The real likelihood that The Interview incited the cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment means that this otherwise unremarkable $44 million comedy must rate as one of the costlier decisions in movie-making history. As with the Edward Snowden leaks, the full measureable impact of those 100 terabytes of Hollywood dirty laundry that have come out of the Sony data wash won’t be known for some time. But what we have learned in the meantime, beyond a few salacious tidbits and damaging telltales, is just how ardently Sony and its studio competitors rely on their internal numbers and tracking services to decide what audiences get to see. Hollywood is way more levelheaded than those stolen electronic communications would have us believe.
Studio executives can call on detailed approval as well as awareness ratings on most every star in virtually every territory. They can triangulate that information with reams of audience reaction and sentiment surveys on existing titles to come up with surprisingly surgical revenue projections on future projects that flex up or down depending on the story that wants to be told and who is currently involved. Human dynamics and personal prejudices evidently play their part too. But look beyond all the email tantrums and you find a cold-eyed, analytical approach that seems to serve the studio system surprisingly well. Sony Pictures apparently enjoyed a 50%-60% profit margin on its 2013 production slate, and several Sony titles popularly characterized as theatrical miss-fires ended up in paper profit once all the ‘ultimates’ were tallied up from all the various global and ancillary markets. With prudent budgeting, proportionate advertising spends and tough-minded creative choices, all those available revenue streams can turn into rivers of gold. Unless external forces intervene.
Since the advent of mechanized cinema, the major Hollywood players have always enjoyed an unfair advantage in the global marketplace. That dominance used to be based around natural (and a few unnatural) monopolies: technology patents, block booking practices, talent ownership, vertical integration, political arm-twisting, book-keeping tricks and the prohibitive costs of manufacturing and marketing assembly-built films for global consumption. Today it is information, at least when properly protected and put into actionable context along the entire value chain, that is at the core of Hollywood’s competitive edge. No wonder studio heads have been thrown into a tailspin by this monumental data hack. And no wonder too that those same studios keep wading further and further upstream in search of new sources of privileged information.
Data is the new plastic of this post-industrial film economy. Just like those endlessly malleable polymers, data can be shaped into everything from providing better business decisions to serving up new opportunities unseen by the human eye or trained mind. Conglomerate muscle is no longer the deciding factor in the film marketplace; in this rapidly flattening landscape, size doesn’t matter nearly as much as efficiency. Behavioral intelligence can be used to outsmart incumbents, particularly if what results from that data is fanned by a viral chain-reaction. Which is why Netflix, and its meticulously gathered audience insights on films across their 76,897 micro-genre dimensions, has been able to upset the film industry apple-cart in just a few short years.
Netflix is a poster-child for the power of both data and self-promotion. Its rapid ascension has benefitted both its customers and its share price, but not so much the independent filmmaking community who crave Netflix’s inside track on the VOD coalface where the majority of independent films are likely to earn their keep. Without those elusive numbers, as was made clear during one of this year’s Filmonomics Talks, it is becoming tortuously difficult to finance non-studio movies based on rational business arguments. For better or worse, film “comps” are the currency by which such projects are evaluated – and yet those statistically convincing comparisons are becoming ever harder to mine. Independent cinema is in urgent need of greater plasticity and transparency - just at the very moment that Hollywood has been given every excuse to double down on secrecy.
It is into this informational void that Slated is now stepping with accelerated vigor and purpose. Its goal has always been to illuminate the path by which projects are packaged and financed for sale to distributors. By shedding light on this byzantine process, using the familiar organizing and network-building principles of social media, Slated wants to make it as simple to invest in films as it is to buy shares in a company.
A two-sided marketplace has been created as result, one that has absolutely no match anywhere else on the web in terms of the caliber of professional talent represented on the platform. Just look at the achievements of its membership, which now number twenty thousand or so individuals, including more than 11,000 producers and 1,200 verified investor/financiers.
This year began with one of Slated’s two thousand listed film projects, RICH HILL, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and several other listed titles also picking up key prizes there and going on to secure distribution. And the year will end with several of our members with a real shot of glory at next year’s Academy Awards, including Jonathan Sehring and Caroline Kaplan for their producing roles on BOYHOOD (aka Growing Up), Bruna Papandrea for both the Reese Witherspoon vehicle WILD and for GONE GIRL starring Rosamund Pike ; Anthony Bregman for the Steve Carell showpiece FOXCATCHER; Mick Garris for Angelina Jolie’s UNBROKEN; Nik Bower and Diarmuid McKeown for SELMA, and the quartet of Garrick Dion, Gary Michael Walters, David Lancaster and Stephanie Wilcox, all of whom were involved on two films likely to score acting nominations, WHIPLASH and NIGHTCRAWLER.
