and the ensuing years. Obviously, as everyone knows, everything became very political. One manifestation of that was a sense that anything too “elite” was bad and anything too hard to write was elite. So if you had pitched Mad Men or maybe Sopranos, two strong shows from Hollywood’s “peak quality era,” they would certainly have encountered resistance.

It’s as if after Rembrandt died, the market decided that his style of painting makes other painters feel bad and we have to set a lower bar.

Did we not get Succession? Did we not make White Lotus, Hacks, and The Bear? Of course. I am not saying that quality went to zero without exceptions or that there were zero comedies. I am saying that their numbers declined dramatically.

Are the New York Times Top 100 and IMDb bad indicators of overall quality? Well. IMDb is definitely not a bad indicator of quality because in my experience it does a great job predicting viewership in the future. So there is something to those scores even if they did give Lost in Translation a mere 7.7/10.

With respect to the New York Times piece, make of it what you will. I think it represents something real. At least, I think it’s much more commercially relevant than the Sight & Sound Top 100, for example. I suppose you might argue that actually everything is okay. But if everything is okay, why are so many movies disappointing?

Two Examples

Let’s look quickly at two films that came out recently, The Materialists (IMDb 6.8) and Elio (IMDb 7.0). No two films can tell us everything that is happening in Hollywood, but I think these point us toward some useful insight. I am not going to go through these films in every detail but I will hit the big points.

The question I am addressing is – what does it look like when people just are not developing movies very well?

The Materialists (warning: spoilers)

In the film, Dakota Johnson is Lucy Mason, who is a matchmaker in NY. She grew up “poor.” which doesn’t read at all. In the course of her business she encounters private equity guy Pedro Pascal (Harry Castillo). They are both single and they met at a wedding so naturally they start to date, where she finds that Harry/Pedro is basically the perfect guy. But this doesn’t sit well with Lucy because she thinks, based on her expertise, that she is not enough for him. (It’s difficult to position professionally attractive actors as ugly ducklings, but she focuses on her age, which to me didn’t make sense for Pedro Pascal, but whatever.) Meanwhile, Lucy’s semi-employed ex Chris Evans (John Finch), who does not have his life figured out at all, comes back into the scene. So, you see the set up. Rich guy. Poor guy. Will she follow her heart? (Let’s hope not!)

The Materialists would not have been made in its current form in any prior era because (a) it is a never funny comedy, (b) it is trying to be deep but has thin characters, and (c) it is full of long, theatrical monologues (which might conceivably be tolerable but for the other two issues).

One problem with an emotionally resonant NY romantic dramedy is that James L. Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Nora Ephron and Woody Allen exist or have existed. So the standard is kind of high. It’s like debuting an opera at the Met. Funny, moving, real, genuine, original, and deep is the standard for this sort of film. We are circling this in The Materialists but we never get there.

I mean. She’s a matchmaker. And we have some slices of life early on about her life. You can’t have one or two amusing matchmaker moments? I don’t get it but I feel like there was someone in here who said “see, back in the bad old days we would have had a hilarious joke here and now we get to skip that.” Crazy choice.

What does it mean to have a thinly drawn character? Well, let’s take Harry Castillo. For a minute, I was thinking that Harry reminded me of a friend of mine. They look kind of similar. They’re in the same business. But then I realized – how would I know if they were alike? We don’t know Harry at all except for the superficial characteristics that I have already conveyed. Would I be friends with him? Who are his friends? Who are her parents? She grew up poor? How so? It’s important to create specific characters. You know who they are and why.

When characters have no personal context and everything is generic (where is his apartment in NY anyway?), it just can’t get started. Look at The Way We Were. They have a whole backstory in college. Look at Annie Hall, where we spend a lot of time with both families. Look at The Graduate. It is essential to create characters that are real, who have context. They have to live in a specific place on a specific block. They need to be as real as people you know. We want to understand why they are the way they are and they too need to be surprised and delighted by what happens. So they have to talk in specifics. That’s how life is.

And occasionally it should be funny.

Just to back myself up, there were some pretty good insights from the actual IMDB reviews.

• Kimberlya7 said in her review “On what planet did someone rate this a 10?”: “It was so bad. The awkward pauses, the effort it was taking to believe any of these people were attracted to each other. The idea of the story isn’t terrible, but everything else about this was just awful. If you wanna see it don’t pay for it.”

• dilpreet-558 said: “The story offered nothing substantial … when you don’t have anything good to say, say nothing. When you have absolutely nothing to say, maybe don’t go make a movie about it. Not every movie has to change your life but it should at least leave an impression. The cinematography and set design were flawless.”

• steiner-sam wrapped things up, I thought, with: “It’s not funny enough to be a comedy, romantic enough to be a romance, or dramatic enough to be a drama.”

So I’m not crazy.

In any normal time, The Materialists would first get a quick title change so it doesn’t sound like a Political Science seminar, and then it would get many, many notes. And one fine day years from now a version that works would finally come out. And that’s ok. It’s better for everyone.

But we are not in normal times.

Elio (warning: minor spoilers)

When you have story problems, they almost always trace back to act one. In acts two and three you have your set pieces, where they dance and celebrate, you have the action sequence, you have the sequence where they realize that they should have been friends all along, and the one where their weakness turns out to be their greatest strength. But none of the business in acts two and three will matter if we don’t set up act one with strong, relatable characters that people care about.

I have heard that the tale of getting Elio produced is quite complicated. I don’t really want to dive deep on those intricacies. However it came about, Elio, sadly, just never nailed act one. Elio himself is an uninteresting character who has no relationships that we care about. Why was Bambi immediately interesting and yet sad sack Elio is not? You know, at the end of the day that’s the difference between strong writing and not strong writing.

Elio lost his parents somehow. And therefore he wants to go to space and meet aliens. OK. And that is what happens. Really? And they bring a lot of trouble of their own because there is a big two dimensional villain amongst them. Uh huh (checking watch).

Part of the problem is that in this story Rudolph doesn’t have a red nose that shines so bright. When you have an oddball thrust into solving a big problem, you want your odd characteristic to turn out to be just the thing to save the day. We didn’t quite get there this time.

And each sequence after act one felt like it owed as much to other stories as to the story we had seen thus far.

It’s not so much that it’s predictable. It is, but it is really that we don’t care.

In Conclusion

1. Never make anything for bad reasons.

2. There is only one good reason: this film is going to be amazing.

Who would not do these movies? Michael Eisner. Peter Guber. Jeff Katzenberg. Dawn Steel. Robert Evans. Adolph Zukor. Irving Thalberg…

You know, it’s kind of a long tradition with standards and a long record of success that we have. You can rely on some of these story principles that have worked before. We already know how this works!

Do you know how many drafts of Tootsie they did? Do you think that none of those drafts were pretty good? Of course they were. But they weren’t amazing. So in the end they paid Larry Gelbart a million dollars to do that final draft and make it golden brown. And that worked. (I know this story because my father made that deal.)

What we have to remember is that this business runs on exceptions. For every studio that’s done well, a small handful of truly great movies and shows did the heavy lifting.

Solid doesn’t move the needle. Exceptional does. Getting there is hard. It takes drafts. Disagreement. Real development.

Yes, there are challenges: theatrical windows, audience habits, COVID aftermath. But the biggest opportunity is still the oldest: make something great. Align with the audience. Obsess over quality.

Start with getting the first ten pages right. Then everything else gets easier.

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Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.

When your eyes first fall upon the Mediterranean you know at once why it was here that man first stood erect and stretched out his arms toward the sun. It is a blue sea; or rather, it is too blue for that hackneyed phrase which has described every muddy pool from pole to pole. It is the fairy blue of Maxfield Parrish’s pictures; blue like blue books, blue oil, blue eyes, and in the shadow of the mountains, a green belt of land runs along the coast for a hundred miles and makes a playground for the world.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, How to Live on Practically Nothing A Year, The Saturday Evening Post, September 1924

Ahh, Cannes. Each May, Hollywood gathers for a two week film festival-party-market that feels like something between showbiz prom and your own private remake of To Catch a Thief. In Hollywood’s nonstop 52 week a year circus of meetings, parties and festivals, Cannes is perhaps the quintessence of it all.

