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February 09, 2009
Today's Sucker Bet
I am terribly amused by all the "you shouldn't have f-ed with Ron Meyer... you won't like Ron Meyer when he gets angry" stuff that is being rolled out to the nattering nabobs and dutifully being repeated as The Gospel across the blogosphere today.
If that's DreamWorks biggest problem in the next years, they will be dancing in the streets.
It’s not that Ron Meyer isn’t mighty mighty.
It isn’t that making “enemies” of former “friends” is a great idea.
But DreamWorks – where David Geffen is a lot more involved in strategy than people think – did exactly the same thing when they went to Paramount, leaving Universal high and dry mid-negotiation. Conversely, Universal did pretty much the same thing to DreamWorks this time as they did last time… hardball… but with less actual money on the table.
I think it’s great that everyone wants to write up their version of “what really happened” (even if, in one case, a misunderstanding that theatrical revenues being 20% of a film’s overall revenue is not accurate… that is domestic theatrical only), but let’s try to keep our eyes on the big picture.
The threat of bankruptcy that threatened DreamWorks and made the Paramount deal much better than what was on the table at Universal is no longer there. But the same kind of desperation has come to pass because of the economy of the moment. No harm. No foul.
The irony is that the story, which feels a lot bigger than it is, has virtually no impact on Wall Street for any of these companies, yet in the internet era, the NYT, followed by Ron Meyer’s media girlfriend of the moment, Nikki Finke, just HAD to break the news right THEN… which is what embarrassed Ron Meyer, not DW looking for a better deal than the one that had not closed.
Now… does Ron Meyer suspect that someone at DW leaked the news to the NYT, causing it to be an embarrassment? Possible.
But let’s be adults here. Ron Meyer needs to worry about keeping Universal afloat. DreamWorks was not a key to that plan. Nor is DreamWorks the key to Disney’s future. It’s a piece of business in a marketplace where 10% distribution fees are important to bottom lines and gambling on a strong producer – whether DreamWorks or Imagine or Bruckheimer or Silver or one of the few others of that weight – is going to have highs and lows, but cannot be expected to move the needle on anything more than ego in any situation.
Snider, Bruckheimer, Aviv, and Rudin is a pretty strong line-up across the board for Disney. Each will bring their part of the pie to the table. But that isn’t how Universal is set up.
And frankly, everyone at Universal should breath a sigh of relieve that DreamWorks is gone, since it means that Universal will have to continue to invest in its own infrastructure and not be throwing 4 films to Imagine, 6 to DreamWorks and delivering a very narrow swath of films in-house. That would have made Universal more a service company to two companies than a stand-alone studio… a problem that Paramount is suffering through right this very moment.
Posted by dpoland at February 9, 2009 01:42 PM
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