The Business
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 42 JULY 31, 2019
AnalysisIllustration by Ben Mounsey-WoodWhy Stars Are ‘Sipping the Quibi Kool-Aid’
As Jeffrey Katzenberg spends big ahead of the April launch of his shortform bet, top creators are jumping on board with projects
that couldn’t have been made (or were rejected) elsewhere: ‘We’ll put them in the mix, but not necessarily as a first resort’Disney and growing DreamWorks Animation
into a $3.8 billion business that sold to
NBCUniversal in 2016. But Quibi might be his
riskiest move yet. Amid the war for stream-
ing dominance raging among Netflix, Disney,
Amazon, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal and
Apple, in which treasured franchises like
The Office and Friends are the battle spoils,
Katzenberg is taking a decidedly different
approach. He and Whitman are betting that
young people (specifically, those 25 to 35)
are thirsting for premium, highly produced
programming delivered to their phones in
10-minute bursts.
There’s data to back them up, including
investor Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends
Report, which revealed that in 2019, people
will spend about 226 minutes per day on
average on their mobile devices, 10 min-
utes more than they will spend in front of a
television set.
But the past five years have seen the rise
and fall of several shortform video start-
ups, including Verizon’s go90, Comcast’s
Watchable, Fullscreen and Awesomeness’
Made for Mobile, which never got off the
ground. There also are questions about
whether consumers will open their wal-
lets for a service that doesn’t have the brand
recognition of a Disney or the deep catalog of
a WarnerMedia. (Quibi will cost $5 a month
with ads — typically 6 to 15 seconds in length,
depending on the video — and $8 for an ad-
free version.) This, coupled with the fact that
there are already platforms like YouTube and
Twitch where young viewers are being served
up programming tied to their tastes — for
free, no less — has made media observers
skeptical about whether Quibi will work ever
since Katzenberg first unveiled his plans in
August 2018. “There’s a lot of uncertainty,”
says a creative executive who has taken meet-
ings with Quibi.
So why are some of those same skeptics
waiting in line for a Quibi paycheck? Always
eager for another buyer, Hollywood has begun
to recognize Quibi as a deep-pocketed new
home for a certain kind of project. “I love the
idea of creating chapter breaks [that end]
with a scare and a cliffhanger,” explains
Van Toffler, the CEO of independent studio
Gunpowder & Sky who is producing horrorDIGITAL | NATALIE JARVEY
NATALIE JARVEY is the digital media editor
at The Hollywood Reporter.
A
fter Steven Spielberg visited the offices
of video streaming startup Quibi
this year, he emailed his friend and
founder Jeffrey Katzenberg with an idea. “To
say I was surprised is an understatement,”
Katzenberg recalls. “He had, himself, writ-
ten four chapters of a super scary, pretty
creepy stor y.”
But Spielberg had a stipulation. He wanted
the project to be viewed only after sundown.
So Katzenberg asked Quibi CEO Meg Whitman
to convene the product and engineering
teams, which went on to develop a feature
that will unlock new episodes of the Spielberg
show, dubbed After Dark, only once night has
fallen. “Arguably the greatest storyteller of
our time, when he hears about something new
and different, he turns his imagination loose,
and there you go,” Katzenberg says. “I would
never have thought of that.”
While After Dark is perhaps the most ambi-
tious show that Katzenberg has lined up for
Quibi ahead of its planned April 6 launch, it’s
now one of several from top Hollywood tal-
ent. With $1 billion in the bank and a goal of
releasing some 7,000 pieces of content during
Quibi’s first year, Katzenberg has been on a
buying spree for the mobile-only platform.
In June and July alone, Quibi has revealed no
fewer than 20 new projects from partners that
include Tyra Banks, Darren Criss,
Rashida Jones and Veena Sud.
They join previously announced
efforts from Guillermo del
Toro, Antoine Fuqua, Jason
Blum, Jennifer Lopez and Anna
Kendrick. He says there are several dozen
more that Quibi has yet to publicize.
Hollywood is jumping into business with
the startup despite pervasive questions
about how consumers will respond to an app
devoted to shortform episodic programming
that’s meant to be viewed during day breaks.
“Everyone’s sipping the Quibi Kool-Aid,” says
one producer who, in the same breath, adds,
“on its face, it seems like a thing that’s never
going to work.”
Katzenberg, 68, has had a long career in
Hollywood, orchestrating a turnaround atFuqua