“Genuinely, I tell people, it’s the moment in ‘Step Brothers’ when they become best friends,” Fasullo told TheWrap of his and Waldron’s first meeting, which was over a spec script Waldron had written called “Heels.” While that show wouldn’t get off the ground for a few years, Waldron and Fasullo stayed close and daydreamed of one day running their own production company.

After Waldron hit a hot streak with Marvel Studios, writing and producing the hit series “Loki” before being enlisted to write the film sequel “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Avengers: Secret Wars,” the opportunity finally came for him to launch his own banner. And he knew just who to call.

Waldron struck a deal with Disney as part of his writing duties on the next “Avengers” films, which included launching his own production company with 20th Television. This is where Anomaly Pictures – and “Chad Powers” – was born.

Launching on Hulu this week, “Chad Powers” is inspired by an ESPN sketch starring Eli Manning that saw the NFL legend donning prosthetics to go undercover to play for a different team. For the Hulu series, Glen Powell takes on the lead role of a disgraced former NFL player who wears a fake nose and teeth to score a walk-on role on a fictional college football team.

The show came together quickly and Waldron – who co-wrote the first episode with Powell – had to work fast to fit “Chad Powers” into Powell’s increasingly busy schedule. But he and Fasullo say the fact that the central conceit of the series sounds “stupid” is precisely the kind of project they want to make at Anomaly going forward.

“When I went in to pitch on ‘Loki,’ my pitch was like, ‘All right, well, Loki traveling through time. What if this was great? What if this is the best show on TV?’ I think that ethos of, ‘Well, what if it was really good?’ is something we want to try to fit in everything we do,” he said. “That’s why ‘Chad Powers’ is the perfect thing out the gate for the company. A show about the Eli Manning sketch where he dresses up in prosthetics. What if that was the best comedy on television? That challenge is really exciting to me.”

Read on for more insight into how Waldron and Fasullo are building out Anomaly Pictures, how they got “Chad Powers” off the ground so quickly and how Waldron fit this Hulu comedy series into his busy Marvel schedule writing on the next two “Avengers” movies.

How did you guys first meet and what made you want to go into business with one another?

Adam Fasullo: Michael wrote a spec pilot that was forwarded to me by a friend of mine and he contextualized it as, “I do not rep this person. I just think you guys will get along.” I had just recently been promoted off of my boss’ desk at the newly formed Paramount Television, and I was looking to get some points on the board. This spec was about the lives of semi-professional wrestlers in Georgia and that pilot was “Heels,” and I just recognized that that was a hole that needed to be filled in the marketplace in terms of a world to explore for television.

Genuinely, I tell people, it’s the moment in “Step Brothers” when they become best friends. We’re movie and television obsessives, we’re almost precisely the same age and we both love college football. I went to the University of Pittsburgh. Michael went to Georgia. I was a psycho about Pitt football, which is a really terrible place to have to live in all the time. But nobody out here in LA really cares about college football, unless you went to Michigan or USC. That was really the thing that caused us to hit it off. 

We sold “Heels” to Starz, but it was put on the shelf. We kind of went our separate ways. After “The Haunting of Hill House,” I went to go work with Mike Flanagan at Netflix. Michael then went to “Rick and Morty” as a writer and that gave him the opportunity to do “Loki.” And we always talked about starting a production company, assuming it was a faraway dream that was simply an impossibility.

Michael Waldron: We didn’t get the show made, but we did become best pals. So fast forward to when I took the job of what at the time was just writing “Avengers 6,” “Avengers: Secret Wars,” there was an opportunity, as I made a new deal with Disney, to also start my own company and have a TV deal inside of 20th Century. So Adam and I said, “All right, we want to do this for real.” And as we were making that deal, I knew Glen Powell and we got the call from CAA that was like, “Hey, Omaha Productions is looking to do this ‘Chad Powers’ thing, would you be interested in doing it?” And me, Glen and Adam sort of all teamed up, kind of instantly started trying to figure that out.

How did you know Glen?

Waldron: I got to know Glen on a general meeting. I remember I saw him in “Everybody Wants Some!!!” and I was like, “This is the next guy.” I chased him down and met him and made him be my friend, and always knew I wanted to work with him. So it was no surprise to us as we were putting “Chad” together, that Glen’s career was taking off. It was certainly a benefit to have him and to have a show that was within the Disney ecosystem. Then there’s a lot of synergy with all of ESPN and personalities and all the college football stuff there. 

With “Chad Powers,” having a project that you can build your company around and say, “We’re going to get this thing made” is incredibly valuable. We said, “We’re going to make this show. It’s going to be incredible, and it’s going to represent everything we want to do as a company. It’s going to have a huge star at the center of it. It’s going to be unexpected, fun, have a lot of heart, and hopefully be a big hit.” That’s the one box we’ve got left to check, but we’re certainly proud of it.

And then the other thing is, it was a really unique hybrid deal. It was half 20th and it’s half Marvel. I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with Marvel Studios and those guys over there for many years now, and they’ve been so supportive of me, not just in the stuff I want to do over there, but me becoming a director in my own right and making stuff like “Chad Powers” where maybe it doesn’t feature somebody traveling from one universe to another, but it still has somebody putting on a mask.

So from my vantage point, it’s like, “OK, great. You’re gonna make the show. ESPN is involved. Peyton and Eli Manning are involved. Glen Powell is involved, and he’s now the most in-demand superstar.” How do you avoid too many cooks without ego getting in the way?

Fasullo: This is just me complimenting Michael and Glen: They’re an incredible creative force just in their own right together. And so much of this is because, like how Michael and I met, we kind of had the same experience with Glen. We’re all the exact same age. Same movie references. We all have the same kind of extraordinary psychotic level of ambition. We all came out here to do this for the rest of our lives. And we all love college football. It was truly one of those extraordinary kismet events, of us all coming together at the same time. Michael and Glen wrote the hell out of that pilot together. Then just to really go out of our way to give the Mannings’ company, Omaha Productions, credit, they really let us make the show we wanted to make. It was always, “Whatever you guys think is best for the character and for the story, we will support you 100%.” That is very unlike most producing rights holders.

This happened really fast. How did you pull it together to make it fit with Glen’s increasingly busy schedule?

Waldron: We had the strike in there as well. That was certainly a challenging part of the first year of our company, we couldn’t do anything. But when the strike ended we had talked about the thing enough that we were able to write it pretty quickly, and we wrote something that we were really proud of. Then “Anyone but You” came out and Glen’s life transformed. He just became that much more the star that we always knew he was going to be. It was no surprise to us that we were suddenly contending with him having huge filmmakers wanting him, and we just figured it out. That meant we had to go into production on a pretty accelerated timetable last fall. I brought my whole writing staff to Atlanta. But the stress of that kind of timetable is a lot easier to handle if your producing partner and the person you’re in business with is your best pal. It’s like, we can ultimately be laughing and look at each other and say, “Wow, this is really crazy. Are we gonna die?” Which is a good thing to be able to do.

Adam, were you as confident, or were you sweating a little bit as it was happening so fast?

Fasullo: I was incredibly confident that I knew if we could get the green light that we would deliver, because I know how good Michael is as a writer, and I know how good he is under stress.

Waldron: It’s like Calvin says, “I work better under pressure,” and Hobbs says, “You only work under pressure.” That is the world that I came up in. I’d always rather have more time, but last summer was crazy and everybody banded together, including my family. We were making a show that’s about kind of a scrappy underdog team trying to do the impossible. It was actually easy to go to work every day and be like, “Yeah, that’s us.”

So due to Glen’s schedule is that why the season is only six episodes?

Waldron: No. It was always a conversation of, are we going to do six or are we going to do eight? “Loki” was only six episodes, and I tend to think, when you have Glen Powell on TV, it’s not really a TV show. It’s like with “Loki” and “WandaVision,” certainly the early Marvel shows, the feeling was that you felt like you were stealing something. Like, “I shouldn’t be watching Elizabeth Olsen on a TV show.” I think we tried to harness a little bit of that feeling with this show. So in that sense, six, while helpful for our schedule, actually was nice, because I think it just makes it feel like more of an event, and it just forces accelerated storytelling. That does go back to the Harmon days of “Rick and Morty,” where it’s like, “We’ve got a great sci-fi conceit for the whole episode,” and Dan would be like, “No, you have your act one break. Now we need three more movie-worthy sci-fi conceits to get us through the rest of this journey.” Accelerated storytelling in TV is always a good thing, I think.