Everywhere in Cannes, or, really throughout La Cote d’Azur, one is surrounded by legends of past Hollywood derring-do and, one hopes, by the opportunity to create your own.

What’s the prize? The prize for you might be selling your foreign rights, financing your film, landing the star you needed after a set of tennis on the clay of the Cap d’Antibes, or just connecting with friends and collaborators.

But ostensibly, the Palme d’Or is the prize — the most prestigious award in international cinema, given on the Riviera, wrapped in gold, and applauded with standing ovations carefully timed by Variety.

But what is the Palme d’Or worth? And should you even be going to Cannes? Below, I will assume you want to win Oscars and make money.

The market part of Cannes, where people make deals, was, a month ago, a bit of a dud (or worse). Foreign sales and all deals were far below expectations. The reality is that the market for films used to be comprised of many healthy sub-markets divided by country and category (film, TV, etc.). So it used to make sense to meet with the Italian free TV person and the French theatrical person, etc. — and they all had to acquire some product. But though there are some licensing deals still to be made, increasingly there is just one unified global SVOD market where most deals are made in LA. The old Cannes, where Dino DeLaurentis or Francis Ford Coppola could cobble together the financing for their next film before heading off to Silvio Berlusconi’s yacht party, is mostly a memory.

But, still, people — studios, producers, filmmakers — push to get their films in competition. Many very legit Hollywood people go to the festival. Films that shine, if they haven’t been picked up for distribution yet, often are picked up. There is a sense that the competition is important. People talk about it.

So is it?

To avoid boiling the ocean here, I am going to focus on Palme d’Or winners because they epitomize “success at Cannes.” The big answer is perhaps unsurprising: for most films, the Palme d’Or doesn’t seem to help much financially. But for the right film—one with a real story, real emotion, and the potential to travel — the Palme d’Or and, in general, a positive reception at Cannes, is a powerful springboard. It can turn a strong indie into a must see event, with tens of millions in profit and a lifetime of prestige for the filmmakers and distributors involved.

The Palme is not a lock, but about 20% of the time, it will take a film to the next level.

The 10-Year Track Record

Here are the past ten Palme d’Or winners:

From a money point of view, most Palme winners vanish quietly after their moment on the Croisette. (Of course, they linger on in our hearts.)

The Cannes jury changes every year but its taste is consistently pretty artsy. I am not saying that in a bad way. I have done a lot of “artsy” movies. But it’s true.

Nomadland’s success is hard to judge because it came out in a dead COVID box office year. I will count it as a win, but we will never know how it would have done in a normal year.

But 20% to 30% of the Palme d’Or winners lived the dream. Which makes it very much worth pursuing. Two standouts in the past decade fully represent the Cannes brass ring:

Parasite (2019)

• Directed by Bong Joon-ho.

• Won Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Foreign at the Oscars—the first film ever to do so.

• Grossed $253 million worldwide on a ~$15 million budget.

• Put Bong firmly in the top tier of global auteurs. Put distributor Neon on the map.

Was it a guaranteed hit? No. It was in Korean. It was dark. But the Cannes win created global urgency — which drove reviews (Metacritic 97%) and eventually, Oscars.

Anora (2024)

• Directed by Sean Baker. Won the Palme d’Or.

• Grossed $20M U.S., $39M international

• Won Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

• Cemented Baker as a major American filmmaker.

Big wins.

Would Parasite and Anora have succeeded anyway? In my opinion, not nearly at the same scale (presuming they didn’t go on to win Venice instead).

• Parasite needed visibility to break through the subtitle barrier. Cannes gave it that visibility—and critical weight.

• Anora had a compelling story, but without the Palme, it easily could have topped out at $5M and been a footnote come Oscar season.

Winning Cannes helped Anora and Parasite and doing the festival was well worth it for them. Either one could have been much more modest successes. Cannes is great for a film that is artistically accomplished but also delivers emotionally in a somewhat traditional way. For those films, it can give you what you’re hoping to get.

Should you go to Venice or Cannes?

Venice is developing a strong record of delivering box office success and Oscar noms and wins. Here are the last ten Golden Lion winners:

Venice has become the strategic favorite for many Oscar campaigns. It’s later in the year (September), friendly to streamers, and has launched recent hits like Nomadland, The Whale, Joker, Poor Things, and Roma. And just before this time period it also premiered Birdman.

All else being equal, I would say that getting the festival boost in September is better than getting it in May because the momentum runs straight into Fall. (One small problem: this year Venice and Telluride overlap.) But, with exceptions, I would say that Venice boosts a slightly different film than Cannes. On the whole, Venice has recently been more open to films that are a bit more commercial. It’s overbroad, because Almodovar’s The Room Next Door for example — no offense — was not at all commercial, but it feels like a somewhat more popular film like Joker and Shape of Water have a shot at Venice, whereas they might not at Cannes. I suspect both might have played out of competition in Cannes.

You might ask whether The Brutalist, which premiered in Venice in 2024, might have done better at Cannes against Anora. I love both these films but I think Brutalist would have had a real shot at Cannes. Would Poor Things have edged out Anatomy of a Fall in Cannes in 2023? It’s possible. Poor Things did great anyway, but it feels to me like a Cannes film.

Venice and Cannes are both great. If your film is a bit more commercial, Venice might be more open to it. If your film is artsy and/or has an auteur director (especially with some Cannes history), it could be right for Cannes. If your film is just a turgid bomb in any case, it sort of doesn’t matter — neither festival can save you. It is a benefit that you can do both Cannes and Telluride, which Anora did. But you cannot generally do both Venice and Telluride.

So Cannes doesn’t elevate everything. But if you have a special film with good performances where the story really delivers, then it can be worth $30M/$40M. It is well worth pursuing.

People do (Jojo Rabbit did), but I would tend not to premiere at Toronto. I feel like by the time we are in Toronto the narrative has already gotten rolling and you’re slightly behind. And I would rather premiere in Cannes and then play Telluride than just premiere at Telluride.

I will note though that Everything Everywhere premiered at SXSW so, really, you never know. But that was a very commercial film in tone.

I don’t want to downplay the non-financial benefits of having success at either festival — or any of these terrific festivals. Even if there are no Oscar noms and your talky, indulgent, tone poem bombs at the US box office and bankrupts your studio, the prestige of winning or even just being well received at any of these festivals has great personal and career value. To be honest, few remember that Anora won the Golden Lion but Brady Corbet won Best Director at Venice and no one cares. Within 24 months it will all fade into a general notion that the film was very prestigious and well-regarded and you’re a fabulous and very svelte person.

Final Takeaway

Most years, the Palme d’Or winner flickers and fades. But once or twice a decade, it hits the right film at the right moment — and changes everything.

So if you’re making something small, powerful, and real? Something with story, stakes, and heart? Cannes could be the choice, and it could take your film — et vous —to the next level.

But you can’t go wrong, really.

Best books —

On the plane to Cannes: Peter Biskind, Easy Riders Raging Bulls (1998); Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944).

On the plane to Venice: Just watch Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). Or for a historical perspective, read Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune (2013).

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Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.

Did they not get the memo about comedy? Has the memo been retracted?!

COVID; MeToo; BLM; the disappearance of the China market; major strikes; the rise of YouTube; acquisitions at Warner Bros. and Fox; layoffs; the decline of theaters; a 40%+ decline from "peak TV"; Disney went up 1% a year for eight years while Warner Bros. went down 12% per year and Paramount went down 20% per year; Otium, Church & State, Le Petit Bistro, and Bouchon closed; agency packages were deleted (!); and streaming increasingly dominated everything.

Together, these events triggered a panic spiral of risk-aversion and Hunger Games-style infighting such as the industry has not seen since the Hays Code.

Hollywood responded with some… choices. Comedy was essentially declared dead. Shows deemed too smart, "elite," or hard to write disappeared. This would include, say, The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad – basically all of the best shows ever made (which is not to say that I did not like Succession or Shogun – there are still a few). First came a purge of some genuinely bad people. Then came a purge of anyone who had ever parked in anyone's space. People went on strike. Networks stopped ordering. Writer hiring declined precipitously. Though there were some rich overall deals, most backend was replaced by bonuses that wouldn’t buy a guest cottage in Montecito.

If Hollywood's drug of choice in the 80s was cocaine, in the "roaring" twenties, it's Lexapro.

