From refuge to threat
Roger Ebert, the legendary film critic of the "Chicago Sun-Times" who passed away last year, said that "when Hollywood feels threatened, it takes refuge in technology". Paradoxically today it is right there tech, together with emerging cinematographies, the threat more looming for Hollywood. It has happened that the safe port has become a hostile port. More than a refuge! The websites, the most impetuous wind of technology, is bringing thefire in the backyard of the Hollywood majors.
The film industry is in good company: any sector of old economy feels deeply threatened from the avalanche of innovations that the network He unleashed. Now, especially in Europe, people are starting to fear, more than anything else, the impudence, bordering on insolence, gods young cowboys who lead the caravan of new economy. It's also difficult to figure out how to take them: the Spaniards made a law, for heaven's sake, which couldn't be more wrong, and the next day a service frequented by millions of users was closed, bringing a billion hits a week to the dying press of the Iberian country. Europe, today a region inhabited by people who are calm and accustomed to a quiet life, has really lost patience with the risk of only doing the wrong things. Difficult to regulate. However, it must be said that it is not the fault of Google, nor of Amazon, nor of Apple that the European technology industry suffers from dwarfism.
Netflix and YouTube
Netflix, which Hollywood regarded as the Albanian army conquering the world the same way Nebuchadnezzar regarded the army of Cyrus, has just come out with a Hollywood-worthy production. It is Marco Polo, shot entirely in ultra high definition (4K) which equates the experience of viewing on TV to that of the cinema. Marco Polo it's a investment da 90 million dollars which will likely generate a blockbuster edge at Netflix as the serial astutely addresses the two wedges of public most interesting for today's cinematography: the western public and Chinese audience. The figure of the Venetian traveller, who also fascinates the ambitious and powerful Chinese leader Xi Jinping, can really be the cultural link between these two worlds and therefore something from the huge commercial potential. The script of Marco Polo filmed quite a bit in the movie capital before being picked up by Netflix which is 340 miles from Hollywood. Netflix took it right away and put out the investment that this mega-production required.
YouTube and the other threat, maybe even more devious, because it is a real ecosystem which is placing itself, unnoticed, in direct competition with Hollywood. YouTube as a place of global fooling around and unbridled amateurism is transforming in a new Hollywood, made and frequented by stars and the public of the future. Even if YouTube lacks everything Hollywood has – i.e. money, skills and relationships – the video-sharing platform's thousands of channels serve six billion di gold of videos to settimana. No there is still the big business on YouTube, but it will be there for those who are there and Hollywood, tragically, is not there: the disconnection from this phenomenon is almost total as shown by a recent and accurate article in the "New Yorker". Perhaps the awareness that Netflix and YouTube are to video in all its manifestations what Amazon is to books is not yet fully rooted.
Lionsgate
Le major of Hollywood are enough bewildered: they continue to churn out blockbuster from vertigo but the mood of its own. It's black. Here Lionsgate, a mime major born in Vancouver, British Columbia (1078 miles from Hollywood), stands showing two things: how work with Internet and how to get organized to manage the process of disruption of the traditional film industry.
Lionsgate she grew up on leftovers of the great ones : Hollywood majors keep their distance from controversial and incandescent films such as Fahrenheit 9 / 11 by Michael Moore o W by Oliver Stone or from arthouse films such as Dogma by Lars Von Trier or Ghost Dog – The code of the samurai by Jim Jarmusch. All of these films were distributed in North America by Lionsgate which over time became the major distributor e produttore di independent films. With the leftovers of the great Hollywood distributors, Lionsgate has one today market share of the 7,2% and it's the major seventh for commercial margin. Used to working with low budget products, she has developed a certain ability to have the best ROI on 'marketing investment. How does Lionsgate a optimize themarketing investment that even for such a large production Hunger Games Was it half of what the majors spend promoting a potential best seller? Whatever it does Lionsgate is in the spotlight not only of the public but also of investors. The real estate developer Wang Jianlin, China's richest man after Jack Ma and already proprietario di AMC Entertainment Holdings the largest cinema chain in the world, is preparing to to hire il control di Lionsgate. Wang likes to go big and it is to be expected a nice injection of energy in the Vancouver society.
Synergy with technology and start-up mentality
Well Lionsgate knows how to work well with social media and on YouTube and knows how to be synergistic with technology companies that know the network like their home garage. In the launch of Hunger Games it turned out decisive la collaboration with Google, to which the great Hollywood looks with a sentiment that oscillates between adoption and infanticide.
Technology and synergy with technological , recipe for success by Liongate; a recipe that is also an old Hollywood acquaintance and something he does very well, it's called marketing e creativeness. If technology could eventually tear Hollywood apart, perhaps it will be marketing that will save this historic entertainment industry. But as Lionsgate shows, it's not the big-budget, big-budget marketing that Hollywood is used to. And the marketing of the social and start-up.
So much major of Hollywood they are hierarchical, pyramidal and obsessively procedural in the formation of decisions, a lot Lionsgate moves with the mentality of a technology start-up. Each head can be an invaluable resource for creating added value for society. Tim Palen, the marketing director of Lionsgate, realizes personally i photographic services on movie sets. Brook Barnes reports in the NYTimes that Palen saved Lionsgate $250 from a professional photographer. The service on the set of Hunger Games it cost Lionsgate a plane ticket and a night's hotel (5 star I guess). After all, who better than a marketing director can know better what to put on the posters of a promotional campaign?
That would even be inconceivable in a major: behavior of Palen would be branded as micromanaging e amateurism. In major la bureaucracy It's really a refuge: respect of the procedures, hierarchies and compartmentalization is a kind of antibody of studio management since risk very high inherent in their work and attenuates the return blow of a possible and probable failure. cinema is unpredictable: Goldman Sachs analysts can predict everything and are unlikely to be wrong, but when it comes to forecasting the revenue of a film, they raise the white flag.
The autarchy of the majors is madness
We return here to a point we have been insisting on for some time: i large groups medium get used to checking thecultural industry, in new scenario determined by network have to start to consideration le technology companies as a resource fundamental of theirs organisers' activities and theirs commercial strategies need marketing.
Here large groups must put aside theobsession of the control of the business and approach the idea of a sort of diarchy. The desire for total control of the digital business has so far produced, if Hulu.com is excluded, bad results. There tech, understood as a system of changes that outline a new mental and operational environment at all levels, is something alien ai large media groups, it's not part of theirs culture and sometimes it is denial. That's why these groups have need of the new ones technology companies , whereby ally and share the enormous resources that the digital revolution can generate. And the decisive step which he accomplished Lionsgate and the results are visible!