Fasullo: And it’s a ticking clock premise. This can only go so far for so long. If we’re lucky enough to make Season 2 and 3, our ambitions are to be one season of football each time out.

Michael, what has your time at Marvel taught you? Was there anything you applied to this as you were producing your own show?

Waldron: If you’re lucky enough to work at Marvel for as long as I have, just the sheer amount of talented, successful, brilliant people that come through those doors is wild. I got to sit next to Sam Raimi for basically two years on “Doctor Strange 2.” That was my film school, and I learned everything about directing from him. The other thing about Marvel is Kevin is the most successful producer of all time, and everybody who works under him, you’re all working together toward the making of these gargantuan projects. So I learned a lot about producing from the great producers over there, Stephen Broussard, Jonathan Schwartz, the folks who are under Kevin.

Then maybe the most important thing you learn at Marvel is just how to work with huge movie stars. On “Loki,” I went from a guy with not a ton of experience to suddenly I’m sitting with Tom Hiddleston figuring out this character, and on “Doctor Strange” working with Benedict Cumberbatch, Lizzie Olson, Rachel McAdams. You’re developing an acumen and a language with actors that is incredibly valuable as a filmmaker and a creator, and that gives you the confidence, and maybe more importantly, gives the studio and the network confidence that you can handle a production with the most ascendant movie star out there at the center of it. In some ways, everything’s easy after after working at Marvel. Not even because it’s hard, but just because it’s so big and because the pressure is so high.

So you’re writing on both “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Avengers: Secret Wars?”

Waldron: Yes, I am. I’ve been back and forth from London, helping that team out while in post on “Chad Powers.” And again, that’s only possible if you have a partnership like this, if I can look at my producing partner and say, “All right, I have to disappear into Marvel world and I trust your creative instincts enough to speak for the show.” Adam and I have to be a hivemind in many ways.

Were you working on “Avengers: Kang Dynasty” at all before that became “Avengers: Doomsday?”

Waldron: “Kang Dynasty” was Jeff Loveness, my friend, who was writing that with Destin Daniel Cretton, who’s now doing “Spider Man: Brand New Day.” Because I was writing the movie after that but there wasn’t a filmmaker attached yet, I was just involved in all those conversations. When that movie went away, I was working on what would become “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Secret Wars” for a time, and then they brought in the Russos and Steve McFeely right at the time we were going to make “Chad Powers.” As those guys got in and wrapped their hands around what these movies were going to be, I was off doing this insane thing, and when I finished, there was an opportunity for me to to come back in and get to know Joe and Anthony and Steve and really just help however I could. That’s what I’m trying to do is just support them.

What’s next for Anomaly? What kind of projects are you looking at and what’s your vision for the company going forward? And Michael, do you want to write and direct a lot of them?

Waldron: The immediate is we hope to make more “Chad Powers.” Hopefully there’s a great response, and we get to finish this story because we think there’s a lot to do there. Then I do think that it’s me writing and directing, directing a lot more of what I write. I directed the finale of “Chad Powers” this season. If we do another season, I’ll probably direct even more. Then on the feature side, it’d be great to direct something for Marvel eventually. We have other stuff that we’re developing independently. I’m working on an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “Libra” to direct, which is kind of as far afield from the other stuff we’ve done as you can imagine. We’re trying to never get pigeonholed into one thing. 

The story that I always tell is when I went in to pitch on “Loki,” my pitch was like, “All right, well, Loki traveling through time. What if this was great? What if this is the best show on TV?” I think that ethos of, “Well, what if it was really good?” is something we want to try to fit in everything we do. That’s why “Chad Powers” is the perfect thing out the gate for the company. A show about the Eli Manning sketch where he dresses up in prosthetics. What if that was the best comedy on television? That challenge is really exciting to me. 

Fasullo: Anything we have that’s in development that unfortunately has yet to be announced, has a bit of that. “What if it was good?” or “What if we took an idea that’s on its face either presents as objectively stupid or objectively uninteresting?” Effectively, we’ve seen this before, and we turn it on its head and we give you the best possible version, because we’ve iterated and iterated and iterated on what it can possibly be over and over again, because Michael and I see everything, watch everything, read everything. And so we have an incredibly high bar for material, and we have an incredibly high bar specifically for ourselves and our own work ethic, and so generally, we’re not going to do anything that we’re both not immediately leaping at.

Waldron: More importantly, I have a very low threshold for boredom. I just am so easily bored.

One final, really stupid question, because you’re into stupid things. “Mrs. Doubtfire” is not available on 4K Blu-ray, and yet it’s on a billboard in this show. Do you know something that we don’t? 

Fasullo: I’m so glad you brought this up. So originally it was going to be a “Mrs. Doubtfire” podcast, and we’re like, “It just doesn’t feel urgent enough, it doesn’t feel like it has enough of a reason to exist.” I’m a 4K Blu-ray, Criterion, Steelbook freak. So this is part of my ploy, basically, to force the Walt Disney Company’s hand to get a 4K Blu-ray of Mrs. Doubtfire into production. They effectively said, “That’s great. That takes years and years of restoration.” But this is my hope here is that people will see that and start demanding it, and there’ll be a groundswell.

Waldron: This is the thing Adam cared about the most in the entire project.

The post How ‘Avengers’ Writer Michael Waldron Leveraged His Marvel Deal to Launch Anomaly Pictures and Spin Up ‘Chad Powers’ appeared first on TheWrap.

One independent TV producer that benefitted from the rising unscripted wave over the last few years has been Plimsoll Productions, which launched in 2013 and specializes in programming for the natural history genre. In 2022, Plimsoll sold an 80% majority stake to ITV after receiving interest from a total of 17 bidders, valuing it at £131 million ($177.5 million).  

In an interview with TheWrap’s Office With a View, Plimsoll CEO Grant Mansfield credited the company’s success to its “no brainer” decision to prioritize work with U.S. buyers early on.

The firm, whose content is distributed in over 100 territories globally, derives 75% of its income from the United States, while the remaining 25% comes from the U.K. Its notable credits include Disney+’s  “A Real Bugs Life,” Apple’s “Tiny World,” Netflix’s “Night on Earth” and the upcoming Blumhouse collaboration “Nightmares of Nature,” which will premiere on Netflix next week.

“The barrier for lots of British TV producers is they don’t have the access because they don’t know any of the buyers,” Mansfield explained. “From day one, even though we didn’t have a lot of money, we spent everything we had jumping on planes to go to Los Angeles rather than jumping on trains to go to London. It paid off for us big time because the buyers were kind enough to let me in their front door, but also it was the beginning of the unscripted streaming boom in general. So we had a bit of a strategy, but in truth, I got a bit lucky with the timing as well.”

Prior to launching Plimsoll, Mansfield started his career as a BBC journalist. He would later transition behind the camera, overseeing commissioning for unscripted shows at ITV, as well as leading its Granada TV division as director of programs. In the the independent TV sector, he served as the managing director of London’s RDF and CEO of Zodiak USA.

Though Plimsoll’s “north star” has been in the natural history genre, the company has also expanded into live, factual entertainment, documentaries and adventure programming as it looks to stay nimble.

“I always say we’re in the entertainment business and that means we’re after ratings ahead of awards,” Mansfield said. “We’d like both if we can get them, but it’s always entertainment first. That does change the way you design your shows, and it’s particularly pertinent at this moment in time in our industry.”

While acknowledging the unscripted TV market has been challenged in the last few years, Mansfield believes there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic about the future. 

“I don’t think unscripted producers should be gloomy about the state of market. We’ve got to be realistic,” he said. “You’ve got to box clever and play the market in front of you. The market moves very quickly and sometimes the reason producers feel like there are fewer opportunities is that we don’t move quickly enough to respond to it. There’s a whole bunch of opportunities out there.” 

Read on for TheWrap’s full conversation with Mansfield below.

How did you get involved in the natural history genre?

When I was setting the company up, my so-called advisors told me not to do natural history because we wouldn’t be able to own the IP. But I saw things differently.