On the shortlist for the documentary feature Oscar are LAST DAYS IN VIETNAM, directed and produced by Rory Kennedy and written by Mark Bailey; KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON, co-produced by John Caulkins and executive produced by Tom Gorai; FINDING VIVIAN MAIER, associate produced and assistant edited by Chris McKinley; THE CASE AGAINST 8, co-produced by Rebekah Fergusson; and ART AND CRAFT, executive produced by Julie Goldman, Carolyn Hepburn and Thomas Campbell Jackson.
And it’s not just US talent either who are scoring recognition on Slated. DUKHTAR, which was listed on Slated and featured in one of our YouTube video segments, was chosen by Pakistan as its official submission for the foreign-language Oscar. And just last week, actress Emily Blunt handed a $100,000 check to Abdullah Boushahri in Dubai after she chaired the jury that singled out his script for THE WATER for the prize to help move projects from page to screen. In short, Slated is as close to a Cannes or American Film Market as you can get online – and just like those real-world markets, success on Slated boils down to momentum-building, verification, due diligence, market research and a healthy dose of salesmanship. Pull that off and you too will join the 170 plus films on Slated that have completed funding, a portion of which as a direct result of introductions made on the website.
Those Slated numbers are about to escalate. Having operated these past two years in “beta” mode, essentially testing and iterating the website among a core selection of the film industry, Slated is now eliminating the barriers of entry. From now on, all professionals, across every filmmaking skillset, can join. And projects too. Instead of Slated acting as gatekeepers, we are now letting our filtering and scoring tools do the job for us, mirroring the evaluation criteria that the industry uses in making its own judgments on people and their pitches.
As of this week, everyone on Slated will have the ability to invite in their social media tribes of friends and followers at the click of a button. The positive loop effect activated by growing one's network is well documented: as the number of users increases, so too does the value of the platform in an exponential curve. Think of this as one growing film industry brain in which all the synaptic connections are being fired up among people and projects that would otherwise never find one another when left to the whims of the physical world. The bigger your network, the greater the opportunities, the larger the pool of capital, and the more doors that will open.
Slated’s server infrastructure has been upgraded to handle what will be a surge of traffic and interactions during the coming New Year. How do we know this? Well, we are weeks away from entering the next phase in our development, one that will deploy studio-grade information to help level that distorted playing field across the creative classes.
“Slated will essentially help you create an entire business plan, soup to nuts, with a really plausible, independently verified, statistically gauged model so you don't have to convince anyone any more that you are just as good as that one outlier that made a billion dollars,” explained Slated’s CEO Stephan Paternot at a recent American Film Market seminar, without going into specifics. “We will help ensure that you don't waste time writing the worst business plan in the world. We will help you write a business plan that is what the industry wants to see and now we are kicking it up a notch to show things they didn't know before…"
It’s important to put this all in a realistic context. We can take the guesswork out of much of the business decision-making process to come up with a probable set of outcomes. But that should never be mistaken for absolute certainty. As the film industry has learned with Sony’s nightmare there still may be some unforeseen costs that simply cannot be predicted or adequately measured.
The world is awash in a tidal wave of data bits and bytes, much of it left behind from the data exhaust of our hyper-connected mobile lives, but that alone has not made the planet that much smarter. Quite the contrary. Using brain scans, researchers at Philadelphia’s Centre for Neural Decision-making have been able to show how our reasoning abilities start slowing down or seizing up when faced with Too Much Information. That ceaseless influx of tweets, texts and emails throws us for a mental loop. At best we give too much weight to the latest piece of data thrown at us; at worst, we become so tyrannized by all that choice that we lack the conviction to act at all. The same brain-freeze applies to organizations: the more that companies drink from that fire-hose of information, the poorer their decisions.
All of which is to say that whatever Slated ends up unveiling, you can be sure that the stress will be put on actionable intelligence. As we mentioned at the AFM, Slated is sitting on a mountain of data that hasn’t been analyzed closely yet. The goal will be to study the patterns of what the industry is doing and then share those best practices through our different outlets. We want to distill what gives producers and investors that extra edge and share that with you so that you, in turn, share that with your own networks.
If the film industry is really the business of manufacturing desire, then Slated's expanding set of capabilities is all about quantifying such delight in ways that make it simpler and faster to realize your potential. And on that hopeful note, we want to take this opportunity to wish everyone reading this a Very Happy Holidays and a peaceful, prosperous and purposeful 2015.