This era needs a name. I have thought – the Streaming Era? But we are still in that.

The "Content" Era? Not bad.

But I think I like the Panic Room Era, which really captures the unsettled and erratic state of the business and its people.

Honestly? Not a great (eight year) decade in my opinion.

That said: what do we have to look forward to?

And what do we have to fear?

What will be good about this new era?

Four predictions.

DIY IP

Creators will have the ability to create popular IP without giving up their rights. This is emerging today. There are many platforms where you can get ideas in front of people in various forms without any transfer of rights – YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, WattPad, WebToons and others. Now, there are many legitimate discussions to be had about AI and I am going to save those for another day and just point out that AI will make this considerably easier. Not only can people popularize ideas, they can also build their personal brands.

This is all happening now of course, and there are a few success cases, but I think it will become more important. This is good because there is a huge difference between having an idea and selling it to a studio or network and, on the other hand, having an established property that you then license to a studio or distributor. Some creators may be totally satisfied with their YouTube economics and never license it at all. Great for creators.

The Return of Popular Taste

As loyal readers know, I have been disappointed by the disappearance of certain types of shows and movies over the past eight years. I believe that this is no longer sustainable. For one thing, times are tough. We can’t be casting aside our best work or entire popular genres. Second, as discussed, many have realized that the idea that the Hollywood bubble is always right about what people want has been punctured by recent events. There is clearly an audience out there that is not having lunch at the Farmshop and is basically not aligned with Hollywood’s recent preferences. And they have money.

Bottom line: when Hollywood stays tightly snuggled in its bubble, it becomes weaker. People have to get back to asking, “will it play in Peoria?” And I suspect at least for a while, they will.

Creator Ownership Begins

Look at Ryan Coogler’s deal on Sinners. After twenty-five years, he will own the copyright to the film (he’ll be 63). Big congratulations to Ryan, his agent Craig Kestel (WME) and his lawyer Jonathan Gardner! That’s not going to become the default deal, but as the value of entertainment companies depends more on streaming wins today than on their libraries tomorrow, you can imagine this happening more.

I could also imagine talent more often bringing their own financing, especially if platforms emerge to connect them with global investors (imagine kickstarter but with real securities). For top creators this would promise greater upside.

Finally, it is not out of the question that the federal government could try to reinstitute some modernized version of the financial syndication (“Fin-Syn”) rules that prevailed from the 70s to the 90s and that required networks to buy shows from independent studios. I personally find it hard to imagine that this gets to the very top of Washington’s to do list, but you never know. Donald Trump does have an interest in Hollywood…

Purging

I have written about this before so I am not going to go into detail. But I think the process left a lot to be desired. I suspect this kind of thing will be handled in a more orderly and just way in the future. But you never know!

What could be bad?

Cable

No one knows the future trajectory of traditional pay TV. Is it possible that, having declined precipitously, it finds its floor and stabilizes? Except for Blockbuster, few things actually go away. But if the decline of pay TV is worse than hoped, a lot of cash and value seep out of the Hollywood ecosystem, to be replaced by bupkis. Though not everyone intuitively agrees, I believe that it is better for everyone if the major entertainment companies thrive.

Consolidation

More buyers are always better than fewer and the majors would like to consolidate a bit more until there are more like three big entertainment companies. This might not happen because of antitrust law, but to be honest it is hard to argue that a merger of say Paramount and Warner Bros. would negatively affect consumer prices. But on the whole I think that substantial consolidation would have a variety of bad consequences.

Indie

Indie is not just about making a special film. You have to pick the right special films and they have to be well marketed. I feel like this is happening less than it used to. Moreover, as discussed, indie films are spread out across all of the services, which makes the whole category harder to follow. Anora and Poor Things get a lot of attention, but there are a lot of other films that did not enjoy anything like that kind of success. Will indie financing hold up?

AI Apocalypse

In the worst case scenarios around AI, it does all the writing and makes the movies and there is nothing for us to do but watch the computer sit there and do all of Hollywood without even going to lunch. Or people start enjoying an entirely different sort of customized instant entertainment.

It sounds revolting, I know, but it is possible.

Mounjaro

Omg what if there is some secret problem with Mounjaro that we only discover in ten years. What if it affects the brain? What if it subtly rewires personality — drains empathy, heightens vanity, frays attention span? What if it turns people into addled, narcissistic ghouls?

Oh wait…

Seriously though — we all look amazing. Let’s just pray it’s not embalming fluid in a pen.

What Should Happen

Hey, what’s your favorite show?

That isn’t White Lotus, I mean.

I believe that the shows and movies are worse and the numbers back me up. As I have shared before a few times (so I won’t burden you with it again), new, original series that scored above an 8 on IMDb took a nosedive after 2017. Actually, they didn’t decline everywhere. Whatever affected Hollywood did not, apparently, happen at HBO. But every other place suffered a sharp decline in shows that America thought were truly excellent. Which is not to say that America did not watch The Night Agent or Ginny & Georgia, but they didn’t put them in the same league as, say, The Sopranos. Or Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Or pick your show from the teens.

Reporters apparently cannot comment on this obvious fall off. It seems that no matter how clear the data is, you just can’t say in an article that “the network is experiencing flat growth mainly because their shows are thoroughly mediocre.” But that’s the beauty of Substack.

This was done on purpose. Or at least things were done on purpose that inevitably produced this result.

I think what we need is either (a) distributed development and producing where it really is more like being in a fin-syn world where indie studios – or even parallel, independent pods within the streaming behemoths – compete with each other and provide a large portion of each streamer’s programming, or (b) at least, we need someone at the top of each streamer who only cares about success. Because we want good shows and movies.

Experimenting with film windowing and possibly with the length of licenses of independently produced TV shows could make the economics of films and shows better by giving them more upside in success. I think there are some worthwhile experiments to be done here and I hope people do them.

I would like to see one kind of consolidation – I want the whole indie space, at least on the distribution side, to consolidate, if not into one company, then at least into one streamer. This is completely doable and it would find an audience (discussed here).

Finally, we have to drop the whole AI subplot. I forget who pitched it in the room — it was very late at night and obviously wasn’t thought through to the gory end. We’re just going to write Sam Altman out of the show. We’ll say he forgot his password, tried ten variations that didn’t work, and his computer self-deleted. Too bad!

But seriously — what is the non-disastrous AI outcome?

Maybe it’s not that AI writes everything or does everything. Maybe the key is this: you can make a Star Wars or Marvel movie for $10 million below the line. Maybe less.

Some interesting implications to consider:

• Adult dramas and comedies might not be affected much. Their budgets are already low, and audiences may prefer that they feel more genuine.

• Genre filmmakers would gain new autonomy — raising money and producing sci-fi, action, or horror independently, with greater upside.

• We’d probably get more originals and fewer sequels.

• Competition would go global. A great team in Nigeria could bang out incredible new franchises.

• Stars would remain valuable. With more content in circulation, a star’s involvement could become an essential marketing differentiator.

• Studios would focus more narrowly on marketing and distribution. Unless, of course, an open streaming platform emerges where entrepreneurial filmmakers can upload their work directly. (I’ve recommended this before.)

• Deceased stars would make a comeback. 1984 Schwarzenegger or 1972 Bruce Lee would be in very high demand.

That’s the pitch. Back to you, Hollywood.

I hope the name for this new decade is something amazing.

RP

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"Grosse Point Blank pulled three-point-one for the weekend," said Craig, adjusting his tie as he scrolled through an Excel spreadsheet on a bulky Dell desktop. "Down thirty-five percent from last weekend. Not terrible for week three."

Dianne Kim entered, immaculate in a tailored pantsuit. "The Dante's Peak comparisons?"

"All prepared," said Craig, handing her a folder. "Along with the revised P-and-A numbers for The Saint. I've placed that issue of Time with Ellen DeGeneres coming out on his desk, and I ran the Q2 Blockbuster sales projections through the fax."

Dianne nodded, scanning the folder. "And The Lost World?"

"Opening Memorial Day. The mock-ups arrived from the printer yesterday. I've scheduled them for his two o'clock."

A younger staff member approached with a slip of paper. "Ms. Kim? Jim Carrey's office confirmed for eleven."

"Craig, what was his mood at breakfast?" Dianne asked, lowering her voice.

