Why We Need to Know What’s Failing

Welcome back to the Bullwork. It goes to Hollywood. My name is Sunny Bunch from Culture Editor at the Bullwork. I’m very pleased to be rejoined today by the entertainment strategy guy now. The entertainment strategy guy, one of my favorite sub stacks.

I read them my subscribe I read him, you know, every every week when he posts, sometimes multiple times a week. Sometimes we got stuff over at the Anchler as well from, from the ESG. Which is great. But glad to have him back on today to talk about a very important subject. Failure.

Failure is, under, under discussed and underappreciated in this era of streaming war, streaming combat, that sort of thing. So, thanks for being back on the show. Really appreciate it.

Happy to be back? This is one of my favorite articles I produce each year. So,

You you loved a rapid failure.

No one. I even wrote that that this year it bummed me out, but I think is where I’m sure we’ll get into. This is one of the Things about the streaming war specifically the content side that most people still just don’t know about, which is what Bulwark. We know what works for the most part. I actually really agree with that.

But a lot of people don’t realize exactly how much misses out there in the world. So

Well, alright. So let’s let’s let’s break this down because as you as you mentioned in the the intro to the, the piece on TV streaming TV show hits that that, have flopped you know, there was a there was a story in Bloomberg. I think it was a couple weeks ago. It was like, nobody nobody knows what’s failing. And I even I reading that was like, I I got a pretty good sense.

Of what is not working out there. I mean, I feel like I look at the Nielsen charts enough and and look at the other stuff to kinda have a sense of what is working and what isn’t working. But you have, you know, if not quite a rigorous formula, you have at least, a a sense of what is going on via a bunch of different inputs. Can you break down for us very quickly, how you kind of look at what constitutes success and what constitutes failure and the different inputs that you use.

Yeah. So I actually do I like sort of try to middle ground. I do think we don’t know what fail or it’s not that we don’t know what fails. We would know what fails if people actually, like, sought out that information. Can I actually do you a quick ask you a quick question, which I think, like, illuminates this really quick?

Okay. So what are the biggest films in theaters this year? In theaters? In America.

Well, it well, okay. It depends on what we’re looking at here. Are we looking at

just Just take a total gross. Total gross. Yeah. Total gross.

Okay. Total worldwide gross. I mean, Super My r Brothers movies, number one, Barbie’s number two. You’re looking at probably Oppenheimer getting up to number three. That that would be the the top three.

You can name them off the top of your head really quick. Okay. What’s the biggest films on streaming so far this year?

Let’s see. That’s a great question. No idea.

Right.

I would assume they’re all on Netflix. But let me let me alright. Let me take actual shot at answering that. I I would assume they’re all they’re all if we’re looking just purely at number of hours watched, they’re all Netflix originals, things like heart of stone. Or, you know, what what I don’t know

how to stone yet, but, yeah, keep going. I I I just find this, like, fascinating because I think it gets to the impact. No.

I mean, I I literally I I’m I’m now racking my I would just let’s see. Extraction two is probably one of the five biggest.

That’s number three.

Okay.

Second biggest, I’ll give you a hint, starred J lo.

Oh, mother.

The mother. Yeah. And the but the number one, they think no one would get was you people. That came out in February around Valentine’s Day.

Wait. Is that the Jonah Hill one?

Yes. Yeah.

The Jonah Hill Eddie Murphy one?

Yes. Exactly.

Oh, wow.

That’s that’s the number one through the first four weeks. And then, prime video actually got one title on there. But so then I bring this up because the other flip side of that is, can you name the biggest box office bomb of the year?

Well, again, a like, That’s that’s a that’s a tricky question to answer because if you’re if you’re looking at box office bomb, you’re you’re really thinking about it in relation to

Yeah. But but that’s into

in relation to budget. Right?

So it’s a flash. Right. And number two is either mission impossible or Indiana joke. But the point is you got the flash off the top of your head. When it comes to doing streaming, if something misses the charts, You know, but if we can’t even remember what the hits were, a lot of times if it misses the charts, we don’t know what they are.

So to to tie it all the way back to my methodology, What I do now is every week I publish a streaming ratings report, but that report is essentially a roll up of all the data sources that provide publicly available information or provide information to me. And that includes three sources that track viewership, specifically Nielsen, Samba TV, and, show labs by Plumbing Research. They all track either the total hours produced or they track the number of unique viewers watching a show. They provide either a top ten list, broken out, or they provide a top five list. What I do when I put this list together is I track everything that comes out every week and I try and find how it does on those ratings.

And if something either missed the charts completely, which I call a dog not barking after the Sherlock Holmes short story, or If the ratings are very low and it’s very expensive or has very top tier talent in it, I label those flops, misses, or bombs. I don’t have a specific definition for those yet, I’m actually working on it. And then I check other sorts of metrics of interest. These are, like, you mentioned real good. TV time.

Those are app applications that allow customers to say, I want to watch this show, and they click a button. So that’s an interest level metric very high that someday they probably will watch this show. Or I look at IMDB because that’s actual customer ratings, and it says did I enjoy this show and the total number of reviews, along with the rating, is a pretty good proxy for some of those things. And so I make this big list for every streamer. And then I basically put into three categories, which is is in competition for the biggest miss of it quarter half for them so far, is it an honorable mention or is it just a miss, or do I take it off the list?