I could see what was happening in the streaming market. Pretty much all the originations were in drama at that stage, but there were rumblings about them wanting to move into unscripted, and they wanted their unscripted shows in the early days to feel premium and cinematic and that really speaks to natural history. So they jumped into natural history very early on.

What makes us unique as a specialist natural history creator is that we’re a multi-genre producer in the premium space. We always lean in from an entertainment perspective and a lot of our natural history show ideas come from entertainment producers, rather than natural history producers. So that’s a key strength in terms of the ideas that we create.

How much do the unscripted productions you work on cost to produce?

The numbers at the top end have come down, but Plimsoll has made shows literally that cost from $50,000 an hour to $5.5 million dollars an hour. We’re not doing that anymore and but it’s still a pretty wide range. I’d say for producers in the premium space, it ranges from half a million dollars an episode up to $3 million or $4 million.

What made natural history so expensive was that every show was designed around essentially describing the world. So a huge amount of the budget was spent on flying. In factual entertainment, those budgets have never been available. So one simple way of keeping the cost down is the precinct model, which is essentially you create a show around a single precinct.

Nightmares of Nature coming to Netflix is precisely that. It looks many, many million dollars an episode, and it costs less money than it looks because essentially we’ve stayed in the same place. It’s been made at a much more attractive price point. It makes it easier to tell stories in that way.

Why did you sell a majority stake to ITV?

I decided about three or four years ago that the next stage of Plimsoll’s evolution involved a partner that could support our ambitions. I assumed that we’d sell to an American company because that’s where most of our business is.

They have a particular way of running their studios group which makes creative people feel comfortable. We still feel like an independent producer. They own 80% of the company, but they don’t intervene. They let you get on it with but are there for advice and support when you need them.

You’ve had projects picked up by many of the major streamers. What are they looking to buy right now?

This is not supposed to sound facetious but they’re always looking to buy hits.

No genre has a right to be on any platform. There’s an interesting, idiosyncratic, admirable tradition in the UK of public service broadcasting, where the BBC wanted to commission a range of programs almost regardless of the ratings. And that’s great, but it’s not a realistic model for the international market. So we should all be in the business of trying to trying to create hits. And that’s a constant challenge. 

There are some particular challenges for some traditional natural history producers. Modernity and storytelling in that genre, in particular, needs to focus around character and narrative rather than spectacle and behavior. Traditionally, it’s the latter that’s taken precedence. It’s the wrong way round. We still want spectacle and behavior, but character and narrative is where it comes from.

Some people are using AI to read some early treatments and that might be useful, but I don’t believe that AI will ever get to a stage where it knows how to commission a hit show. 

What’s a major trend in the independent producing space that people should be paying more attention to?

We all have to rightly be much more focused on what I’d call value pricing. We’re a premium unscripted company, we make expensive TV shows, but we need to look at ways that they can be less expensive, because we absolutely recognize it’s a business and people are looking for return on their investment. So there has been an adjustment on that front. But streaming is an incredibly exciting place to be working and it’s about us adapting to the needs of our customers. That’s partly about price and partly about modernity in our storytelling.

Certainly in the unscripted space, it feels like broadcast networks in the U.S. are coming back into play and that’s because the cost of drama is increasing exponentially. So there’s a big opportunity on broadcast networks. But digital and AI are also huge opportunities. Obviously, everybody knows the biggest content platform of the world is now YouTube. There’s a bunch of opportunities there that we should all be jumping into. 

There are also enormous opportunities in AI. We just delivered our first pilot entirely created on AI. It’s a really interesting experiment because we did it in house. We have a very large development group by UK standards of about a dozen people working full time in development and nearly a half of them create sizzle reels all the time and are using AI extensively. One has to proceed with a certain amount of caution, authenticity is absolutely critical, but I think there are some really interesting opportunities.

And then there are interesting new funding models emerging which ranges from big investors in America and China to philanthropic investment. So I genuinely feel there’s never been a better time to be in the unscripted TV space, whilst also recognizing it’s been a tough time for some. 

How does streaming’s increasing push towards sports and live programming impact your strategy?

Despite the challenging circumstances, streamers are still spending a bit more year on year. But behind those numbers, they are spending an increasing amount of that spend on sports rights. The discretionary spend available for original content is smaller than it was.

Sports, obviously, is a shortcut to finding a large audience, although it’s an expensive way. But there are other things you can do in the live space where you can create your own live events. To a certain extent, even the Tyson-Paul fight is an example of that. I’m sure Netflix paid a small fortune for it, but it’s not like buying sports rights. They created their own pseudo sports event. So live is a big part of the future and not just for streamers. A lot of broadcast networks are looking for them and we are well placed in that space.

We have a department that specializes in live. The most notable show we made was called Earth Live, but we’ve made a bunch of other ones. We are going to produce a big live event for a major American buyer in the early part of next year. It’s a key area of growth. 

What do you make of major Hollywood studios increasingly moving productions overseas to areas like the UK?

It’s obviously a big challenge for some producers in America. There are some issues around tax incentives that maybe people on the West Coast need to get their heads around. But from our point of view, we’ve always done nearly all our production here and it’s become easier to do that with the advent of Zoom calls. So that’s a trend that, for selfish reasons, we’d like to see continue, although we’re really happy to produce in the states as well. 

What about warnings of looming consolidation in entertainment?

If one is being honest, there are probably too many buyers and too many producers. But to use a natural history term, it’s evolution, isn’t it? It will be survival of the fittest. There’s a constant conversation in the UK about whether the independent sector can sustain the number of companies it has. And the evidence of the last few years is it can’t. That’s why, sadly, a number of them have gone under.

What’s your advice for people looking to break into the industry or advance in their career?

You’ve got to have a healthy appetite for risk. The opportunities have never been bigger, but neither have the risks. This is not a job for somebody that can rely on a 30-year career without experiencing unemployment. Most of the people I know have had periods of unemployment, including some of the most successful ones. 

If somebody from the UK was asking me, I would say don’t be too parochial. There’s a lot of brilliant creativity in my country, but for all the brilliant creativity in the UK TV market, it’s so small compared with the bigger TV markets.

Obviously, there are huge TV markets outside the U.S., but the one that matters most is the U.S. because it’s the biggest and everybody speaks English. So anybody in this country looking to develop a long and exciting career in TV, I would say, do what Plimsoll did and look west. You’ve got to be engaged with what’s happening in the United States. It’s the bit of the TV industry that matters most, not by a small fraction, but by a disproportionately huge amount. There’s obviously enormous amounts of money in America, but there’s enormous amounts of innovation as well. 

The post Plimsoll Productions CEO Grant Mansfield on His ‘No Brainer’ Decision to Prioritize Work With US Streamers appeared first on TheWrap.

This month, Regal Cinemas will bring one of the Internet’s most popular creators, Dude Perfect, to the big screen with a documentary around their latest live tour, “The Hero Tour.” Since 2009, the Frisco, Texas-based team of five former Texas A&M classmates has turned their YouTube channel of backyard trick shots into a globetrotting entertainment behemoth that has drawn 61 million subscribers and cameos from Steph Curry, Keanu Reeves, Bryson DeChambeau and dozens more sports and movie stars.

Dude Perfect isn’t the first channel to partner with a major theatrical chain. Last year, Cinemark partnered with Sam & Colby, a Kansas-based YouTuber duo known for their paranormal vlogs for an exclusive release of their film “Legends of the Paranormal” in 302 theaters.

But “Dude Perfect: The Hero Tour,” will go beyond its main partnership with Regal, releasing in other chains’ locations like AMC in an effort to reach out to fans, many of whom are families, who were unable to see the Dudes’ live show.

Adam Rymer, chief commercial officer of Regal, and Matt Deimund, chief product officer of Dude Perfect, spoke to TheWrap about how this partnership came together, where this fits in the larger effort by theaters to experiment with new types of entertainment, and the challenges facing theaters as audience tastes change. The interview has been edited for clarity.

How long has this tour film been in development? How did it come about from the Regal side and the Dude Perfect side?