"Good but he kept asking when the Titan screening was happening. I said I'd check with Cameron's office."

"Craig is that a Zyn in your mouth? Spit it out.”

Craig spit it into the trash can.

“Thank you,” said Dianne.

"He was talking about Cameron directing with Leonardo DiCaprio starring."

"That was never even announced," Dianne said with a frown. "Does Dr. Imbroglio know?"

Craig shrugged. "I made a note in the log."

Craig arranged the documents in the folder —box office reports, development slates, competitor analyses.

Everything was ready.

Dianne reached over to the cassette player, pressed play and Third Eye Blind’s “Semi Charmed Life” poured out of the tinny speaker.

I want somethin' else

To get me through this

Semi-charmed kinda life

Baby,

Baby,

I want somethin' else

I'm not listenin' when you say,

'Goodbyyyyye'!

She pressed Stop.

"OK everyone, phones in the safe. Welcome to 1997."

Another day at Keystone Pictures had begun.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Dianne walked by the Keystone Film Co. logo on the wall of the waiting room, approached famous actor Jim Carrey and said “Mr. Walsh can see you in about five minutes. May I ask a favor?”

“Sure, Dianne.”

Dianne presented a pair of size 12 Stan Smith tennis shoes.

“I need you to change into these shoes. Your shoes are not period appropriate.”

“Really? They’re pretty generic ….”

“As you know, in this house it is still and always 1997. I will need your phone. And I need you to wear these shoes, which will send no one into paroxysms of cognitive dissonance.”

Jim Carrey, for better or worse, has very small, even delicate feet. But Dianne only had the one pair of period appropriate sneakers, which were size 12 because as she said, “better too big than too small where shoes are concerned.”

Jim handed over his phone and switched into the Stan Smiths.

“In Korea they call such tiny feet burglar’s feet,” she said accusingly.

“Listen, Dianne, is there something I can do to help with all this?”

She turned to him sharply.

“Whatever you do, don’t try to, as you say, ‘help.’ Anything that jars him from the illusion threatens his well being — and even his life. We have crafted this for many years, as you know. So it’s 1997. Liar, Liar is out now and Clinton is the President!”

Dianne turned and let the way toward Jerry’s office and Jim clomped after her.

Jim entered Jerry’s office and took in the familiar sight. A classic fax machine. Scripts and memos on the desk to the right. Oscars arrayed on the walnut bookshelf to the left. The ubiquitous Motel 6 ashtrays since, as Jim vaguely recalled, Jerry’s parents had run Motel 6’s.

And Jerry himself, as always well attired, in a deep blue pinstriped Carroll & Co. suit with a rich silk orange tie. Older now of course, but the same man, and lively.

Jerry rose from his desk chair.

“Jim, you look amazing! Thanks for coming in.”

They shook hands and Jim took in the posters on the far wall — Airplane, In Living Color, Home Alone, The Mask — just a small selection of Jerry’s legendary string of comedy hits.

“Jerry, it’s been too long. Man, look at all these. Good, good times!”

“Fun stuff. Much more to come, old boy, hopefully from our collaboration.”

As Dianne had suggested to Jim, they kept the conversation at a high level. It was a general meeting.

“So what’s next, Jim? How can we get on the Jim Carrey dance card?”

“I’m about to shoot one called The Truman Show with Peter Weir.”

“Love Peter. Good choice no doubt. Love Truman, too!”

“What’s the date, Jerry?”

“What’s the date for what?”

“What is today’s date?”

“April 25, Jim. You writing me a check?”

“What’s the year? I really haven’t been paying much attention of late.”

“Ha. Jim, it’s 1997. You must have been really focused. Is this a bit?”

Jim walked over to the window and surveyed the back lawn, which rolled down out of sight just after the life-sized chess set. He turned back to Jerry.

“It’s a beautiful day out, Jerry. Do you need any help? Is everything ok?”

Jerry looked a bit confused. And at that moment, Dr. Imbroglio burst into the office.

“Mr. Walsh — I’m afraid your next appointment is here early.”

Everyone looked at each other in sequence — Jim at Dr. Imbroglio, Dr. Imbroglio at Jim, accusingly, Jerry at Dr. Imbroglio, and then everyone at Jerry.

“Well. Apologies, Jim. Do call after The Truman Show. I’m very eager to get something on the slate for Keystone.”

Dr. Imbroglio gave Jim an extra stern glance.

“I will, Jerry. And we will.”

Astrid pulled off Crescent Drive on to the white gravel driveway to see her father’s white beaux-arts mansion, which she remembered only vaguely. Closer to the house, the green lawn gave way to a large bed of red roses; the chorus of sprinklers, like automated sparrows, maintained the familiar, rhythmic Beverly Hills chant — “chit-chit-chit-chit-sheeeeee chit-chit-chit-chit-sheeeeee” that sang, she thought, that ‘everything was going to be okay’, in the sprinkler tongue.

A uniformed maid opened the front door as Astrid stopped her car. Astrid got out and thought it could have been any time in the past century — 1925, 1965. Stardust ran through her mind: Beside the garden wall when stars are bright…, perhaps some vestige from the before times, before her mother spirited her away to Ojai and then Uppsala.

“Are these espadrilles ok?” she wondered.

"I'm so glad you called," said Dianne, motioning for her to sit. "But there are complications we need to discuss."

Astrid clutched her screenplay. "I can pose as a writer seeking his mentorship."

Dianne chewed her pen as her expression tightened. "And if he loves your work? If he starts making calls? Ovitz doesn't run CAA anymore. Marty Baum — gone. How do we explain that? Half the studio heads he knows are retired, dead, managers, have been metoo’d, have transitioned, or in any case don’t have landlines. The moment he reaches out to the real world, this ol’ circus tent comes burnin’ down."

"Could it … could it be time?” Astrid suggested.

Dr. Imbroglio poked his head in from his adjacent office, his tall, gaunt frame moving with the slight stoop of someone who'd now spent decades now hunched over playing Minesweeper 1997. He pushed his Lennon wire-rimmed glasses up his long nose with his pinky finger, a habit he'd developed to avoid smudging the lenses.

"Ms. Walsh," he said, his Italian accent still faintly detectable after forty years in America. "With all due respect, you're not qualified to make that assessment. The neurological impact of such a shock—"

As he spoke, his right eyelid twitched slightly.

"And in those twenty-eight years, your father has been stable. His blood pressure, cognitive function, emotional state—all maintained within safe parameters. We've created a sustainable environment."

Dianne gestured to Astrid's outfit. "Those capris alone could trigger questions. And your screenplay references ‘Bumble’ — which didn't exist in ‘97."

"I can change that," Astrid insisted.

"I’m still concerned. If he calls Broder Kurland Webb and discovers the agency no longer exists? When he mentions Keystone Pictures and hears bewilderment on the other end of the line?" Dianne shook her head. "Each of those moments creates a fracture in his reality. His stability is like a full glass from which no water must ever spill. I carefully hold that glass in my hand all day every day like some ill-fated Korean in a Greek myth, as the world tries to shake shake SHAKE …”

Dr. Imbroglio put a soothing hand on Dianne’s shoulder. "Now, now. Cognitive dissonance is not merely uncomfortable in your father's case, Ms. Walsh. It could be catastrophic. The mind creates barriers for protection. Breaking through those barriers—"

Ms. Kim and Dr. Imbroglio looked at Astrid, wordlessly communicating the horror and the fraught tension of 28 years of keeping time.

"So … pretend." Astrid asked.

"Yes," Dr. Imbroglio said firmly, his eyelid twitching more pronounced now. "Precisely that. He can give you notes. He can feel useful. We can intercept any calls, manage any follow-ups. But crossing the stream risks everything."

Astrid stared down at her screenplay. "After all these years, I just wanted to see him. And maybe get some help. In reality."

"I understand," Dianne said, her tone softening slightly. "But you need to decide what matters more - ‘in reality’: getting his help, or keeping him alive."

Astrid stood at the door to her father’s office, script in hand, feeling a slight sweat developing, feeling the need to breathe in, to breathe again through her nose, to breathe again through her mouth, to breathe again …, feeling verklempt, feeling breathless and urgent, wondering what her heart rate would be if she hadn’t had to leave her Apple Watch with that golem, Ms. Kim. It had been 27 years and she could not have a panic attack at this very moment. What year was it? This is not how the scene had played out in her mind. She felt dizzy. And she couldn’t die right now, because she still hadn’t even mastered Wordle much less anything else.