Because I think it did well in And there’s a ton of edge cases, but that’s it. I leave out certain types of content as well, which I think we’ll talk about. But I don’t do kids content. And for the most part, I try and avoid reality shows in unscripted documentaries because they tend to be cheap, but that doesn’t mean they’re missing a lot of misses. It just means Like, for example, citadel, which is by some reports the second most expensive TV show of all time, is definitely a much bigger swing and a miss.

Sort of like the flash, then say, you know, there’s, like, another prime video show that I had on the charts. Like, the rig or something like that. Those shows aren’t as expensive. So while they’re still misses, they’re not to the same degree that something like citadel is. And so that’s my rough calculation.

And then I make these big lists, and then I publish them all so everyone can know what missed though. Again, it’s for the whole half of the year. And I

wanna I wanna just emphasize for folks that we’re talking pure numbers here. You’re not, factoring in critical acclaim, you know, Emmy wins, whatever, Oscar nominations, whatever. This is not, this is not a measure of quality, exactly, but, popularity.

Many of these shows I’m writing about, I am a big fan of I thought we’re very good. I have one on Disney Plus that I loved. But again, it didn’t make the ratings chart, so my opinions don’t matter. And again, to the point with critics, there definitely is a role for content that is critically acclaimed and that we’ll win those awards. I think that field overall is pretty crowded, so it actually can be tough get a good ROI, but that’s not what I’m evaluating here because whether or not things are good critically beloved or doing well in the awards, Most other people know those things already.

So that’s not really that they don’t really need me because in the those cases, rotten tomatoes really can provide the guide.

Yeah. Can I I wanna I I wanna drill down into just one of your inputs, for a second because I know I know some folks, you you get sometimes some pushback on using IMDB? Because IMDB, is, first, it’s entirely user, generated. Right? It’s, you know, it’s people, you know, assigning ratings, whatever, which creates a which creates a an issue, just in terms of, specifically campaigning Right?

People campaigning to make things, you know, higher rated or lower rated. But also it just, it appeals to a certain There’s a certain built in user base there already that, kind of prefers sort of, like, Christopher Nolan has, I think, nine of the two hundred and fifty films on IMDB. Right? And as much as I as I am a well known and registered with the government, Christopher Nolan Shill, But the but that does that strikes me as a little a little over the top.

Yeah. So I’m the last Pendant fan, I think, in America. And so I agree with you. But his interstellar scores, when they had recently made the charts because it switched services are we’re over like two million IMDB review of votes, which is insane. So, yes.

So when I use IMDB to be totally clear, I actually check every score to see if it was campaigned. And you can tell something’s been campaign because there’s a large number of ten star votes or one star votes. We have seen a lot more in the last year. A lot of shows getting more positive campaigns. So if folks are really into something, they all go and throw a ten votes, and you can tell that the ten votes are really not in line with, like, it should look like a normal distribution.

And if it doesn’t, it’s been subject of a campaign. But that’s it. If something’s been subject of a negative campaign, I just sort of ignore all the ratings, except in one case, to pop up because it was so extreme. It’s like the greatest IMDB score ever, which is Velma because their number of one star votes was from everyone. So there was no one positive campaigning it, which you don’t really see.

So I ignore those. You also mentioned John Resque, which I think is absolutely super important. And it’s something I try and take. I definitely take into account, though I haven’t done a full quantitative system. That’s on my data road map.

But I try and only compare shows to similar shows in their genre. So if you’re talking, does something have high ratings for a superhero show? You don’t compare it to other dramas. You don’t compare it to reality shows, which do very poorly on IMDB. So only use it as sort of a backstop, especially for the cert shows that aren’t making any of the ratings to sort of see, hey, is this picking up and getting some you know, steam that I’m not seeing, especially if its ratings are over an eight.

Because to your point, it doesn’t mean it’s broadly popular then, but it means it’s popular within its niche, which can still be a good thing.

Mhmm. Mhmm. And also importantly, you look at total number of reviews, which I think is the most interesting and objective part of all this. It’s not it’s not strictly speaking, you know, Hey, this got a seven point two. It’s this got a seven point two with, you know, hundred thousand reviews.

Right. I’ve

actually seen a

lot of ratings.

Yep. Sorry to interrupt. I actually seen a lot of people use just the ratings, and I specifically have a a rough threshold that if it doesn’t get over ten thousand reviews and say the first three months, it’s really probably not that popular, and we kind of know that. So you really need to look at both the rating with the review. I would also point out that, I also only use IMDB because most of the other customer review sites just don’t have the volume of metrics on the TV side to really justify their use, mainly meaning metacritics user reviews, and Braun tomatoes.

Because a lot of times you see the Ron tomatoes credit score to customer score. Some of those customer scores can be in the hundreds of reviews. So it’s just really not that notable. The one exception is letterboxed, which actually is really getting a big following, and actually does can have a lot of movies that have quite a few number of reviews, but I haven’t started tracking that data yet.