Adam Rymer: I live in Dallas. I’ve known about the Dude Perfect guys for a very long time and watched them grow as as one of the innovators in the space and building that key fan relationship. I knew that they were really interested in figuring out how to expand the business and knew that they were doing these summer tours. I happened to be at a dinner event with the new (Dude Perfect) CEO, Andrew Yaffe. We’re just talking about what we were up to, and through that talk the idea of putting this up on our screens resonated with their plans as they were already thinking about recording the tour and were figuring out how to exploit it.

Matt Deimund: The idea and concept to make a movie out of our tour really came fairly late in the game. There have been other creators that have appeared in cinemas, there have been other tour documentaries that have appeared, but we just found ourselves in a situation where the demand for our tour was so high. We launched ticket sales for our tour in October and by Christmas we were 70% sold out across all dates for a tour that wasn’t happening until July. By the time the tour began, we had sold 95% of all tickets and prices on the secondary market were very high.

It was around last spring that we approached Regal about the idea for this film, hoping to appeal to both fans who saw the tour and those who couldn’t go because of ticket prices or the tour didn’t come to their city. The great thing about Dude Perfect is that we are very nimble and can work fast on these films, and these tour documentaries usually take much longer to make. But this was going to be something where we would really challenge ourselves.

We saw Cinemark do a similar partnership with Sam & Colby last year. Adam, where would you say “The Hero Tour” fits in this larger wave of bringing YouTubers to theaters?

A.R.: I think we’re still in the early stages of this. YouTubers have very passionate communities, but they have very few opportunities to bring them together in person. I don’t know if this is the ultimate format for bringing them together. I think there’s more things that we can do in theater, but I’d say this is the beginning of an experimentation, telling content creators that our theaters serve as a place for their communities to gather, get to meet each other, have some kind of shared experiences. Maybe there’s some sort of live event that goes along with that in the theater, leveraging the fact that we have real estate and a pretty big footprint across the country to bring fans together. And the good thing is that these content creators are very imaginative and know the best ways to engage their audience.

Matt, what input did the Dude Perfect cast have on “The Hero Tour”?

M.D.: It is truly a privilege to work with these guys, because they’ve got such creative vision and have such a history, obviously, with the brand and knowing how to engage with fans. We spent a lot of time working with them on what should the movie feel like. What should it feel like to someone who’s already seen the show and they’re watching it and kind of reliving their experience? How do we give them some new things along with the nostalgia of how fun it was when they saw the show live?

With digital media like YouTube, you’re getting immediate feedback from fans and the pipeline from idea to a new video being published goes so fast. Does that fast production speed at Dude Perfect spill over to your work as chief product officer?

M.D.: When you work in the world of digital content, you have the ability to test and try so many things, and you can do it at a very rapid pace. You can test how thumbnails perform, how concepts of videos perform, and days later have results come in.

In the world of physical products, that gets a little bit more challenging, because it takes some time to work through logistics, supply chains and other real world hurdles. But when you think about a tour movie, for example, it’s not as fast as how we can experiment on YouTube, for sure, but it’s still something where we’ve really pushed ourselves to find the scrappy kind of creator mindset that we can apply to this product.

Adam, films like “The Hero Tour” are coming at a time when it’s unclear when or even if major studio theatrical output will return to pre-pandemic levels. As you’ve navigated all the roadblocks the box office has faced since the pandemic, what gives you the most hope for exhibition’s future, and what is the biggest challenge still facing your industry?

A.R.: There were a lot of positive aspects of this summer. The performance of some new players in the space gets me very excited. We’ve seen plenty of younger folks come in and have a good time at the theater with “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and before that with films like “Minecraft.”

Those were films that brought something fresh and got lots of people excited, even with the popcorn throwing and everything else that came with it. Just the fact that so many were having a great time gets me excited about the future of our industry, including with the growth of premium formats like 4DX that offer something that you can’t get at home.

In terms of challenges, shortening windows are an area that we’re still trying to work through, as we want to make sure that films have an appropriate amount of time to reach the audience. We’ve seen the value of a theatrical release in terms of generating value for the IP that’s out there. They understand where we’re coming from, and at certain level, we understand where they’re coming from as well, trying to maximize the marketing dollars that have been spent to support a title.

Matt, “The Hero Tour” is Dude Perfect’s fifth live tour. While feedback from the fans is still forthcoming, could this tour film impact future tours and other in-person events the company is planning?

M.D.: I think we learned a whole lot about how in the future we would format and think about our live show, if the intent from the very beginning is to create a cinematic product. That’s the benefit of being at a very agile place. So absolutely, as we see this release and launch in theaters, we’ll be looking every step of the way at how this resonates with our core fans and with those who maybe are just getting to know us.

We’re constantly taking that stream of feedback into everything we do, whether it’s on our main channel, new channels, cinema or whether that’s other mainstream media sources, podcasts, streaming, you name it. Even with the other physical and digital products that we create, I think our success comes from our willingness to test and learn.

The post Regal’s Adam Rymer, Dude Perfect’s Matt Deimund Talk Bringing YouTube’s Trick Shot Kings to the Big Screen appeared first on TheWrap.

When she launched the creator-focused firm in 2019, Zapata didn’t know much about running a business, she told TheWrap. Fittingly, the types of clients that were referred to her were also fresh, determined faces new to the influencer game and in need of guidance.

“I didn’t even know how to begin to find resources or someone that would invest,” Zapata shared. “So for me, it was really just about starting something that was purposeful. I really just wanted to create impact.”

Traditionally, all it took was for your favorite celebrity to show up in a Pepsi commercial to encourage you to buy a bottle or a massive movie star to use a Nespresso machine to get you to add one to your shopping cart. Now, more companies and brands are leaning on influencers to help market and sell their products. And Hollywood is tapping viral names like Benito “Benny Drama” Skinner and Charli D’Amelio to carve out their TV slate.

For Zapata, who has now landed on the Forbes Next 1000 and Inc. 5000 lists, there’s a bigger untapped opportunity in pushing influencers of color. Since 2019, Zapata told TheWrap that she’s scaled her company into a seven-figure business that boasts a roster of more than 40 clients, including Netflix’s “Love Is Blind” stars Kwame Appiah and Marissa George and OWN’s “Heart & Hustle: Houston” star Muneera Page.

In a conversation with TheWrap, Zapata unpacked how her drive to champion content creators of color led her to the creation of Society 18, her mission to shift society to be more equitable and inclusive, how the rise of AI influencers may just be a blip in the algorithm and where traditional celebrity is falling short.

Read on for Pamela’s full Office With a View interview, edited for length and clarity.  

What made you want to start Society 18, and where did the name come from?

I went to school at Emerson in Boston, majored in broadcast journalism. I ended in marketing and PR, moved to L.A. and thought I wanted to be on camera. I interned at E! Entertainment, ESPN, Disney, had all these great internships behind the scenes, but ultimately found a love for that.

So straight out of college, I worked at Ryan Seacrest for two years in TV development, made my way over to E! Instead of booking celebrity talent for on-air opportunities, our team was tasked to book content creators and YouTubers. At that moment, I was like, “Alright, there’s a massive change here happening.” I feel like I need to kind of dive in and understand the space a little more. I went to a startup called Sweety High, where I created their entire creator network. At the time, TikTok was Musical.ly. Initially, I saw there was a lot of talent and influencers that just didn’t really have good management. A lot of them were being managed by their parents. Sometimes, kids were/are being managed by really weird, seedy older men. And I was like, there needs to be a better organization focused on people in underserved communities, specifically, but also just talent that doesn’t have guidance and doesn’t really know how to navigate the space.

From there, I wasn’t ready to start my business yet. I wanted to get a little bit more experience. So I moved to New York, worked at UEG and Star Power, which are two separate agencies, one of them where I was overseeing Unilever’s influencer marketing and strategy — so a lot of their personal care brands, Dove, Suave, Tresemme, Axe, Simple. Then I transitioned over to Star Power, where I was overseeing the Estée Lauder business. So Estée Lauder the brand, Mac, Aveda, Origin, so heavily in the beauty space. Eventually, what I noticed is two things: there was a massive lack of representation on the management side. A lot of these bigger agencies were sending the creators to cast for these campaigns, but a lot of them weren’t truly diverse. You would see Black creators, but a lot of them had [light skin] or certain curl patterns. You weren’t really seeing deep skin tones, coily hair. I wasn’t seeing plus-size women. I wasn’t seeing Muslim women. A lot of diversity lacking. But I would find them on my own, and I was casting them through YouTube and Instagram, so I knew they existed. And when I was reaching out to them directly, a lot of them just didn’t have management. They were self-representing, which is where I saw the second issue, which was a massive pay gap where creators of color were just under-charging for certain scopes of work because they didn’t understand their value.