The door burst open from the inside and there was her father but much older. They stared at each other in shock. He said “Ingrid!”

Astrid lost her balance and tried to put her hands against his mouth to silence him and in doing so stumbled into him as he yelled again “Ingrid! Ingrid!”

She stumbled to the floor and he said, “My wife! Are you dead? They said you went out to fetch avocados but. I feel you’ve been gone … so long!”

Astrid heard a brief ringing in her ears but being slumped on the floor helped her recapture her composure.

As Jerry bent over to help her, or kiss her, or to recapture his lost life — it was unclear — Astrid finally spoke, “I’m not your wife. I’m … a writer — with a Friends spec.” And she held out her script in both hands.

Jerry took steps back and stumbled into a seated position on his leather couch.

Ms. Kim entered. “Jerry. This is a young writer from Paradigm. Great promise.”

“It’s clearly Ingrid.”

Dianne said, “Definitely not Ingrid. Definitely Lisa.”

Astrid held back her tears. “I’m Lisa. A writer.”

Jerry gathered himself and straightened his suit as Dianne helped Astrid into a chair.

“OK. Well, sorry about that. Bit of confusion. You look like my wife! But tell me about your script. And don’t be nervous. I’m just a regular guy.”

They were both sweaty, to be honest.

Astrid staring mumbling about her scripts. A Friends spec and a movie spec a woman who unwittingly rents a room from the father she had never met. She talked it through in some detail.

“I must say you have a great sense of drama and at creating moving scenes. Creating turns. That’s what so many writer’s miss — scenes that change and go from A to B to C to D and it’s a new disposition and conflict and mood every time.”

“Thanks so much.”

“I’ll read these but I have a crazy idea that you should join the Keystone team. And here’s a spontaneous idea — come to dinner tonight. We’re all going to Chasen’s. Everyone will be there.”

Astrid had a photo of her parents at Chasen’s restaurant, the legendary Hollywood hangout. The picture was one of the few she had of them. Chasen’s had closed years ago though and become a Bristol Farms.

“I’d be happy to come.”

Astrid had had to rush home to get a dress to go to “Chasen’s.” Now that she was caught up on her neglected phone, she wondered whether all the phones were really for the best.

Dianne took her to the end of the kitchen to the garage entrance and said, “Here we are. Remember, this is Chasen’s. In 1997.”

Astrid slipped in.

The atmosphere was instantly warm and bustling, a swirl of besuited, jewelry encrusted bonhomie flavored with sizzling meats, sizzling secrets, and the site of a bartender in the further room making the “Flame of Love” Martini, which indeed threw off a burst of flame with each concoction.

Jerry waved Astrid over from his table, the second red leather booth in the front room decorated with photos of David Chasen and stars who had graced this room in the past.

“Hello, I’m Julius,” said the older tuxedoed European man, evidently the maitre d’.

“Lisa,” said Astrid. “With Mr. Walsh.”

They walked to the table.

Imagine the life I would have led, Astrid thought.

As Astrid approached the table, Jerry yelled out to a passing guest, “Jon, meet Lisa.”

Astrid turned and an intimidating man of her height reached out a hand, “Jon Dolgen.”

“Lisa.”

“That’s my newest, best writer Jon. You gotta move fast in this town!”

Dolgen laughed.

To Lisa, he said “Good luck and welcome.”

To Jerry he said, “I’ll get you next time!”

Astrid sat at the table with Jerry, Diane and Dr. Imbroglio.

A tuxedoed waiter approached, a tall older man with red hair.

“Jerry, what will your new friend be having? Mademoiselle, a martini perhaps?”

“Astrid saw that everyone was having martinis and she smiled “Yes” in assent.

Jerry pointed out the prestigious guests — Ovitz, Diller, Dolgen as mentioned, Sherry Lansing. For a second, Astrid actually wanted to meet all these people before she reminded herself that this was only Disneyland 1997 Chasen’s.

Everyone was there and no one was there.

Jerry expounded and went into his sales pitch for Keystone. He had finished her script that afternoon.

Jerry’s notes, and even Dianne’s, were insightful. He seemed in his element, talking fast, going deep but not to deep for a dinner table and not so detailed that it dwelled on any picayune quibbles. He was skilled at this — making you feel good and promising while also making substantive and helpful points about how the script could improve and what its prospects were.

“So anyway I look forward to moving it down the road. It will take and draft or two but we’ll get there,” Jerry said.

“Oh, fantastic.” Astrid actually felt great. It was 80% like a real development deal, except for the fact that she was in a fake 1997 Chasen’s and that her father wasn’t running a studio anymore and didn’t seem to know that he was her father. Maybe fake pick ups could be a great therapy session back in 2025, she thought.

He asked her where she was from and she demurred. He asked her who her favorite bands were because he liked young people to keep him hip. She struggled with that, but Dianne fed her some suggestions — Third Eye Blind, Jewel, the Notorious B.I.G. She got into it enough to make up a story about a recent Jewel concert.

By the end, as they enjoyed some 1990 Stag’s Leap Cabernet with Hobo Steaks, Jerry was chatting with his “team” and with passing friends. He was in his element.

“I love it here,” Jerry said.

Astrid walked through the east wing of the mansion, an area she had been expressly, though politely, forbidden to enter. The hallways here broke character—modern art hung on the walls, the carpet was new, and an unmistakable aroma of contemporary perfume lingered in the air. So much for 1997, she thought.

She found Dianne's quarters easily enough—double doors with a small brass nameplate. She knocked once, then more urgently when no answer came.

Dianne opened the door just enough to reveal her face. "You shouldn't be here," she said, then relented with a sigh. "What do you want?"

Astrid pushed past her into a room that seemed contemporary. It seemed like a Four Seasons hotel room. Sleek furniture, minimalist design, a massive flat-screen television mounted on the wall. A smartphone lay charging beside a MacBook on a glass desk. "Well," Astrid said, taking it all in. "At least you're living in this century."

Dianne closed the door quietly. "This is my private space."

"I need the truth," Astrid said. "I've been playing along, but I deserve to know how this happened. How he got... like this."

A gentle knock interrupted them. Dianne's face tightened as she opened the door. Astrid felt her breath catch—her mother stood in the hallway.

Ingrid Andersson-Walsh had retained her beauty at sixty; her blonde hair now ash-gray but elegantly styled, her posture still model-perfect, her accent still faintly Swedish despite decades in Los Angeles. "Hello, Dianne," she said with cool formality.

"Ingrid? You can't be here." Dianne's voice had risen half an octave.

"I called her," Astrid said.

"Do you have any idea what seeing her could do to him?" Dianne's fingers gripped the door handle so tightly her knuckles had turned white.

Ingrid swept past her into the room. "What you've been doing to him for twenty-eight years?" Her eyes took in the modern furnishings, the technology, the luxury. "I see you've made yourself comfortable."

Dianne closed the door, her back against it as if to prevent escape. "Do you have any idea what your leaving did to him? You took his daughter and vanished to Sweden."

"After he had his breakdown at the shareholders' meeting? After he threw that chair through the window? After they voted him out?" Each question hung in the air like an accusation.

Astrid felt her stomach tighten. "He threw a chair through a window?"

Her mother turned to her with softened eyes. "You were three. I didn't want you to see him like that." Her gaze hardened again when she looked back at Dianne. "The doctors said six months of rest and therapy. Not twenty-eight years of this... charade."

"He is happy here," Dianne said. "He couldn't face what happened."

"So you built him a prison of 1997," Ingrid said.

"I built him a sanctuary!" Dianne's voice cracked with emotion.

Astrid moved between them. "With yourself as... what? Warden? Caretaker?"

Dianne sank into an armchair. "I kept him alive! When he came out of the coma, and thought he was still running Keystone... Dr. Imbroglio said the shock of reality could kill him."

"And when did Dr. Imbroglio start living in the east wing?" Ingrid asked, gesturing toward a man's cashmere sweater draped over another chair.

The silence that followed felt thick with implication.

"So this whole time..." Astrid began, the truth settling over her like a cold shadow. "This whole elaborate production... it's been about you?"