Yeah. I I love I’ve just interject here. I love letterboxed, and I, specifically, I love looking at the, they actually have a little handy chart usually on every individual movie showing the distribution of reviews.

Okay. And

you can you can you can look at them and you can see you almost always see a bell curve of some sort. You know, sometimes it’s skewed toward five stars. Sometimes it’s skewed toward one stars, but you don’t generally see, you know, low, then a then a middle rise, then, you know, kinda back down. And you can always tell when something has been campaigned against, as you say, or is, you know, has has transgressed against something with the user base on letter which I think is a little younger and a little more progressively inclined, that shall we say. You can always tell when those movies have have transgressed there are movies that transgress against those sensibilities because they will skew very sharply, like a ski slope down.

And then there will be like a little uptick, a little bump at the end when somebody counters.

And you can find those on IMDB. You just have to click on the review. Mhmm. And then you can find that same bell curve. But, yeah, so I like letterbox.

I think it’d be useful I just haven’t done the process to actually compare them. But having a good the number of reviews is a good double check on whether or not something’s getting popular. Yep.

Yep. Alright. So let’s talk about let’s talk about a one show before we get into a a more broader discussion to kind of, crystalize some of these things. I mentioned before we before we started, the show on AppleTV plus hijack. Now hijack is a show that jumps out to me as a hit.

It it it’s a it’s my friends are watching it. We’re we’re talking about it. My wife was like, we should watch this show. I was like, okay. Yeah.

We’ll watch this show. And she is not, you know, necessarily paying attention to all the the new stuff that’s coming out. So that’s usually an indicator that something is broken through to me when when my when my wife, recognizes it. And, on top of that, it was a I think it was at the top of the real good charts. You know, I guess the emails, the top ten from real good.

It was on the the top of those charts for, for a couple weeks. I know the just watch folks were, I think, into it as well. But I I was a little bit surprised to see it make the honorable mention miss like, not not really a miss, but an honorable mention, almost miss. On your in your email. What so what what what’s the disconnect there?

What am I what am I as a viewer and as a critic not experiencing correctly from a numerical standpoint?

I think your experience it correctly. The one thing which we pointed out above is you mentioned just watch and real good. They’re examples of interest metrics. One thing I’ve definitely noticed with all the interest metrics, including TV time, where it had a four week run on TV time, which is pretty good, but never got above fifth place in the interest metrics. The one one of scenario I’ve noticed with interest metrics is like IMDB.

They definitely have, certain audience and genre rescues. And that’s because in most cases, unless the companies are very, very good about having panels that are, you know, representative of people across the country. You’re essentially people are opting into those applications. Most of those applications tend to start with Apple apps. So there could be some bias.

And again, I can’t prove this. I don’t have all their data, but this is what I see where, you know, customers who tend to be higher income, tend to be more likely to be mobile phone owners, tend to be more likely to be cord cutters, tend to use these applications. And I think Apple TV plus is strategy is to deliver content to those types of customers. So in a sign, the fact they’re doing good on those interest metric, doing well on those interest metrics, is a sign that they’re delivering on the customers they’re targeting. But this gets back to where whenever we’re dealing with lots and lots of data, you know, it’s as much an art as in as a science, and there’s philosophy behind it.

And one of the big challenges whenever I’m writing a streaming ratings report is making is doing the evaluation, is this show a hit, or does this show a hit for Apple TV plus? And so hijacks the perfect example where it’s something that I’d say, I it’s absolutely a hit for Apple TV plus. And again, there’s a lot of edge cases. And in this case, based we did get a Samba TV, what I call, static, though, where they say how many households watched it. And they said, four hundred and sixty thousand watched it in the first week.

What’s funny about that though is, Samba TV, when they’ve released these selective data points, they’ve never actually They’ve only rarely done it over the same time period. So we only have one other show to compare it to over the first week, and that’s platonic at three hundred thousand households. Or in the first six days. And then you have and then we only have a handful of other shows. So hijacked on that metric is like is on the higher end.

But that said, if we’re comparing four hundred and sixty seven thousand households to something that, like, you know, the witcher that did one point two million, tough to say that that drop off means that this thing’s a huge hit. And then the other factor when it comes to Apple TV plus is They almost when it comes to scripted content, nothing looks cheap, and everything has top tier talent. Idris Elba, I don’t think he’s working for free. I don’t think he’s working for scale. I think he got a huge paycheck to make that TV show.

So I like try and factor those things in. And that’s why I didn’t call it their biggest miss because I think some other shows were more expensive and had clear much lower ratings but I would say it’s the closest they have through the first half of the year of being on the edge of being say, not a not a miss or a hit just sort of in the middle. Servant would be one of those as well that I know I put on the list. Yeah, Is that all me? Yeah.

I you know what? Here, one more point too, actually, when I I didn’t think about it. The other point, which I also really hold against Apple T. V. Plus, is that When you do go to service that uses really a representative sample size, like Nielsen, the show never made the Nielsen charts any of the data we have so far.

We haven’t gotten the the data for the third week of July. So it could surprise us and make the charts for the third week of July, but it likely won’t. And so that just means you have a show that wasn’t one of the top ten most viewed in America. And if Apple had never had Ted Lasso make those lists, I can maybe say, well, Apple just can’t make the list because their user base is too small, but Ted Lasso was on the charts, one of the longest running shows this year so far. So when it comes to a show that is genuinely really popular, Ted Lasso did really, really well.