At that point I was like, “OK, how do I turn my passion into something that’s a little bit more purposeful?” I started consulting a couple creators on the side six months before I quit. I kind of hit a wall with my agency where I just felt overworked and felt like I wasn’t really being valued. And things started to pick up with the creators that our work was working with. I wasn’t really ready, but I truly believe in God, the universe and timing. Even though I wasn’t ready, something in my gut was telling me that it was time to go off alone. And that’s where I quit and put everything in. And was like, hopefully I can pay my rent and just cover my bills. Within my first 12 months in business, I was able to secure a million dollars in brand deals, which at that point was 20% as a management company, so I was able to actually make more than my salary and my agency.

[As for the name], one is symbolic of new beginnings and prosperity and eight was symbolic of success, growth and wealth. And that’s kind of where the number and name came from.

We live in a time where social media influencers are still somewhat rejected or not as easily accepted. What was it about this industry that appealed to you?

Social influencer marketing is probably one of the strongest forms of marketing, because you can really measure the ROI (return on investment). After the pandemic, consumer behavior completely shifted. Even though I started about six months before the pandemic, the pandemic hit, we initially took a hit with our revenue because brands were scared and pulling back. Then they realized that everyone’s at home, everyone’s social, digital-first and they had to find a way to still touch the consumer when no one’s leaving their house.

So billboards and more traditional forms of media were just not as effective, so they could hire content creators to create content remotely, use them for social and digital initiatives, and not have to take a L because studios and productions were shut down. They were like, “How do we make our dollars work?” I just personally feel like the content and the creators are just resonating more with audiences because they’re more true to what we are. And I feel like celebrity kind of just lost its appeal a little bit.

Do think traditional celebrities should try to tap into an influencer mindset to maintain a certain degree of relevance and/or help their brand?

Yeah, I think so. We’ve seen a resurgence of celebrities that are trying to get into content creation. I mean, look at Will Smith with his whole entire brand. He actually hired the person [who] used to handle Ryan Seacrest’s social, went to work with Will and has completely turned him into an actual social media influencer. [Smith] came from the traditional side. So we’re seeing a lot of celebrity talent, traditional actors, singers go into that space because they see value. Everyone has the right to create the brand they want on their social platform, but I think it’s a missed opportunity. If I’m looking for talent, especially celebrity talent, I’m looking for video content because 95% of the requests that we get for scopes of work are video content.

What would you say is the biggest misconception about social media influencers?

One of the biggest misconceptions, and I think brands are finally starting to [figure it out], is that influencers don’t really have value, don’t have personality, may just be pushing products. That’s not the case. A lot of influencers will pass on deals if they’ve never used the product or if they can’t relate to the product. We’ve had to pull out on a couple of deals because of some brands that were dissolving their DEI initiatives. Our clients were like, “We’re not going to do that,” and we fully support them. We have another creator that’s been very transparent about her IVF journey and that’s something we fully support as well because there are women that are going through things that other people can relate to. The misconception that creators are just pushing product, don’t care and are just trying to get a paycheck isn’t real.

As you mentioned, there’s still a huge racial pay gap between BIPOC and white social media influencers. For Black and white influencers specifically, there’s a 35% pay disparity. How did you first notice this and why do you think this is still happening? Is it lack of resources or knowledge?

I remember when I was casting for a Suave campaign and there was a creator we had, probably like a $25,000-$30,000 budget, and when I asked her for her rate she was like, “I’ll do everything for $5,000.” I was seeing that over and over and over again. So I knew the pay gap existed and a lot of it was to your point, lack of resources, lack of knowledge, lack of diversity within the representation realm in general.

One of my colleagues called me, she’s like, “Hey, I had a six-figure deal for this creator and she came in at at like $15,000 and this is commercial usage, digital, print.” I was seeing all across the board through myself firsthand and through a lot of my colleagues in the industry who were working who were sending me talent, they were like, “They need help. They can’t do this.” We had another creator that was making maybe $50,000 [in deals] with a bigger agency and a year after that, we were able to close $250,000 in terms of deals. So that’s five times the amount. That was directly impacting her, because they probably didn’t think it was time for her to update her rate. They probably weren’t really pitching her strategically. A lot of these creators feel like they’re getting overlooked, especially by these bigger agencies. We actually just got talent who came from CAA and was feeling like she was just a small fish in a big pond. We’re a little more boutique, more strategic and a lot more hands-on.

You went from being $100,000 in debt to scaling Society 18 into a multi-million-dollar business with no investors. I know founders and entrepreneurs often try to keep as much equity as they can, but I’m curious what made you personally want to go take a path with no financiers?

Honestly, I had no investors to seek. I’m first-generation. My parents come from the Dominican Republic. I don’t come from generational resources with people that were willing to invest. I didn’t even know how to begin to find resources or someone that would invest. So for me, it was really just about starting something that was purposeful. I really just wanted to create impact. When that happened, a lot of creators just started to come to us through referral. We grew a lot faster than I would have ever anticipated, so we didn’t really need investment because when I started it was just me. I was just trying to cover my own salary. Then slowly we doubled our roster year over year. We were doing no new outreach, no new business, it was all through referrals. Once I got to a place where I was steady, then people started approaching us for investment. But I was already kind of going. We’d already hit seven figures and I really didn’t need support at that point.

Developing, launching and scaling a business is no easy feat for anyone. And when you’re a woman, especially a woman of color, there often comes unique challenges. What’s this experience been like for you?

I’ve had to hire a business coach/therapist/meditation coach because there were a lot of struggles because — back to the [earlier] point — I didn’t come from a family of entrepreneurs. I don’t have generational wealth; I’m trying to build that for the next generations of my family. Between understanding finances, understanding legal, understanding taxes, understanding how to scale properly when it’s time to hire, how to follow LLC — there’s so much that goes into it. No one in my family has ever had a financial advisor. I’ve had to work through, “What is my relationship with money?” I came from a saver mentality. My mom was like you need to save, save, save, but as a business owner, you have to shift that mindset.

Like the rest of the entertainment industry, artificial intelligence is creeping its way into the social media influencer space. We’re seeing AI influencers garner massive followings despite being fake. What’s your take on this growing trend?

There’s definitely value that creators can pull from. The AI influencer is an interesting topic. Ultimately, I think it’ll have its moment, but I don’t think it will replace people. People still want to connect with people and I think that’s just inherently ingrained in who we are. The AI influencer ultimately is not going to be a longterm strategy. I think brands and agencies have to understand how to leverage AI in a way that is going to help them, but not in a way that’s going to replace content creators. I know it’s a hot take, but I’m like you can keep it moving. We’re not interested.

What is the future of the creator economy? What do you foresee over the next five to 10 years?

I think brands and agencies are going to be a lot more conversion-focused and insights-driven instead of doing campaigns with creators that they’re like, “Oh, this person looks pretty or this person has great hair.” It’s like, can they actually sell a product? Are they a fan of my brand?

Back in the day, I feel like I used to be able to close a deal just by hitting up someone and being like, “Hey, I have this creator. This is her reach. Do you have any deals you can put her on?” Now it’s like, “Well, what’s her reach? What’s her engagement? If it’s not over 2% we can’t even consider it. What are her story views? Does she have link clicks?” [Brands/companies] are getting so much more nitty gritty with data, and I think that’s great because, ultimately, everyone’s going to have to level up. You can’t just be a pretty face anymore. What is your personality? I think you have to stand for something, too.

What advice would you give content creators or folks who’d like to be?

Just focus on the creation of the content and your audience first and then from there you’ll grow. People get caught up with wanting to be an influencer that they lose sight of what it actually is to be a content creator. They’ll be like, “How do I get brand deals?” I’m like, “No, build your brand, build your community, build your audience.”

You’re coming out with a podcast titled “Redefining Influence.” What made you want to pivot into podcasts?

