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February 08, 2008

Who's Selling This Stuff?

It's one thing when Crazy Nikki Finke gets obsessed with tearing Bob Shaye a new one because one of her dark masters tells her too... God knows who that one is. But now Business Week's uber-hack Ron Grover, who gets it wrong endlessly and has become exposed since the web gave anyone out of the magazine's small circle a chance to read him, is pushing a WB absorption of New Line also...

For all the problems New Line has had… are these monkeys out of their minds???

The easy part of this is the biggest question… when has a total absorption of a mini inside a studio worked.

The answer: Never.

Searchlight marketing is in-house. Par Vantage marketing is in-house. Miramax marketing is in-house. DreamWorks marketing still has a strong in-house component, though there is a more clear crossover on the bigger, non-award pictures. And Dimension, when it was part of Disney… in-house.

Now you get to the more personal issue, to WB… which makes this suggestion even stupider.

Does Ron Grover know that there is no official marketing chief at Warners right now?

Has Ron Grover noticed that WIP, which has had more direct big WB oversight than New Line does, has been a relative car wreck?

Is Ron Grover really suggesting that the company that brought us Superman Returns, The Ant Bully, Lady In the Water, and the ambitious arthouse flops The Good German and The Fountain, not to mention the lowest grossing Best Picture nominee in recent history, Letters From Iwo Jima all in one year needs more on their plate?,

While Ron Grover is busy in the utterly insane game of mouthing stats about average box office gross between the major (WB) and a studio that releases 3 big films a year and otherwise works in genre (NL) making the comparison insane, has he even considered the budgets (particularly in marketing) that the two different entities use to get to those grosses?

And while we’re at it, maybe I should point out that even the numbers Grover uses are false. Some might suggest, intentional lies to make his case. New Line released 13 films in 2007, not 17, as misleadingly suggested in his piece. The average was $37.9 million, not Grover’s $28.6m. Where did he get this false number? He looked at Box Office Mojo’s calendar gross chart, which includes holdover from the year before’s movies that are grossing something in the new year. And unlike years past, where a Rings film would make that number more impressive, in 2007 that meant counting the last $11,401 of the Texas Chainsaw sequel (week 14) as part of the average for the year. Likewise, the last $22k of Tenacious D and the last $1.4m of The Nativity Story. The only holdover that had a significant percentage (more than 4%) of the total gross was Little Children, the 2006 release that generated just over half its domestic gross in 2007.

How dare he?!?!

You want to take down a company, do it honestly and show the respect of getting the numbers right.

To his credit, in an incredibly bad show of journalistic laziness, he makes the same dumb mistake with Warner Bros, which averaged $61 million per release in 2007, not $40 million.

This is the plight of people who want to shortcut their stories using Box Office Mojo without paying attention to the details.

Does someone really need to point out to Mr. Grover that WB hasn’t had much success in releasing niche pictures because, like all majors, they aren’t built for it. (Sony Screen Gems… in-house.) Or did he not see the numbers for The Astronaut Farmer or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford or Rails & Ties? Did he not notice that New Line did significantly better with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle franchise, even in its weak third sequel, which in perspective was #34 at the box office in its year of release while this year’s revamp was #46 and had no cultural impact at all.

Absorbing New Line would be an act of unmitigated vanity on the part of WB and on a business level, simply, stupid.

Just last year, WB had perhaps the worst summer of any studio in the modern history of the business… unless you just measured it by grosses and not costs vs revenues... you know, the way you might expect Business Week to do.

Grover, like whoever is pushing this agenda to him and Finke and getting ink for it, is living in a past where people really thought a heavily verticalized studio would work. But the prove is completely clear… it does not.

Now, it would be completely reasonable for Time-Warner to look at their movie properties and to decide what business they most want to be in... or don't want to be in. But the idea that they don’t want to be in the genre business would fly in the face of the rest of the industry.

Essentially, Time-Warner faces the basic issue that Disney faces with The Weinsteins a few years ago. Miramax/Dimension had grown into a problem. The annual budget for the studio was too big, but not because of the genre elements at Dimension, but because Harvey was chasing Oscar each year with expensive art films. Disney offered The Weinsteins a deal with a $400 million a year budget (down from $700m), but it was rejected. And the separation was unstoppable from there.

Should New Line be free to make $250 million movies without corporate oversight? No.

And may I say, “Duh!”

You want to make the case that Lynne & Shaye are over it after 40 years and new blood needs to be brought in? Okay. Find a candidate. I may or may not agree, but it’s a conversation.

You want to bring in some operations of New Line into WB divisions? Makes perfect sense. With due respect to the good people who are about to lose their jobs in the fold-in, the model for all Home Entertainment being under one roof has worked rather well for Sony. Do it.

But marketing? Warners released 23 films last year. And if Grover actually knew anyone in WB marketing, aside from the studio’s corporate publicist, he would know that they were terribly strained just doing that, with three full marketing teams working their asses off. Adding another 10 films would be in-fucking-sane.

So what do you do? Fold in New Line and hire a fourth team? Uh…

And does Robinov oversee the New Line product like he does the WB product? Uh…

Let’s not even point out that Grover doesn’t bother to note that the new head of marketing at New Line has been in place for just 6 months. This doesn't mean he will make it... but it does mean that the company has already begin a transition. Let’s not even point out that the deal for The Hobbit, New Line’s version of Harry Potter, just got done and that if you took “that film” away from any studio, they would look much softer.

And has it occurred to anyone that New Line has its strongest line-up in a few years this year? The Gondry will be a commercial stiff, but a Will Ferrell comedy, Sex & The City, a Harold & Kumar sequel, a Rachel McAdams drama, and a star-studded He’s Just Not That Into You seems like a marketable group of films. Maybe they will all stiff. I don’t know. I haven’t seen the movies.

But in the end, either you are in the genre arm game or you are not… just like WB is either in the art arm game… or not. Half measures and folding marketing in are sure bets for failure. Even the mighty Fox Searchlight quietly failed in doing this with Fox Atomic… and they have the machine to market to teens like no one's business.

How can someone as long in the job as Grover be so fundamentally ignorant of how the industry works in 2008? I wish I knew. But he is yet another example of a last gasp from Old Media for relevance, playing it the old way, assuming they are too important (tee hee) for anyone to challenge them. But if you really want to be in the analysis business, do a little analysis… please! You work for Business Week... you're not supposed to be just another self-promoting, hyped-up blogger with an agenda.

PS - I completely forgot to note... studio stuff hasn't moved a corporate stock price in a decade. Time-Warner didn't get a stock market boost from Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. So, moving NL into WB is going to get Wall Street's attention? Pul-eeeeze!

Posted by poland at February 8, 2008 08:36 AM

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