Now it is in its third season. There’s some caveats like that. But adding all those things up, I still think hijack was an expensive miss, for app for when you look at the TV environment, as a whole, though it might be one of Apple TV pluses better performing shows this year.

Yeah. Do the do do the the services like just watching real good, skew toward smaller networks like Apple or I when I say smaller, I just mean, Bulwark that are not necessarily the first stop for everybody. So not not like a Netflix or,

you

know, Hulu or Max. Right? So, like, does it would would they possibly skew toward the smaller networks like that because people just don’t know where some someone’s like, I’m I’ve heard about this show hijack. What network is it on? So they pull up Just Watch to find out where it is.

And then that’s how they they they get there.

That absolutely could happen. I think more what happens, even though Netflix tends to do well on the charts, is that Netflix is more penalized. For that. Because I think they truly are the first stop. Same with private video.

I think they get penalized a little bit on that metric. Though I haven’t seen it enough with the smaller services. I think Apple T. V. Plus is the one that does the best on the T.

V. Time charts. They definitely over index there compared to some of the other metrics. Though I Will Saletan lot of their shows do tend to be speculative fiction or science fiction, Those tend to do well in IMDB charts. So Apple TV plus has had some shows that really accumulate IMDB viewers.

Like hijack, for example, does have thirty thousand reviews. But it only has a seven point five. So it’s sort of like right on the edge for being a very good show. Overall, I know the show they had last year Blackbird did well, which I had called that one a big miss, which it was because missed all the ratings charts, but it came from, Richard Pluckler’s company and had a lot of buzz behind it. It ended up right now.

It’s it’s over, I think, eighty thousand MDB reviews. So its audience found it. But more what I would say is the Netflix effect, I wouldn’t trust they don’t need TV time because they’re so big. So if a show doesn’t do well on TV time for Netflix, don’t really factor that in. I will also say the superhero shows do insanely well on TV time.

So, secret invasion, which never the top show in America was number one on the charts for five straight weeks. So the superhero shows have a bias, and then, star trek shows do very well. As well.

Yeah. That’s interesting. Do the star trek shows are they showing up on Nielsen very often?

So Paramount Plus wasn’t tracking. But Nielsen wasn’t tracking Paramount Plus, I believe, until February or maybe it was earlier, so we didn’t know. But since they have started tracking them, the card has shown up. I think it showed up for two weeks, and then strange new worlds has been hopping on and off the charts. During its new one, which strange new worlds is a version of my hijack that everyone’s telling me I need to get on and watch that one.

So

Yes. I’ve gotten I’ve had that conversation as well. I’m like, look, I love Picard because it’s just force feeding me the member berries. And that’s all I that’s all I actually want. I don’t want new I don’t want new stories and and that sort of thing.

I just want I just want to relive my youth Alright. So let’s, let’s let’s talk a little bit about why it matters to track these fields. Let’s I I wanna I wanna just I’m gonna pick on a network here. I’m gonna pick on max. K?

I’m gonna pick on max. So, here’s the thing. I watch Max a lot. I watch a lot of shows, you know, on HBO, HBO Max, whatever whatever it’s called now. I like the Bulwark.

Even though it has the the rebrand and everything that they have done to it has made it much more difficult. Thing for me to deal with and track and and whatever. Whatever. I’m not gonna I’m not gonna get into yelling about David’s Azlov right now. But, like, I I I watch a lot of TV on Max is what I’m saying.

And I’m looking I’m looking at the I I was looking at the list of TV misses. On Max, and I did not recognize half of the I literally did not recognize half of these shows. Just did not did not, know what they were. So here here are the some of the shows, here’s the entire list of misses that you have on, for for Max. Let’s see.

And just like that, the climb, clone high, Downiest dream cars, fired on Mars, bunny or dies high science, The other two, smartless on the road, swiping America, ten year old Tom, warrior? What am I eating with Zoe Deschanel? And Velma, the previously mentioned Velma. So that that that’s let’s see. That’s what?

Twelve titles or so here. I would say that I am I could actually describe what the show is in four of the cases there, which means that eight of them, I just, like, I I actually really liked Fire on Mars. Funny show. People should check it out. But, like, I, you know, most of these shows on here, I I don’t even know what they are.

Don’t know I don’t know what they are. How can you run a successful, a successful streaming company when your some of your most loyal customers look at your, lineup of programming that you have spent at least tens and possibly, you know, low nine figures of millions on, and don’t don’t they they just don’t know what they don’t know what it is.

Well, I mean, so that I mean, you basically justified the explanation in a nutshell. I mean, when I I think for a while in the streaming wars, to hold disruption that moved to streaming. For a while, we sort of forgot some core principles of both entertainment and then business and say smashing together the entertainment business. And one of them is that when you’re making shows, it really is a portfolio game. But the reason it’s a portfolio game is because the hits pay for the misses.