I have so much insight and knowledge to share. I feel like only my creators, our clients and our team benefit from the wealth of knowledge that I feel like I’ve acquired over the last six years. For me, I felt like I needed another outlet to help share insight and knowledge in terms of the creator economy, entrepreneurship, scaling a business, building a business and also all the stuff that comes with that. The imposter syndrome, the trauma, the healing, the limiting beliefs — I wish I had more resources to lean into when I was kind of building and scaling. So for me, I want to use my platform to just share knowledge. I’ll have guests on my show that are entrepreneurs, but also creators.

The post Society 18 CEO on Empowering Content Creators of Color: ‘Shift That Mindset’ appeared first on TheWrap.

For the uninitiated, “Demon Slayer” is a massively popular anime about an organization that specializes in hunting demons in Taishō-era Japan. The show follows main character Tanjiro Kamado, who wants revenge after his family is massacred and his sister is turned into a demon. It sounds dark, but the show features a nice mix of action, humor and gorgeous animation. 

“Infinity Castle,” which has already grossed more than $200 million around the world, is the first of a trilogy of films that promises to conclude the “Demon Slayer” story. To get a sense of what this means for fans, imagine if “Game of Thrones” ended its adaptation with a series of films instead of the rushed last few seasons. 

“Infinity Castle” also follows Crunchyroll’s move to release an earlier “Demon Slayer” film, “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train” back in 2021. Coming in the wake of the pandemic, with audiences still a little leery about public gatherings, it was a surprise hit with nearly $50 million at the U.S. box office and $470 million worldwide. 

Berger, who manages theatrical releases, merchandise sales and many of the non-streaming aspects of Crunchyroll, talked to TheWrap about how the success of “Mugen Train” led to the release of “Infinity Castle,” why he believes streaming and theatrical releases can co-exist, and when he sees anime hitting total mainstream awareness. 

The following is a lightly edited transcript of our interview:

You’ve been in the media business for a long time. Tell me about your journey to Crunchyroll.

I wanted to be a rock star and that didn’t quite work out for me, so I actually swerved into the record business. But then I ended up in the film business with Universal, so I spent 21 years there, which was a great experience. I loved it, had an amazing time, but got to a point where I was looking for something different. The opportunity came up with Funimation, at the time Sony bought Funimation and with Crunchyroll brought us together. One of the things that was really interesting to me about the opportunity was it was going to give me the opportunity to do more stuff. I could do home entertainment and theatrical and consumer products and things like that. But really, the bigger, more interesting thing I loved about it was the fandom. I’m a massive “Star Wars” fan and I love pop culture movies. But most of those fandoms are tied to an IP. You’re a “Star Trek” fan or you’re a “Harry Potter” fan. But what I love about anime is that the core fandom is of the medium itself. By being a fan of just anime as a storytelling mechanism and an art style and a medium, it opens up all these different things. There’s always content that you can dive into and you can explore. 

Were you an anime fan going into this job?

I was not a hardcore fan coming in. I’m an ’80s kid, so I grew up watching “Star Blazers” and “G-Force: Guardians of Space” and things like that. I didn’t know they were anime, I just knew they were cool shows. But by being a fan myself, I understood what it was like to be a true fan of this medium and really care about it, so that helped me bridge the gap. But the other thing that really helped me is my kids. When I started, my son was 14 years old and my daughter was 10 years old. My son was just discovering anime at school. So I learned a lot about anime, initially, through my kids and me joining Funimation at the time. You know, for all the cool stuff I got to do at Universal, it wasn’t until I got into anime that my kids thought what I did was cool at all. There’s lots of things within anime that I love and I would consider myself an anime fan today.

It’s funny that you bring up your son, because I noticed my grade school-age boys are now going to a lot of “One Piece”-themed birthday parties. Do you think anime is approaching mainstream, even from a generational perspective? 

You hit it right on the head, which is it is changing as the generations change. There are tons of Gen Z and older fans who grew up with it, that love it, that have been with it for years. But what we’re really seeing is, when you look at Gen Z, Gen Alpha and folks your son’s age, it’s just part of life. It’s just part of their cultural awareness. We just did a study with NRG, and we did a deep dive into fans. We talked to teens and 93% of them were proud to be anime fans. Eighty-eight percent of them said it was an important part of their identity. Eighty-two percent of them said it helped shape their outlook on life. It speaks to them and it helps them express who they are.

Crunchyroll had a surprise hit in 2021 with “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train.” Talk about how that happened. 

It was a great confluence of events where “Demon Slayer” itself had grown exponentially. It really resonated with fans during the pandemic. I think people had a really great opportunity to consume it and live with it and really become passionate about it coming out of the pandemic. “Demon Slayer” itself is such a cinematic piece of content that I think it naturally lends itself to a theater experience. It plays incredibly well on the big screen. The bigger piece, though, is when you look at the anime community, it really is about community. The anime community itself really does love to not only connect online, which there’s a lot of, but also in person. When you look at conventions or cosplay meetups or things like that, people use anime as a way to connect and make real-world connections and lifelong friends. What happened was, during the pandemic, we all lost that human connection. We all lost that opportunity to get together in person, and it’s such a core part of the anime experience that as soon as we got to “Mugen Train,” that was everyone’s opportunity to get together again with everyone and say, “I’ve missed you guys.” It was the perfect opportunity for everybody to come together. Even post-pandemic I’ve talked a lot about why the theatrical experience itself is great, because not everybody can get to a convention. Not everybody can get to something like Anime Expo or Comic-Con. It’s just not feasible for everybody around the world to do that, but everybody can get to a local cinema. You get that same rush. You get that same feeling of community connectedness. It was the first time that I had, from a theatrical standpoint, put an anime film out, and I had a lot of my old connections in traditional Hollywood coming back to me, who were like, “Where did this come from?”

Did the success of “Mugen Train” change the calculation on theatrical releases versus putting the content on Crunchyroll, which is the core business?

It proved that there is a cinematic experience that is valuable, that it is not cannibalistic of a streaming experience. The show was available in the service after it came out theatrically, the movie obviously was available on the service, but the theatrical experience itself is a different, unique moment in time. You know, anytime you go to a theater, you’re a unique participant in that experience that will never be replicated. You can’t replicate that at home. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to watch it again at home. It’s a fundamentally different experience. The other thing that we proved is that we’re going more mainstream. There’s a massive audience for anime out there, and fans will show up, and great content will fill up theaters. So we’ve had a string of successes now coming out, with three of the five highest-grossing anime films of all time in the U.S. have come out post-pandemic in like the last two or three years. That talks about the sustainable growth we’ve had.

You’ve got “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle” coming up. What lessons did you learn from “Mugan Train” and the subsequent anime theatrical releases that you’re applying to this release?

First and foremost, we have a massive “Demon Slayer” fanbase that’s only grown since “Mugen Train,” and that’s our starting point. It’s making sure that the folks who are “Demon Slayer” fans know that the movie’s coming out. We’re very fortunate, because the fanbase is very educated. They’re very, very clued into what’s going on. These three films that are coming out are kind of the culmination of the manga arc of the “Demon Slayer” story. You can only see them in theaters. I think it was a really great opportunity to make this a cinematic experience. So making sure people understand that this year, the only place you can see “Demon Slayer” is on the big screen. Getting that message out there is critically important. We’re trying to make sure that everyone has access to this film as much as they can, because seeing it on the big screen is going to be a truly unique experience.

That’s interesting, since the legacy media companies traditionally tied to theatrical had been bringing movies to streaming, but you’ve got this reverse dynamic where you’re bringing this movie to theaters, despite coming from streaming. Talk about that. 

Streaming and the theatrical experience are not cannibalistic. They’re not fundamentally at odds with each other. They are fundamentally different experiences when marketed the right way. There’s a place for both of those. There’s a halo that comes out of doing a promotion right now where we’re re-watching the entire “Demon Slayer” series. We’re making it available on the (ad-based tier) for people to watch for free. It’s a great experience to come in and experience the community on the streaming service. We did this with “Jujutsu Kaisen.” We did this with “Demon Slayer.” You can create a franchise from a streaming perspective. Then you can come and have a film as part of its life cycle, and then you can have subsequent seasons. And again, I don’t think that fans themselves have to just live in a box of one way of consuming content. That’s one of the things that we’ve done, uniquely in anime, that I love, is trying to move people back and forth and again; not make those windows at odds with each other, but use them to promote each other and have this virtuous circle of flywheel of the fan experience.