"No." Dianne looked up, her eyes glistening. "It is about saving him."

"And his money kept paying for it all," Astrid said, nodding toward the luxury surrounding them.

"He's well cared for," Dianne countered. "He's happy."

"He's living a lie!" Astrid's voice rose despite herself.

Dianne looked up, her face suddenly calm. "Who isn’t?"

Astrid felt her mother's hand on her shoulder, steadying her.

"I will be back and I'm going to see him," Ingrid said. "At the party."

Dianne stood quickly. "You can't. After all these years—"

"After all these years," Ingrid cut her off, "it's time."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The lawn shimmered under strings of paper lanterns. The swing band played the hits of 1947. Waiters in crisp white jackets circulated with trays of shrimp cocktail and gin fizzes. The fading light of 2025 lit up a cake decorated with miniature saplings.

The banner strung across the patio read:

KEYSTONE PICTURES ARBOR DAY SOIRÉE

About fifty guests mingled — the carefully maintained illusion of a thriving Hollywood studio party. Fake stars, fake agents, fake executives, some of whom she recognized from last night.

Astrid stood near the edge of the crowd, feeling the unreality of it all press against her lungs. Dianne hovered nearby, tense, tight-lipped, watching everything.

At the microphone, Jerry Walsh beamed. He was in his element — toasting the spirit of Arbor Day, the strength of roots, the power of legacy.

“And here’s to the next generation,” Jerry said, lifting his champagne glass high. “The ones who’ll keep Keystone Pictures green and growing.”

The crowd applauded dutifully.

And then the applause stuttered and died.

One last guest entered from the driveway. The woman who entered was not as tall as she had once been, but she carried herself with the same model’s posture that had caught Jerry’s eye thirty-five years earlier. Her platinum blonde hair was now elegantly silver. Her black gown was classic rather than fashionable, her only jewelry a pair of diamond earrings — a gift from Jerry on their fifth anniversary.

Dianne saw her first.

Her champagne flute slipped from her fingers and shattered on the patio stones.

“No,” Dianne breathed. “No, no, no…”

The guests, uncertain, began to part, creating an invisible corridor.

Jerry’s hand tightened on the microphone stand.

He stared, wide-eyed, as Ingrid — Maja — walked slowly toward him.

“Maja?” he croaked, the microphone amplifying the sudden roughness in his voice.

Ingrid kept walking, calm, composed, her eyes locked on his.

“Hello, Jerry,” she said, her voice still carrying that slight Swedish accent that had once disarmed half of Hollywood.

Jerry stepped down from the stage like a sleepwalker.

Dianne pushed through the crowd, trying to reach him, but Jerry didn’t even see her.

He reached Ingrid and, trembling, raised a hand to her cheek.

“You’re real,” he whispered.

“I’m real,” Ingrid said.

Jerry shut his eyes. A long, rattling breath escaped his chest.

When he opened them again, he turned slowly toward the swing band, who had frozen mid-song.

“Play ‘I’ll Be Seeing You,’” he said.

There was a beat of confusion. Then the soft, mournful notes began — tentatively, then stronger — drifting over the stunned party.

Jerry took Ingrid’s hand, pulled her gently onto the patio, and they began to dance.

Astrid watched from the shadows, her throat tight.

They moved slowly and gracefully. One could almost see the swirl of memories surrounding them and the dance floor.

The lanterns swayed above them. The roses nodded in the breeze. The garden was suspended in an impossible moment, the moment that was finally here.

When the song ended, Jerry held on for just a beat longer before stepping back.

A tear ran down his face.

He turned, scanning the crowd, seeing it truly for the first time — the actors, the perfect scripts, the endless façade.

His gaze settled on Astrid.

“You’re not Lisa from Paradigm,” he said.

Astrid stepped forward, feeling every eye on her.

“No,” she said. “I’m your daughter.”

Jerry blinked, dazed.

“The script you showed me… is it real? Is it available?”

“It’s real,” Astrid said. “And it’s available.”

Jerry laughed. “Thank God!”

A ripple of uncomfortable chuckles passed through the crowd.

Jerry turned back to Ingrid. His voice steadied.

“Obviously, I have to ask — what year is it?" he asked, his voice clear and strong.

Dianne stepped forward. "It's 1997, Jerry. April 25th, 1997. Please—"

But Jerry's focus remained on Ingrid. "Tell me the truth."

"It's 2025," Ingrid said. "It's been twenty-eight years since your stroke."

Jerry nodded slowly, as if confirming something he'd long suspected. He turned to the remaining guests. "Thank you all for coming. The party is over."

The backyard emptied quickly, leaving only Jerry, Ingrid, Astrid, Dianne, and Dr. Imbroglio, who hovered anxiously near the door.

"Twenty-eight years," Jerry said, not a question but a statement of fact. "I've been living in 1997 for twenty-eight years."

"You had a stroke," Dianne said, her voice breaking. "After the board meeting when they voted you out. You threw a chair through a window. When you woke up in the hospital, you thought you were still running Keystone. The doctors said any shock could trigger another stroke, possibly fatal."

"So you built all this," Jerry gestured to Dianne. "This elaborate fiction."

"It was supposed to be temporary," Dianne said. "Just until you were stronger."

"And then it became permanent," Jerry finished.

He turned to Ingrid. "And you took our daughter to Sweden."

"I couldn't let her grow up in Hollywood," Ingrid said. "I thought you'd recover. I thought you'd come find us."

Jerry closed his eyes briefly. "I remember searching for you... in 1997."

Silence stretched between them, heavy with decades of lost time.

Astrid opened her mouth, but Jerry spoke first, his voice low and bewildered.

“Before the stroke,” he said. “It was the emails.”

He turned slightly, as if seeing the ghosts gathering around him.

“They hacked Keystone. The North Koreans, of all people. They were looking for secrets — secret movie plans about Asia, whatever — and instead they found me. Calling Rosie O’Donnell a shaved bear and saying that the marketing people at Keystone were mentally retarded.”

His voice cracked on the words.

Ingrid said nothing. Dianne looked stricken.

“They leaked it to get to me so I wouldn’t make the Kim Jung-Il movie. The trades picked it up. Overnight, I was a punchline.”

He let out a dry, brittle laugh.

“Savages Keystone. Savages Rosie.”

He shook his head. “They fired me the next day. Voted me out. I still had the chair in my hand when they made it official.”

Astrid stared at him, not sure if she should move closer or stay perfectly still.

“I thought maybe if I showed them — scared them — they’d remember what mattered. But all they saw was a crazy man throwing furniture.”

He paused.

“And then you left,” he said, looking at Ingrid. “Took Astrid. Took the only real thing I had left.”

He pressed his hand lightly to his chest, as if remembering the slow collapse of his own heart.

“And then,” he finished, “I woke up here.”

He gestured faintly at the tented lights, the lingering music, the vast and empty night.

Astrid stepped forward, carefully, like approaching a wounded animal.

“You don’t have to stay,” she said. “Come with us. It’s not too late.”

Ingrid reached for his hand, not pleading, just offering.

“We can go home,” she said.

Jerry looked at them — really looked. His wife, older but still radiant. His daughter, grown, a stranger and not a stranger.

The real world stretched out just beyond the driveway, waiting.

He took a step toward them. Then another.

For a terrible, hopeful moment, Astrid thought he might actually cross the threshold.

But then he stopped.

“We can be together,” he said. Looking at Ingrid.

Ingrid said, “You can come with us, Jerry. We’ll help you. But I can’t stay with you. My life… it moved on.”

His gaze drifted back toward the house, the red booths, the paper lanterns still swaying in the warm spring breeze.

Jerry smiled — a small, broken, beautiful smile.

“If you’re not going to be with me,” he said quietly, “I’d rather you be just out getting avocados. Always about to return.”

Jerry turned back toward the house without waiting for an answer.

The lights from the party flickered softly against the arbor trees, casting long, wavering shadows across the lawn.

Astrid watched him go — a figure retreating into the past, smaller with every step, until he disappeared into the golden haze of the old world.

Astrid stood there for a moment longer, not crying, not moving, feeling the stillness settle around her like mist.

She would never see him again — not really. But he would always be waiting, forever, around the corner, where the avocados were.