But overall, you’re trying to get that return on investment. So the hits pay for the misses. So long as you don’t make so many misses, that the hits can’t afford to pay for them. And so that’s what when The reason why I think it’s so important is to know what the misses are is for the before we had streaming ratings, And especially when everyone was funding deficit financed operations, no one focused on what the misses were because it just didn’t matter. The return on investment wasn’t there because it was all about subscriber growth.

And then once you got subscriber growth, there’s gonna be to turn back the profitability. Now that everyone’s focused on profitability, the return on investment comes back to the fort. So the question is if you can make it’s actually, like, I think sixteen shows, of which dedicated customers can’t identify five of them. Even if they might not be the intended audience, the lesson there is you need to identify which of those shows not to make in the first place, especially because even on Max, the biggest hits so far this year all came from HBO shows. So clearly the HBO with max distribution model makes sense, or you need to go back to the start and figure out how you can launch shows this many shows and get people to actually watch them in real time.

Again, not saying that’s that easy challenge, but you have to know how many shows missed because that’s the basic input to are we succeeding based off the hits?

Alright. I I wanna I wanna I wanna drill down on one point here.

Okay.

When we and I agree with this, hits pay for the misses. Right? This is this is a bedrock idea of entertainment. Mhmm. And that’s basically how the industry has worked for years.

You know, but when we say the hits pay for the misses, I don’t understand exactly how you quantify that in in, in in modern times and modern streaming TV. Right? Because when you say the hits pay for the misses, hit TV show, like friends, Right. Pays for the misses because you can charge way more money for ads on friends, you know, back in the nineteen nineties and two thousands. Or Seinfeld.

Right? You’re you’re you can charge advertisers of seeing amounts of money for thirty second spot. And that is what that is what makes money. And then it goes to syndication, whatever. There’s other revenue streams.

The revenue waterfall is is deep and long, whatever. But, like, that Alright. That’s how it or with a movie movie much much simpler case. They hit the Oppenheimer, you pay you you bring in nine hundred million dollars in ticket sales worldwide, and that pays for, you know, your, I don’t know, Redfields or whatever. That that don’t that don’t that don’t fight that don’t hit.

And I actually enjoyed Redfield. I don’t wanna sound like, but I but, like, you know, you you know what I’m saying? Like, Alright. So, like, that but in streaming, there is no it’s not like it’s the the idea of what works and what doesn’t work is so diffuse that I don’t I’m not entirely sure how you say, alright. I don’t know.

The righteous gemstones or something or succession. Right. That covers that covers, I don’t know, the other two and swiping America. You know, I, like, I I don’t I just don’t understand how you break this down.

So I don’t think you’re wrong to say you don’t understand it because I think this is actually I was just reading, I think, an article on CNN where someone said, you know, all the streamers value different things, and we don’t know what they value. So it’s very complicated, so we don’t know. And you read you wrote a, actually, a terrific column a few, maybe a couple months ago about how Hollywood’s big problem is that we don’t actually value things with dollars anymore, that breaking down all those markets has actually made it much tougher to identify what success is and relatedly how to share profits. It’s a point I totally agree with. Again, to go back to what I was saying, like, five, ten years ago is when I saw this streaming model was for films in particular.

So they go from theatrical to home entertainment to second windows, and we’re gonna condense it all down into one, which is only streaming It never made sense to me how that pie is bigger, and so how you share that pie. That all said, while it’s harder, and more difficult. When I say pay for itself, really, in this case, I’m not talking about actual dollars and cents, though it can translate to that. It really is talking about something like The acquiring of new customers and the retaining of old customers is basically the job of every piece of content on your platform. And so shows that are huge hits will acquire more of them, and they will retain more of them.

And you can put a quantitative measure on those things And you can triangulate how well the content is doing based on things like the viewership, the completion rate, and the total number of customers. So when to use like a a much easier example than like Max, when I ask what hits paid for all the misses, because you know Netflix, if you scroll down, in the article, they had quite a few misses as well. They more shows make the Nielsen charts, but, you know, key factor in budgets, they still have a lot of shows that are misses for them. But we know that Wednesday essentially paid for all their misses in November and December because so many people watched it and watched it for so long. So they’re not paying for it in the sense of actual value, but any show that you keep people on the platform makes it much more likely that they’re gonna keep their subscription.

If they’re gonna be more likely to keep their subscription, you can raise prices on them. And if you raise prices, you’re generating more value. And so, you know, if fired on Mars, which is one of the shows on the Max list that I had not heard of. But if say it had broken out and a lot of people are like, you have to check out Max to watch this, that’s gonna pay for, say, swiping America or ten year old Tom or potentially warrior. Right?

Because they’re tuning in to watch that, and so it’s driving the success. So then it’s a matter of weighing the number of hits and how big those hits are versus the number of misses. And so for HBO, they’ve actually done a really interesting strategy and that they’re they’re doing more and more shows that are going to Max They’re doing less fewer originals, but having the shows appear on HBO and then drive viewership on Max as well. And in that sense, they actually had a pretty good start to the year between the last of us was a big, big hit in succession, which actually grew enough in the viewership that paid for it. I bring up a show, like, and just like that, the sex and the city spin off that I think would have done better had it been given an opportunity.

So it’s more a statement that Max just still needs to grow. And probably make a few less shows.