Are you marketing beyond the fanbase for this film? Is there a prospect for general audiences to check this out? 

It’s open for everyone. For sure, we invite everybody to come and enjoy it. The “Demon Slayer” fanbase is a starting point for us, because they’re familiar with the story. This movie is a continuation of a very long journey. As a “Demon Slayer” fan, I would love to have new people come in and watch the film, because it’s an incredible piece of content. What I would love to ask them to do is look at whether it’s on our AVOD tier. Come subscribe to Crunchyroll, dive into the “Demon Slayer” universe, so you can really enjoy this for the rich experience that it is. 

You talked about the anime fandom being about the medium, and in that sense, Crunchyroll has more of a community feel to it than other streamers. Can you talk about the thinking that goes into fostering that community?

We have very robust social engagement across all of our social channels, whether it’s the Crunchyroll official channels or some of the IP channels that we manage. What I love about our fans is that they talk to us. They want to have a two-way conversation. Whether it’s online, from a social perspective, TikTok or X or Facebook or Instagram, wherever it is, there’s a robust conversation that goes on there. But also, we attend a lot of conventions every year. We’re obviously at (Anime Expo) or Anime Japan or Comic-Con. There’s a ton of conversations that go on there as well. I love the fact that, in person, it’s not just this transactional ‘show up, go through the booth, get a piece of swag.’ The fans want to talk. What are you doing? What do we like to see? For me, what always amazes me is I travel all over the world, and without fail, whether I’m in the airport, a restaurant, wherever, if I take out my credit card to pay for something and the person looks at it and sees Crunchyroll on it, invariably, I’ll get somebody go, is that the Crunchyroll? And it’s like you’ve opened this door and turned on a light, and they want to just spend as long as you’ll sit there and talk to them about my favorite show. It’s like this green light to share this passion with you. It’s a great kind of feedback circle, where we can hear what’s working and what’s not.

Looking ahead, what are some projects that excite you?

There’s a lot of stuff that we’re working on that I can’t talk about, unfortunately, that I’m excited about. But one of the things that we did announce that I’m really excited about is a co-production for “Ghost of Tsushima,” which is based on a very popular PlayStation game. That’s something that we’re working on that I’m really excited to see how that plays out and how it comes down the pike. It’s a great piece of game content to begin with, lends itself very well to that storytelling. I’ll just tell you that we have some really cool things that we’re working on for the next couple of years, and I’m going to leave it at that so that I don’t get myself in trouble.

“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle” opens in theaters on Sept. 12.

The post Crunchyroll Commerce Chief Explains How Anime Streaming and Theatrical Releases Co-Exist appeared first on TheWrap.

The vertical short dramas app hosts 1-to-2 minute-long chapters of films about cheating scandals and mafia bosses, with titles like “Pregnancy Contract” and “Maid in Mafia Family.” The content, which Ovdiienko labeled himself as a “guilty pleasure,” keeps audiences hooked whether they would like to admit it or not. 

After launching in May 2024, Ovdiienko’s platform reaches a monthly active user base of 5 million. His European platform is attempting to rival the Chinese market, which popularized this form of storytelling. 

The short drama industry, inspired partly by TikTok but has taken a life as its own medium largely driven by international markets, has grown significantly in the past year. Compared to the latter half of 2024, average monthly revenue for the industry is up 12% in 2025, according to data from Sensor Tower.

DramaShorts partners with a mobile library platform, Alpha Novel, which Ovdiienko said has been invaluable in producing content at the rate that they must to be competitive. Leaning on AlphaNovels for creative backing has been a “trampoline” for the company, the co-founder told TheWrap. 

The short-form genre lends itself to high stakes – and sometimes cheesy – content, created to keep you hooked. The DramaShorts co-founder and COO said that there is a discrepancy between what viewers say they are “triggered” by and when the app notices the most engagement. Oftentimes he had to trust the analytics more than viewers because the consumer behavior did not match their verbal feedback. 

With over 80% of its audience coming from social media, DramaShorts is growing quickly. The key Ovdiienko has found is to scale and increase production. In 2024 DramaShorts produced 30 original films – each broken up into dozens of short chapters. This year the platform is on track to produce 150. 

The following is our full interview with Ovdiienko.

How has DramaShorts utilized social media to drive viewers to the app?

We are shooting a full movie, like one hour and a half in vertical format — a lot of cliffhangers, a lot of plot twists, make it bingeable — and you’re almost addicted to this content. Then we put it into social media, basically taking the hook and the most provocative parts, mix them all together, adding some AI sometimes, and just launch it on TikTok, Meta and YouTube shorts, and it makes wonders. We have a YouTube channel with more than 200,000 subscribers organically without any paid promotions. We just post our content, and it just went viral.

I believe why this niche is growing is because the distribution is here. People are so used to the TikTok format to Instagram Reels to YouTube Shorts at the moment, and that’s why it’s so effective.

What is different this time is the cost of production. The average movie at DramaShorts we produce it for around $100,000, and Quibi did it for a couple of millions. We are now building production so it’s cheaper to produce and better to distribute. That’s why it’s growing exponentially at the moment.

What percentage of your audience found you through social media?

I would say 80% of our audience is coming through social media: Instagram reels, Facebook reels, TikTok feed, YouTube shorts, those four channels. Meta is the biggest at the moment, TikTok second behind, and then Google, with YouTube, is behind them but still quite stable.

We show audiences the most anticipated moment of the movie. Then we lead them into our app. Then there is a subscription in order to watch the full movie. It’s subscription-based monetization, and you need a lot of content to stay relevant. Four to five premieres per week is our end goal.

How many productions are you doing a year?

In the previous year, we did 30 per year, and now we are on track to do 150, so we scaled quite considerably. We’re producing around 10 per month, and by the end of the year, we want to do 15 per month. That’s basically the required scale.

This niche originated in China, and it’s already quite mature there. And basically only 4% of players on this market control 90% of use and revenue in China at the moment, and we see a similar trend going in U.S. On scale, you have much better unit economy, you have much better retention, and basically the only way to win this market is produce more. That’s why we are building our production shooting in Europe, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, just to lower the costs, but we are also building our production in the U.S.

Now it is a good time to build your production in the U.S. There are a lot of very talented individuals who are working in this industry at the moment, and we’re just leveraging this opportunity. We are working with the guys who are ex-Disney, ex-showrunners, and they are just shooting for us. It’s their full time job at the moment.

How does the Chinese market differ from the European market?

Basically what (Europe is) doing, they take what is working in China or worked previously and adapt it to U.S. market. It’s pretty straightforward, take what is working, scale and put it on the U.S. market. We believe how we can be different is only through content.

Why this market appeals is because if you do a hit, it doesn’t matter if you have like, 1 million or 10 million or even 50 million views, you can grow exponentially. That’s why we are betting on this. For Chinese players, at the moment, they’re doing a lot of soap opera-type of movies. It works to some degree, but I believe this industry will evolve, and at some point, Netflix, Amazon will also look into it.

Do you anticipate other streamers acquiring companies in this space?

Strategic M&A, I believe in the future will happen in this market, because it’s basically a way to distribute the content. We already know that a lot of players look into this market because it’s huge. Revenue is growing like five times year over year.

This industry in China is already bigger than traditional streaming, so vertical short series are already bigger than classical media. So yes, I believe they will do it.

How do you balance engaging a wide range of people but also honing this niche?

We lean on Alpha Novel. Alpha Novel has 20,000 books on for U.S. audience and okay, this book is a best seller. If it’s a best seller from a scenario perspective, it has something in it that’s triggering for the audience, they want to read it. Our first movie was a book adaptation, and it was a super hit.

We are watching very detailed analytics. So for instance, if we have a movie that is a huge success in marketing, we watch by the second how creatives are working for the audience: where is the drop off, where is the bounce off. We know something happened here that is not interesting, so we cut everything unnecessary.

What has been the biggest surprise for you in launching DramaShorts?

