Why Media Mogul Barry Diller Thinks Filmmaking Is Dead: NPR

Barry Diller made his name in the film industry as president and CEO of two Hollywood studios, Paramount Pictures and what was then known as 20th Century Fox. Now, he declares the industry dead.

In an exclusive interview with NPR on the sidelines of the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, Diller said, media and technology conference in Idaho. “The cinema business is over as before and will never come back.”

Yes, this has something to do with Significant drop in ticket sales Movie theaters closed during the coronavirus pandemic. But Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC, a company that owns online properties, said, “It’s so much more than that.”

According to Diller, who has run Paramount and Fox for several decades, streaming has changed the movie industry in fundamental ways, including the quality of the movies being made now.

In the past year, several media conglomerates, including Disney and WarnerMedia, Decided to release new releases in cinemas and on streaming services simultaneously. This was a drastic change, and theater chains protested.

“There was a whole period of time,” Diller said, recalling the amount of time, energy and money that the distribution studios and advertising campaigns invested.

The goal, he said, is to generate continued excitement and enthusiasm for new films. “It’s over,” he said.

The way companies measure success varies, too, says Diller.

“I used to be in the film industry where you make something because you really care about it,” he said, noting that popular reception mattered more than anything.

During Diller’s tenure at Paramount in the late 1970s and 1980s, the studio released films such as Saturday night fever. But since then, he is best known for his work in television. Help create Fox TV, for example.

Now at the IAC, he is closely associated with Internet projects, including the Daily Beast.

Diller talks about how the quality of films is affected

Today, broadcasting is a multibillion dollar industry, and competition between companies for content and customers is fierce. Diller pointed to Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming service, as an example of how incentives are changing in entertainment. In May, the company announced plans to MGM’s purchase of nearly $8.5 billion.

“The system isn’t necessarily to please anyone,” Diller said, noting that Prime Video’s primary purpose is to get more customers to sign up for Amazon Prime. “It’s buying more Amazon products. That’s not a terrible thing. It just doesn’t matter to me.”

During the pandemic, there has been a huge rise in video-on-demand. In the first quarter of 2020, Netflix added 15.8 million new subscribers. Since then, its growth rate has slowed, but the company says it ended the year with more than 200 million customers.

Diller acknowledged the streaming services’ recent success and how they have become indispensable during the pandemic, but it wasn’t a complement to their exorbitant efforts to create more original content.

“These streaming services were making something they call ‘movies,’” he said. “They are not movies. It’s a strange computational process that creates things that last 100 minutes or so.”

For Diller, it’s about seismic change and nostalgia, but it’s also about semantics. He said that the definition of “film is in transition so it means nothing at the moment.”

Companies are trying to figure out what viewers want and how they want it. This resulted in blows and losses.

Diller dishes on the amazing Quibi fail

When asked about Quibi, the now-defunct streaming platform founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former president of Walt Disney Studios, Diller was clear. “Quebe was just a bad idea,” he said. “I mean, it’s that simple.”

The company raised $1.75 billion, and most of that money was spent creating content — short videos designed to be watched on smartphones.

In the months since its launch last year, Quibi failed to gain any traction, and this is what happened Streaming service ended in December.

“It was a bad idea with no testing ground other than a large-scale investment,” Diller said. “Otherwise, it would have slipped around for a while. But it was something so extensive that it lived and died in a millisecond.”

In January, Quibi sold its assets — 75 shows and documentaries — to Roku, for less than $100 million.

“It has nothing to do with anything,” Diller said. “The idea of ​​high-quality, professional stuff for 10 minutes or less does not make sense.”

Katzenberg was one of Diller’s sponsors—part of a group of people mentored by Diller known as the Killer Dealers—and is also in Idaho this week, where he is attending the Allen & Co. Conference. Through a spokesperson, Katzenberg declined to comment.

Diller said he has “almost” no interest in the movie business today. In recent months, he has turned his attention to producing plays on Broadway.

“I find that more creative,” he said.