Did did Max not put and just like that on HBO? Was that streaming exclusive?

Yes. It was.

Wow. That’s that seems idiotic.

I mean, I could double check, but I’m I’m, like, eighty percent.

I I don’t I don’t doubt. I I am not doubting you. I’m again, my one of the problems here with all these discussions is that, all of my viewing is skewed because I don’t watch anything with advertising anymore. I don’t I don’t ever see any ads. I pay I pay extra money for even the services I don’t use every week.

Like, peacock, not to see ads ever on the rare occasion that I do. So, like, everything is kind of it just shows up on the app where it doesn’t for me, which is a terrible way to go through life. Right. If you wanna understand these things work. I will just say again, fired on Mars.

Very it’s the it’s the best Mike Judge show that Mike Judge has nothing to do with as far as I can tell. Nice. But it’s it’s great. People people should check it out.

So you have it on peacock jumped on the Super Mario Brothers bandwagon. I’m actually very curious to see how that movie does for them. I think it’ll

I assume it’s gonna do very well. Right? I mean, all of the the animated things have have done pretty well on, Peacock. From universal, haven’t they? I mean,

they they have. I just think Super Mario might be in a different level in the one. Prediction I’m trying to guess is my or one of the predictions I’ve made is I think it will be the biggest film on Netflix this year because it’s coming out in December if the four month, you know, delays rate. It’s and again, it could not. You never know how they do it, but it it should come out around December eighth.

And if it’s it’ll essentially be going up your against your favorite Zach Snyder’s rebel moon. So that’ll make it very fun.

So you’re saying I have to cheer against Super Mario. That’s that’s one too. That’s what I, no. I, I, I have we have not watched it on peacock, because my children for my birthday, got me a copy of Super Mario Brothers movie. It was very thoughtful of them.

Okay. They bought it for me on Blu Ray.

Nice.

So I could watch it. Not them. Very, very thoughtful

to to get you. Yeah.

I really appreciate it. I really appreciated that. But the, okay. Alright. So let’s, let us move off from fired on Mars, which is a good show people should watch.

And talk about, you you, have a piece over at the Angler about, the general failures of sports documentary sports programming. But not I wanna be clear here, not my sports programming. We’re talking about, like, memories, TV shows, that sort of thing. And one of the one of the the nuggets that had jumped out in your, in your emails was, just how incredibly poorly watched the various LeBron James. Specials shows have been.

Like, there was, I think, one of One of them, had something like a hundred and fifty, IMDB ratings, which is, I mean, functionally zero. Yep. Why is it that sports? And also, I get the sense that nature documentaries, like the dinosaurs CGI thing on, on on Apple or Disney or wherever that was. Why why do why do why aren’t these things hitting with audiences?

In in the way that, you know, something like, earth, the earth the planet earth show on BBC used to kinda hit with audiences.

That so to go back to the question is why aren’t they hitting? I don’t quite I don’t quite know the answer to that. Like, it’s actually a puzzle. You brought a planet earth, which I think is the right example. I believe planet earth and planet earth too are still two of the top.

I’m DB tier TV series of all time by total by ratings, the number of reviews. So they definitely hit there. So when it comes to nature documentaries, I still haven’t figured out why per se they’re not hitting with audiences. We just know that whatever the base is that really had those shows pick up in, like, drive, like, again, when they were on AMC and BBC American and PBS, and everyone was watching these planet earth. That viewership just have translated Netflix.

Another one, I believe, their version is called our planet. And it has David Attenborough or Richard Annborough, which one but whoever is the, you know, the it might be his last nature documentary he narrates. And it’s from the BBC team. It’s just massively more expensive than with the BBC team makes each year, and it didn’t make the charts. So for whatever reason, nature documentaries seem to be the type of content that people would watch on the linear TV screens of old, but they’re not picking to watch amongst all the deluge of scripted content that’s out there.

When it comes to sports in particular, though, and this is what my piece in the inkler is about. I think there’s just a very clear distinction that a lot of the streamers want to get into the sports game, but they don’t wanna play pay the, like, eye watering prices required to get into the sports game. We’ve even heard rumblings that even Amazon’s like, we’re very happy with the NFL. But it was really expensive, and we wanna do a couple more seasons to see if we’re actually gonna make our money back. But I think the NFL, the Thursday night football and Amazon is a perfect example.

Is I believe it was the most if you just go by total hours viewed, it was the most watched show last year or it’s amongst like top three something like that. So it’s like if you have actual live sports, particularly the most popular sport in America football, you get the viewership. When you drop down from that and say, okay. Well, let’s go to basketball, slightly less popular league. And now let’s make a documentary about one part of that, or we make a show inspired by one of the characters There’s so much other scripted content that it being basketball on its own won’t help it thrive.

It has to be great and good for basketball movie or show to sort of get to those peaks. And like the example is, you know, peacock had a a biopic about LeBron James, who’s our who’s the biggest basketball star in America in the world, and it has one point five thousand IMDB reviews. Right now. Most people, even basketball fans, couldn’t tell you what it was called. So I think that’s more a sign that if you wanna get into sports, you have to actually have live sports itself.