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When Bigger Isn't Better

The super app oligopoly model assumes that scale conveys benefits and wins. This thinking has dominated media for decades, and it tends to be true. But I would note that nothing lasts as long as people think it will. The brief dominance of Blockbuster and Wal-Mart, even of Comcast, all had their day but we did move on.

Open systems have historically often outcompeted closed systems. The internet defeated AOL. Android (built on open-source Linux) dominates iOS globally. WordPress powers 43% of all websites. When platforms become too extractive or controlling, sometimes alternatives become attractive.

The Problem with Centralized Development

Big, centralized media systems have inherent creative limitations. Development executives are, today, incentivized to avoid risk and seek social consensus, which usually leads to less risky and more mediocre outcomes. A pilot that 30% of viewers might rate a "10" but 70% might give a "3" can often be exactly the kind that breaks new ground—but these "rule breakers" often won’t survive a social consensus development process. Think about how Game of Thrones and Squid Game kicked around for years before getting made. How many potential masterpieces never make it at all?

Remember, we saw a massive decline in new, original American fictional TV series after 2017. There are a few reasons for this, but I would argue that consolidation is one major reason.

The best recent content has often come from creators operating with relative autonomy: Parasite, White Lotus, Everything Everywhere, Curb Your Enthusiasm. These creators aren't conforming to development systems. As I understand it, in each case they enjoyed a lot of independence.

What if there was a Hollywood in a parallel universe that was more like a commercialized BitTorrent (i.e. BitTorrent — but you have to subscribe to it)? You can put wherever you want on BitTorrent. In our commercialized version, you could choose to charge something and Bittorrent would enforce that price and take a small portion of your transaction. BitTorrent is a technology, like email or html. So this would be like if we didn’t have Spotify, but we had stuck with LimeWire (but a commercialized version).

Currently Netflix has ~$25B in annual cash flow, which dominates the entire industry. Its market cap of ~$400B reflects the market’s expectation that (a) Netflix will be able to preserve its dominant position, and (b), in overwhelming the total market cap of all other studios, it reflects the centrality of Netflix within the industry. One could imagine a world where this platform part of the value chain acts as a utility and only takes in as much as it needs, in which case the $400B in surplus is distributed to the many studios, entrepreneurs and creators who supply it. So instead of decision making being concentrated in one office, as in a “queen bee” model with one queen and many drones, it’s the opposite; it is what you might call a “human model” where many people are separately making their own important decisions that yield new creations and profits (or not as the case may be).

I think the human or distributed model would yield better creative outcomes and would distribute wealth in a more attractive way. And I think the customer experience would be about the same for people.

A Decentralized Vision

Imagine a three-part system that separates the infrastructure from the user experience and financing:

1. Basecamp (Content Protocol): This is our back end in the sky. It handles storage, streaming (through a decentralized content delivery network), encoding, transactions, etc. So this is an open-source protocol that handles video storage and distribution on decentralized networks. Content owners upload directly, and enter into an agreement including a transparent revenue-sharing formula enforced by smart contracts. Governance tokens give stakeholders voting rights over platform policies.

2. A1 (User Interface): A sleek front-end application built on top of Basecamp. This provides everything customers see — the recommendation algorithms, user experience, and discovery or social features. If A1 becomes too controlling or tries to suck too much money out of the system (seeking “rents”), anyone is allowed to build their own A1 (A2) on top of Basecamp.

3. Dealflow (Financing Marketplace): This is where you get your “green light” and your financing. This is a decentralized platform where creators can secure funding directly from studios, investors and/or fans. Projects range from indie films to ongoing series, with transparent performance metrics and various investment structures. This means you don’t have to ask anyone to make your movie. You don’t have to send them a holiday card or invite them to lunch. Your financiers are hundreds of interested punters probably larping as frogs on the internet. The major advantages here would be that creators would get more control and upside.

Nothing about this is fantasy. The technical components already exist. Livepeer provides decentralized video infrastructure. Smart contract platforms enable transparent revenue distribution every day. Token-based governance systems are operating successfully in various domains.

Super App Features Without Super App Control

An open-source ecosystem can incorporate virtually all the features we discussed for super apps—social interaction, commerce, gaming elements, personalization—without centralizing control.

Imagine community features that travel with content across different front-ends. AI companions that creators design for their own shows. Merchandising opportunities where creators keep the majority of revenue. All of this is technically possible in a decentralized architecture. The platform is just a sort of farmer’s market.

The difference? Value and control flow primarily to creators and users rather than platform owners. Features serve the content experience rather than trapping users in a single corporate ecosystem.

The Cold Start Problem

The biggest question: how does a decentralized system overcome the chicken-and-egg problem? If we launched this tomorrow, it would have o content and therefore no users. How do we get from there to 1,000 customers to 1,000,000 customers?

Here's one plausible path:

1. Start with underserved markets: Focus on content categories and audience segments currently neglected by major streamers. Maybe comedy?

2. Secure anchor content: Partner with 2-3 established studios or producers willing to experiment with this model, providing credibility and initial quality content. I imagine this would be possible.

3. Target creator dissatisfaction: Actively recruit showrunners, directors, and producers frustrated with the creative restrictions and economics of traditional platforms. (And once creators see their peers doing well, they will want to do well, too.)

From there it actually should build up its own momentum and flywheel.

Success doesn't require stealing Netflix's entire audience. If Basecamp+A1 captured 1% and then 10% of the global streaming market with a more creator-friendly model, it would represent a massive shift and I’m not sure why the momentum would ever stop.

Is There Enough Capital Out There?

This approach requires a fundamental shift in how entertainment is financed, raising the important question: is there enough capital out there willing to flow through a marketplace like Dealflow?

This is not strictly required. You could retain a system where studios finance and greenlight shows. But i think it would be even better if creators could manage that themselves.

There is no way to know about the capital. But i think it is credible that the maximum amount of accessible capital would be sufficient. If the projects as a whole are offering good returns, then theoretically why wouldn’t it be? Global capital is always seeking alternative categories that aren’t necessarily correlated to the markets and we have seen a lot of money run through the (much less regulated and more speculative) NFT markets.

The traditional film financing system is notoriously inefficient and opaque. A more transparent marketplace could potentially unlock billions in previously inaccessible capital by reducing friction, improving information symmetry, and enabling smaller minimum investments.

Why Blockchain? Preventing Another Monopoly

The fundamental reason for building this on blockchain technology is simple but powerful: to prevent the emergence of yet another rent-seeking monopolist.

The history of media platforms follows a predictable pattern:

1. Platform launches with creator-friendly terms to attract content

2. Platform achieves critical mass and network effects

3. Platform gradually increases its take rate and control over creators

4. Creators become dependent with few alternatives

Even platforms that begin with good intentions inevitably face shareholder pressure to extract more value once they achieve dominance.

Blockchain fundamentally breaks this cycle by encoding the rules of engagement into the protocol itself, where no single entity can unilaterally change them. The revenue split between creators, infrastructure providers, and other stakeholders is transparent and requires broad consensus to modify.

When content owners participate in Basecamp, they're not helping create another aspiring oligopolist that will one day use its market power against them. They're contributing to infrastructure that they collectively govern.

This isn't about using blockchain for its own sake. It's about using the right technology to ensure that the next generation of entertainment platforms remains structurally aligned with creator interests.

Traditional technology could create a more open platform today, but it would lack structural guarantees against future capture. Blockchain provides those guarantees.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

While the technical foundations for this vision exist today, practical implementation would require optimizing for security, transaction speed, and cost efficiency. Several Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions are already demonstrating the necessary performance characteristics, with transaction costs falling to fractions of a cent and confirmation times measured in seconds rather than minutes.

So Who Wins — Who's At The Polo Lounge in 2032?

Rather than one insufferable tyrant nibbling all the cheese toasts because after the merger of Amazon and Iqiyi his network is the biggest network in the universe, power becomes distributed.

The next hit series might be backed by thousands of investors worldwide, with creators maintaining creative control. The platform it streams on might be governed by a mix of creators, fans, and operators through token-based voting.

The new "martinis at the Grill" will be a wallet ping silently recorded on some validator node running Ubuntu, flipping some bits before packaging them into the next block. Revenues divided by smart contract and sent to DAOs, then wallets in Dubai, Singapore, Dublin, Memphis...

