THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 68 AUGUST 14, 2019
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BREKKEN/GETTY^ IMAGES.^The Meg. “It helps you through
any eventual down cycles.”
Perhaps seeing the writing
on the wall, talent agencies are
discouraging high-end producers
from renewing their traditional
studio deals so they can have
multiple buyers competing for
intellectual property and land
progress-to-production con-
tracts, largely absent at the major
studios. After all, Disney is down
to making one or two original
movies a year, while Netflix is
churning out 40-plus. Right now,
the streamers are leading the
charge, but neither Netflix nor
Amazon is doing film producing
deals at the same pace as the tra-
ditional studios once did. Netflix
currently carries 10 producing
deals that would qualify as film-
centric, including those with Matt
Reeves’ 6th & Idaho Productions
and Adam Sandler. Amazon has
three including Nicole Kidman’s
Blossom Films.
Kinberg, for one, says his
Fox exit was by design. Among
of the profession back in 2003,
when DVD sales were strong and
the seismic quake of the 2007-08
Writers Guild strike hadn’t yet
cleared the stables. As studios
grappled with ways to cut costs
during the strike, they extricated
themselves from their pricey
producer relationships, all in the
name of efficiency. That trend
was exacerbated by the down-
sizing of the studios’ average
annual film output. For instance,
in 2007, Paramount released 25
films a year. Now it is down to
nine. As a result, the first-look
deal and its accompanying perks,
including “put pictures” — that
coveted guarantee of having at
least one movie on the calendar
per year — have never rebounded.
Consider Disney, which had 24
first-look film producing deals
during the 2003 peak. Now it is
down to seven.
“If you focus just on motion pic-
tures from major studios, yes, the
business has changed in the last
10 years, and there are probably
fewer big overall deals,” says Matt
Kline, an entertainment lawyer at
O’Melveny & Myers. “A lot of fac-
tors contribute to that: expense,
changing approaches to manage-
ment and some deals that some
would argue went awry.”
The studios’ cutting back on
output has proved to be a factor in
subsequent deal slashing, but the
rise of branded event-size movies
also has hurt those who don’t
have their own financing or ties
to intellectual property.his upcoming projects are the
independently financed thriller
355 , which sees him taking an
ownership stake in the Universal-
released film that he also is
directing, and a War of the Worlds
series for Apple. “It’s a good time
to be a producer when there’s
such a proliferation of platforms,
streaming and who knows what’s
next in technology,” says Kinberg,
who also produced The Martian, a
film that was based on an obscure
self-published book that went on
to earn $630 million worldwide.
“There’s a lot of panic and confu-
sion out there, but there’s more
opportunity than ever before.”
Still, the landscape is proving
to be particularly rocky for the so-
called noncreative producer, the
ones who don’t generate or write
material. “Unless you’re a Simon
Kinberg type with an established
track record, studios don’t want
you,” says one agency partner.
The tenuous plight of the
producer has been intensifying
for some time, since the height“The reality now is that Disney
and Warners try to focus exclu-
sively on franchises. That’s
half the slate,” notes a produc-
tion exec. “Then there are the
remakes. And then, in Warners’
case, a Christopher Nolan movie.
Who needs producers for that?”
On the flip side, as the old-fash-
ioned movie producer may have
lost his or her place at e. baldi, the
seat is being kept warm by the
television producer.
“Given all the different plat-
forms out there, particularly the
way TV has changed so much and
there is such great storytelling
going on, I actually think overall
there are more producers work-
ing and more people are doing
more interesting work than ever
before,” says Kline.
That point was echoed by one
producer with a major studio deal,
who acknowledged that first-look
pacts are harder to come by for
those working in features, but
“for TV, it’s triple what it used to
be. No, make it 10 times more.”
That might be so, but the nine-
figure deals are the exclusive
domain of such writer-producers
as Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes,
and David Benioff and D.B. Weiss,
all at Netflix. The film compo-
nent of these deals is largely
an afterthought given that this
type of talent is being courted
more for their series prowess.
Furthermore, a typical deal at a
streamer, particularly Netflix,
doesn’t include backend compen-
sation. However, the streaming
giant will buy out an A-list
producer’s backend based on a
formula that factors in the budget
and what the movie would likely
do at the box office. A knowledge-
able source says Netflix paid
producer Joe Roth close to eight
figures as a backend buyout for
the fantasy The School for Good and
Evil, which is in preproduction.
The shift of resources toward
the making of serialized content
is leaving less to go around for
overhead film deals, making it
more difficult for a new gen-
eration of producers to break
in. “It’s harder to start a new
[film] company because of deals
that have little or no room for
paying [staff],” grumbles one
junior producer.1 Neal Moritz (center) at the premiere
for The Fast and the Furious in 2001.
2 Tom Holland and Amy Pascal at the
Spider-Man: Far From Home premiere
June 26.
3 Matt Tolmach (far right) at the Sony
presentation at CinemaCon in 2018.31 2