And documentaries can be good, and people can watch them, and they can have, say, a good shelf life but it’s not the same as having the actual sports itself.

What do you make of Apple’s foray into some of, I I mean, you could describe them as niche sports, right? MLSs, But also, MLB, I mean, Major League Baseball, they have a they have a deal there. It it feels like Apple is making the biggest moves into sports, but also at the lowest stake.

Yeah. Like, for example, with the baseball ones, right, isn’t it only, I believe, like, a handful of games with, like, a wraparound thing? So it’s, like, a way to, like, dive in and get it. I do think there’s partly a piece with the sports. And, again, with Apple, always put out the caveat that, you know, This is which I sort of I hear it so often that it, like, starts bugged me, but it’s a lost leader for them so they can lose money on it.

I personally think that it would be better if every company had to tell exactly how much money they were losing to Wall Street. So then the way you don’t have any economic distorting things. And if people wanna know what’s wrong with Hollywood, people willing to lose money on projects is not sustainable, and therefore, it does distort the various economics. My gut is they are trying to really test the markets because for Apple TV, and I think this actually benefits a lot of their shows, their goal is really to get as many devices into homes so they can get as many people signing up for services, but then also just tie tighter into the Apple ecosystem. Sports are a great way to do that because it becomes must watch content for certain groups of people, and you can sort of justify those costs.

That said, think we’re gonna see across all sports that niche sports. And again, I wouldn’t put baseball in this, but I would put MLS for lack of a better word. They really don’t drive as much viewership as people think because it really does drop off a cliff. I’m not saying it’s NFL or bus in America, but in a lot of ways, it is like you either have the NFL and you can really upcharge a lot of those things or you don’t. And so until you actually have some of that football, it gets much harder.

And then I would put basketball baseball, oh, and college football as well.

Yeah. The MLS thing is interesting to me, though. From a from a very specific, it, like, almost I mean, I I guess probably not a coincidence. It probably it probably is all tied together, but the acquisition of Messi, lionel Messi, one of, you know, arguably one of the greatest soccer players ever. I’ll tell you what I see every time I turn on Apple TV plus now is a row of programming options offering me chances to pay them extra money so I can see all of Messi’s games.

And I that doesn’t work on me because I’m not an MLS fan. I I’m, I’m a soccer snob. I only watch the euros. But the but the but the But the but it but it I could see it I could see it working on, you know, the five hundred thousand hard core dedicated MLSS fans in this country or the, you know, seven hundred fifty thousand hardcore MLS fans in this country. And if you get a significant amount of them to sign up.

Well, alright then then they’re tied to the service. They’re paying extra for the MLS package. Like, I could see that making sense. But it is it’s still it, you know, to your point, it’s small potatoes compared to the NFL.

And it could work, but again, I also think there’s just a myth for whether or not those people are willing to pay it. The other problem with sports content in a lot of cases is that If it does get too expensive to join the Apple ecosystem, you just pirate the streams somewhere else. I actually think that Again, we mentioned piracy last time, but I I think that’s actually one of the biggest issues. I’ll point out though, one of those interesting things about describing that Apple T. V.

Plus behavior. Is the top bar when someone enters one of your applications is very expensive real estate. And I think a lot of people for that. And then it can actually in a lot of ways drive viewership to various shows and films. So essentially, when Apple’s saying we’re devoting this to the MLS to help make the deal justify itself.

That actually comes at the cost of the other shows. For example, hijack could be up there instead. Or a show from another streaming service could be up there instead. And I actually think that also helps a lot of Apple TV plus shows is that they can put their shows right up there. Where say peacock or Disney plus would have to pay them to get a show up there in the marketing campaign, which is exactly what happens.

Something I don’t think people realize. I think that’s just like a spot up there, but it definitely can influence things. So, so to the point, I haven’t seen all the particulars of the MLS deal, you know, one of the I wish I could see the contract and not have a field day, like, looking at it. The one worry though is even getting someone into that ecosystem, it makes it, you know, to your point much earlier in the conversation about how do you value those things? The whole we got someone into the ecosystem.

It’s a lot of times a very good fudge factor to justify companies making bad decisions. That we don’t actually know about because they don’t provide open financials. And if everyone provided open financials, sort of like all the traditional companies in Netflix, we’d have a much better idea for how well they’re subsidizing these things or not and could have the conversation on is that subsidization good or even working? Think right now, they benefit a lot because whereas Apple is three lines of business. You know, when their services business would probably make the fortune one hundred by itself, you know, So maybe even higher.

So it’s just something I think about.

Yeah. Let’s, let’s let’s jump to a slightly different topic, along the same lines when we’re talking about streaming. One of the things that you mentioned in your discussion of film flops. Is that if you make a movie, you should put it in theaters. Yep.

Now this is a subject near and dear to my heart, for a number of reasons. But the, but but the broader point here is that an advertising campaign creates awareness, not just for theatrical release, creates excitement for the streaming release. But doesn’t this really what aren’t aren’t what you really saying is that there just need to be fewer movies made period and the ones that are made need to go theaters, and then those movies need

to come to streaming services? I’m not saying that specifically, but you could assume that. I actually I mean, in today’s climate, I don’t wanna say, like, yes, make fewer movies because, you know, it benefits everyone to make more movies. I think, I was just having another conversation where I think the main conversation in town when it comes to theatrical films, especially the ones flopping, is the budget situation. So again, the other way to describe it is, do the budgets make sense for how much they’re returning?