In Hollywood, only the real estate is forever—and the illusions. Power is always more temporary than people imagine. Technology is once again offering us a choice about how entertainment is financed, produced, and distributed.

The oligopolistic super app world isn't inevitable. It's just the most likely possible future. The decentralized alternative would create a more vibrant, creator-friendly ecosystem—one where power resides with the many not the few.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.

Despite frequent past disruption, there’s some tendency to believe that today’s version of Hollywood is going to be pretty stable from here on out. I’m here to suggest that this is not likely. The future will not be Netflix with more shows. It will be something new.

In the next wave, the most important metric for major streamers won’t be subscribers, it will be churn (how often people cancel) and daily engagement. So the next evolution of the streamer will inevitably do more — it will be part TV, part Facebook, part Wordle, part shopping mall: a daily, habit-forming experience that spans video, games, AI characters, social interaction, and commerce.

Let’s walk through why and what that could mean.

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What Changed

In the early days of SVOD, the playbook was simple: make a handful of great shows, win awards, gain audience. That got you to 30 million or so subscribers.

Once services hit 60 million, 80 million, or 200 million subs—and especially once ad-supported tiers became the growth engine—the game shifted.

Now, growth is slowing. Most U.S. homes already have three or more streamers. Churn is the issue.

So the goal is no longer just acquiring customers—it’s keeping them and making them more engaged. That means driving more hours per day, more app opens per user, more reasons to come back. If you’re not generating three or four meaningful notifications per day, maybe you are falling behind.

New Formats for New Habits

To thrive in this new reality, streamers will look for formats that support frequent, habitual engagement, year round. Here are two formats that could thrive in the Super App Era:

The Serial Movie Franchise

Think M3GAN—but part two drops in three months, and part three three months after that. Or imagine Jack Ryan delivered as four films per year, like seasonal chapters in a franchise novel.

The idea is to blend the narrative power and production cadence of television with the event value of film. When you commit to the first one, you have to commit to two or three follow ups which are quickly shot in a series fashion.

This format is riskier upfront—streamers and producers must commit to multiple films before the first has proven out—but the reward would be increased anticipation, reduced churn and some eventizing of the slate. You replace the series finale with ongoing anticipation.

The All Year Series

What if a show never ended?

Picture Billions or X-Men reimagined as an open-ended, 52-week narrative. The cast expands. The storylines multiply. You follow different factions or characters, and each week brings a new episode from somewhere in the world.

The economics could be serious: a $7 million-per-episode show running once a week for 52 weeks costs $364 million per year. Or $500K per episode every weekday is still $130 million annually.

But if the result is a show that becomes part of people’s weekly rhythm the payback is real.

As engagement becomes the key priority, we might expect things like soaps, (more) reality, talk shows, and maybe news. As Gen Z focuses more on short shorts and as Chinese shorts apps like DramaReel gain momentum, no doubt some percent of programming will be shorts. (Was Quibi just ahead of its time?)

The Social Layer

Where this gets especially potent is in the social feedback loop.

Right now, most streaming apps are silent. You watch a show and close the app. But in the next phase, the goal will be persistent engagement—just like Facebook, Reddit, or TikTok.

Expect to see:

• Comments, likes, and reactions inside the app

• An AI asking what you’d like to see and how your day is going

• Incentives for interaction: badges, leaderboards, early access

You finish The Boys, and the app notifies you that 3,000 people liked your comment. You comment again. You watch the teaser for next week. Now it’s 10pm and you’re still in the app.

If anyone is still up for “the metaverse,” you could then have friends over to your virtual apartment in Netflix City.

This layer makes streaming sticky.

AI Characters, Games, Notifications, and Friends

In the future, your streaming app may include characters you can talk to.

Some will be AI companions: a coach, a gossip partner, a game show host, a digital friend. Others may be actual characters from your favorite shows, available for short interactions: a pep talk from Geralt of Rivia, dating advice from a Bridgerton, or fashion tips from your Emily in Paris AI twin.

They might message you. They might know your watch history. They may suggest what to watch—or what to buy. They might even tell you that your last purchase was “smart.”

It sounds strange. But it won’t feel strange for long.

Netflix has already started on games.

Shopping and the Mallification of SVOD

• Live shopping segments, hosted by personalities or AI — its big in China

• In-character hosts demoing outfits, collectibles, or home goods

• Merch, bundles, and digital goods personalized to your profile

• Rewards for watching or sharing, redeemable in-app

It’s not hard to imagine Netflix as a platform where your favorite Stranger Things character sells you a limited-run hoodie—or an AI-voiced message for your birthday.

In this environment, content, commerce, and community blur into one experience.

What This Means for Streamers

As I discussed here, this model favors scale.

Mid-tier services will struggle to meet this challenge. Max, Peacock, and Paramount+ were built for the boutique era. They may need to shift to licensing, or become branded channels inside bigger ecosystems—Amazon Channels 2.0.

In general, mid-sized services will either go niche and lean or be absorbed.

Key Opportunities

What are the opportunities in this new world, aside from creating a super app?

Be talented and unique

As always, talent wins. A great voice, an original sensibility, or the ability to do something no one else can still cuts through—even in an AI-saturated, engagement-maximizing landscape.

But get it out there — you have to build your brand.

Build IP online

Creators who can seed characters, story worlds, or aesthetics online—whether through webcomics, shorts, podcasts, or even memes—can build real followings before the studios ever call.

Once you’ve proven concept and traction, you are holding real value.

Create a platform for decentralized content funding

If people are going to build IP independently online, they will need a way to finance this activity. There’s a growing opportunity to build the first real capital market for digital-first IP, a place where fans and investors can fund creative projects—across film, TV, games, podcasts, animation, and more using tokenized securities.

Think AngelList meets Kickstarter meets NASDAQ.

Big streamers will always want things that have built in audience, so producers and creators will increasingly try to build IP on their own and this will be an economically viable way to develop.

Build the alternative

Not everything will be a super app.

There’s probably room for a curated, high-quality boutique streaming platform: something like Criterion meets A24.

The pitch: We’re not the mall. But we have the smartest shows and films. Whether these platforms can attract the strongest creators indefinitely remains to be seen—but the ones that do will punch far above their weight.

Hollywood's Platform Endgame

Streaming is now competing with social platforms—X, TikTok, Facebook. Those are the apps people already open 10 times a day. Those are the places where entertainment and interaction are fully integrated.

It's worth noting that social networks tend toward monopoly in each category. People don't want to be split across five platforms—they want to be where everyone else is. That gravitational pull toward one dominant platform applies here too. If streaming becomes social, interactive, and habit-based, it may also become winner-take-most.

The streaming wars were merely the opening skirmish. The platform wars will determine not just what we watch, but how we connect, shop, and even form our identities online. And unlike traditional Hollywood, where a handful of studios could comfortably coexist for decades, the economics of engagement platforms suggest there might ultimately be room for just one or two winners.

Looking at today's players, the winner isn't obvious. Netflix has the subscriber base and global reach, but lacks social DNA. Disney has beloved IP but struggles with technology and seems to suffer from a substantially diminished ability to launch new properties. Amazon already blends commerce and content (and owns Twitch) while Apple has the ecosystem integration. Meanwhile, TikTok and Meta hover on the periphery with engagement expertise but content gaps. The most dangerous player might be one we're not watching closely enough—perhaps a gaming platform like Epic or a YouTube that decides to grow in this direction. And if TikTok really changes hands, that could be an important acquisition.

We'll likely see the first semi super app emerge within 24-36 months. But by 2030, we'll wonder how we ever tolerated the passive, siloed streaming experience of 2025.

For executives, creators, and investors in this space, the implications are clear: betting everything on the current model is fighting yesterday's war. The opportunity lies in building the new experience, including content, community, and commerce.

The question isn't whether you'll subscribe to a super app—it's which super app will get your attention, your social graph, and your entertainment budget. For Hollywood, it's existential: evolve beyond content into experience, or become merely a supplier to the platforms that do.

For next time: is there something that could prevent this outcome? What is the alternative?

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Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios. He developed 16 patented technologies. His shows have won 14 Best Series Emmys and Globes. He was formerly at McKinsey & Co. and The Walt Disney Co. He graduated from Harvard College in 1989.