So I think you could make these films for streaming But the films should look a lot like the movies that were made for TV back in the day, which means Hallmark movies, which means some of those broadcast like, multi night events, but they are not the same high quality as blockbusters. And so if all the blockbusters say came down and budget by twenty five percent and your streaming films were made for a more reasonable amount, they would make sense on the various platforms with the caveat that except for Netflix, most of the time your film that comes out straight to streaming is not gonna achieve the same cultural awareness and same viewership upside. Though, again, as we went over, you know, We forgot the names of the mother and you people in the three other films. So arguably, even then they don’t have the cultural upside, but they can have the viewership impact that’s a little bit higher. So I think all the budgets need to come down, especially for the streaming only films.

That said, if you really are devoting the effort to make some of these films, like the example. I have a couple examples that I think really would have benefited from it. The Tetris movie It sounds like customers really like that one, and it was on Apple TV plus earlier. If you put that in theaters and you have the stars go out does that get some sort of buzz and put it in the box in the academy award conversation? Maybe white men can’t jump and you people both looked very, very funny.

So can they, you know, counter program, get some people into audiences for a smart effective marketing campaign? And then Disney in particular, you know, figuring out when its films should go to theaters and when they should be in theaters, Peter Pan and Wendy. I mean, the other I think after put your films in theaters, your other biggest point is make more kids movies. Peter Pan and Wendy is a kids movie, and it didn’t go to theaters. So no one watched them.

Yep. Yep. These are these are my hobby horses. More movies and theaters and specifically more movies I could take my children to to kill four hours on a weekend. Yep.

And I those are those are my priorities.

I’m firmly with you.

We — More people. — we

saw teenage Kraken in theaters. So that’s how much That’s how that’s how much we were ready.

I’ve

yeah.

I I, you know, I’m surprised that movie didn’t get a bigger push. My my daughter my daughter really liked it. I mean, she’s, you know, seven year old at the time, she was seven and, really, really enjoyed the, you know, kind of Yeah. Awkward teen tween sort of thing. You know, I I I didn’t I did not make any sense to me why that got totally buried.

And I think it got buried by the calendar because the other thing that theatrical does is they really seem to compress the calendar into those two months of May and June for some reason. I also think, you know, like now that August is emptying out, it would have been a good time. I I also would wonder if Disney seeing the, you know, oncoming freight train of Barbenheimer would have moved haunted mansion to Halloween, which, to me, you should release Halloween movies and Halloween. And then when they come out on streaming, guess what? They’ll be popular next Halloween if they’re good.

You know, So to your larger point though about should the films go to streaming? I am gonna keep updating my series on that. I think I three articles back in May, then the writer strike happened, and that sort of distracted all of us. I’m gonna keep updating that. I would say tentatively though looking at the Nielsen data, if we talk about just how well films did on streaming, because I said straight to streaming films earlier, but actually Bulwark Panther two and Avatar two are both, I think, in the top five.

If not, I think the two top films for how well they did. So that gets or maybe at least top ten, yeah, because extraction, they do right around the same. So that gets back to the argument that you can get all this box office money and you’re still gonna get mostly the same streaming numbers. Shouldn’t you try and get both?

Yeah. Yes, speaking speaking my language. Alright. That was pretty much everything I wanted to ask as you know, I like to close these interviews by saying there’s anything I should have asked. Think that there’s things folks should understand.

About, you know, the the the state of the industry or, you know, what why why we should be paying more attention to what misses, instead of just what hits. What, what do you think folks should know?

Well, see, I would actually step back. We should actually just first know that we absolutely know what the hits are as well. And if anyone doesn’t know, I have a newsletter that covers that hit some misses every week, in addition to a lot of other topics. And that’s the biggest thing that, you know, is all the conversation about what’s Royal in Hollywood. We actually have more data at our disposal than we’ve ever had before.

And we know what the hits and misses are. It’s just the coverage of all the hits and misses is sort of as confusing as trying to find all these shows that are coming out on streamers anyways. And knowing Any industry to be functioning properly has to incentivize people to make money on the given shows. And while it’s tough with straight to streaming because it goes into a big pile and out pops customer things. If we just know what the hits are, we can tie that to those success metrics.

And so we need to know that so that everyone up and down the value chain is making good decisions to make the best content possible which is really, you know, the point of the entire entertainment industry in the first place.

Yes. Making making value propositions work. That’s the Hollywood dream. That’s alright. Well, thank you very much, mister Entertainment Strategy guy.

Again, great newsletter. I’ll link to it in my newsletter. So can you can check it out, but, I I strongly recommend it if you want to have a good sense of how the, the, the, you know, actual economics of the streaming age work and what is what is being watched and what isn’t, check it. Check it out. Make sure you sign up.

Strongly recommended. Again, my name is SunnyBunch. I am the Culture Editor at the Bulwark. I I will be back next week with another episode of the Bulwark Coast of Hollywood. We’ll see you guys next time.