We did roundtables with users, and they told us, “We don’t like this,” but those were the moments that they watched the most. It was super counterintuitive for us.

For example, when the main lead female actress gets bullied by some secondary character, and she is getting saved by the main lead, our users said, “It’s so cheesy. We don’t want it. We don’t like it.” But on the analytics side, we saw that it was the best performing moment of the whole movie.

Another example, the abusive partner, was the biggest one. They all told us they hated it. But then, from the perspective of marketing analytics, those were the best performing assets that we produce.

It’s like a guilty pleasure, this discrepancy between what users are telling us what they like and what they actually like. 

How do you monetize your content?

Revenue is coming from three sources. The first main one is subscription. Second is in app purchases, in coins, if you want to watch additional content with those actors, backstages, Q&A’s. We also have view-to-unlock so you are watching ads in order to unlock content.

In terms of percentage, 70% comes from subscription, 25% from in-app purchases of coins, and 5% from ad revenue.

How have you implemented AI into production?

It was a great asset for us for horizontal scale. We are doing dubbing. We are doing subtitles, and it helps us produce a ton of content, but I can assure you, it is not writing proper scripts. We cannot use it for storytelling,

Previously, to do like a Spanish dubbing, you need two weeks and a dubbing studio and around $10,000 to do it. Now, you can do it in three hours with ElevenLabs, and it’s almost the same quality for our users.

Answering how we grew so fast and went global, AI definitely helped, especially with localization, translations, audio and the number of assets that we can replicate.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

The post How DramaShorts Co-Founder Scaled Short-Form Viewing Into a Binge-Worthy Business Model appeared first on TheWrap.

Hippeau this year is marking a quarter of a century as a top venture capitalist and he shows no signs of slowing down, having raised another new seed fund, the firm’s ninth. Hippeau started the company, which now counts 400 companies in its portfolio, with Ken Lerer and his son, Ben, all of whom came from the media industry. Ken Lerer at AOL, then AOL Time Warner, and Ben at Thrillist.

Hippeau was publisher of PC Magazine and chairman and CEO of its parent company Ziff-Davis. Hippeau was also CEO of The Huffington Post, where he was an investor. He was a managing partner at SoftBank Capital, serving on the Boards of Yahoo, GeoCities, Danger, and Buddy Media, among others.

Through the years, Hippeau has developed a unique lens on the investing landscape, not just in media but across all sectors, from robotics to defense to healthcare, a view that makes him much sought after by outlets like CNBC (and TheWrap!) to share his perspectives from time to time.

When asked about the secret to successful investing, he has always said it’s about the people, the founders. That, and “we make decisions based on a million small signals,” he said.

We were able to pin down Hippeau from his crazy-busy schedule to answer a few of our questions recently. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This year marks your 25th year as a VC, and 15 years of Lerer Hippeau, the early stage fund you co-founded. Before that, you operated public and private media companies for several decades. How did your days as a media executive inform your successful early stage investing career?

In innumerable ways. I’ll try to keep the list concise. For one, media is, and always has been, about encountering new information, synthesizing it and condensing it. The core exercise for both media operators and venture capitalists is to parse the truly significant platform shifts from that which is merely novel — so it’s made me better at choosing the right companies and leaders with that filter applied. Further, media’s volatile, and has been especially in recent years. That’s taught me not to be surprised or perturbed by much — one just has to keep moving forward, stay laser-focused on tasks at hand, and bring a balanced, empirical mindset to what could otherwise be deeply stressful and emotional.

This perspective is hugely helpful in the business of early-stage company building. I’d also emphasize the importance of storytelling, which is obviously a component to any media business, and one whose importance in the VC world cannot be overstated. Founders must be able to tell their stories. They have to communicate clearly about what they are doing, why it matters, how it will reshape their markets, and how it solves a real human need — at scale. Finally, working in media has also made me significantly more comfortable with the unpleasant business of knowing when to cut bait. As VCs, we can’t be afraid to let our companies pivot, or close down and return money to investors. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it isn’t existentially scary. It’s a part of business and we all move forward.

Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio is much more than media companies. What is your formula for deciding which startups to invest in?

You’re right that we had some major wins in media and consumer in our early years at Lerer Hippeau, so we’re fortunate to be known for our prowess there. And, as you say, our portfolio of over 400 companies has always comprised many B2B businesses as well, across robotics, climate, fintech, healthcare and so many other critical sectors.

Choosing the right companies to invest in is an almost laughably challenging proposition, particularly at the earliest stages of investing, where our firm operates. More often than not, we’re looking at nothing more than a piece of paper and some rough projections. Sometimes our only task is to evaluate a founder and believe them when they say they are the right person to build whatever they’re attempting. “Formula” suggests a sort of science, and I would say that our business is equal parts art and science. We make decisions based on a million small signals. For us, it always comes down to the people. Do they have a sophisticated and proprietary sense of their market, product, and timing? Do we believe they’re equipped to build an enormous business? Do we trust them? These are the sorts of questions we consider, and the answers, typically, do not come purely from analyzing an early model. They come down to the founders in front of us. 

M&A has been tepid so far this year, and IPOs aren’t much better. How has that affected your strategy on exits from your investments?

The short answer is that our focus is on finding great companies — rather than exiting them—agnostic of market conditions, so our core business of being a founder’s first and most aligned institutional partner is largely unaffected by later-stage market machinations. That said, we take an active role in helping our founders generate liquidity for early employees, investors, and themselves, through later-stage transactions, M&A, and IPOs. Everyone in our business wants to see a more robust IPO market, which typically spurs more M&A activity as well, and we feel strongly that we need to adjust several factors that are currently making it difficult for companies to go public. Adjusting regulatory and compliance requirements, for instance, for mid-cap public companies will encourage more activity and lower financial burdens that make the option unattractive. There isn’t a silver bullet for this issue and a lot of small changes will accumulate to make a big difference, but what’s non-negotiable is that we must have public markets that are robust and accessible to maintain our place as the world’s most innovative country.

Let’s circle back to media and entertainment. We’ve been reporting a lot on Hollywood’s slow embrace of AI but there are still lots of skeptics. How do you look at AI in this space and what have you invested in?

We think AI will play a critical role in media and entertainment in a manner akin to how it will change other key industries — that’s to say, we’re bullish on companies using AI to augment and complement human ability rather than replace human ingenuity. AI should be used as a tool that unlocks new efficiencies. In the case of Hollywood, we are looking at opportunities that use amazing AI tooling for production alongside human creative and artistic talent. We’ve recently invested in a company — more on that soon — that marries AI and human talent to produce studio-quality movies at a fraction of the cost — allowing independent filmmakers to compete and get their stories told. I’ll call out a couple of other interesting early stage investments we’ve made in media and entertainment as well: TollBit is a tool to help companies monetize the AI agents scraping their content; Mother Games is  an emergent gameplay media and entertainment studio soon to broadly debut its first title.

Besides AI, name two trends in media and entertainment that excite you in the next year or two?  And on the other side of that, what worries you the most?

We think it is difficult at this stage to disentangle AI from the future of media and entertainment. Ultimately we believe that most companies in this space will to some extent be AI companies, much like how every media company today is also an internet or streaming company. So we are deeply interested in the ways AI can be applied to positively shape quality content generation. At the risk of repeating myself, I would also note here that we aren’t interested in AI that aims to replace human talent. We are bullish on the application of AI as an augmenting factor for the processes involved in content production. But to hone in on your question a bit more, two trends we are beginning to see emerge are, (1) an emphasis on individual talent and, (2) hyper-personalized content. We think that media and entertainment will continue to shift more and more toward smaller, independent teams or individual talent and solo creators. The result will be twofold: continued fragmentation, but also hyper-personalization. Consumers flock to content that speaks directly to them. One additional consequence of this will be that loyalty to big brands will fade away — and that pattern has already started.

We think that media and entertainment will continue to shift more and more toward smaller, independent teams or individual talent and solo creators. The result will be twofold: continued fragmentation, but also hyper-personalization. Consumers flock to content that speaks directly to them.

Now, we see a particular downside to this, which I’ve already briefly touched on. We are concerned about what will happen to the quality of content with uncontrolled AI bot scraping. We believe creators and publishers need to be compensated for the writing and content they produce — or we’ll all experience a complete dearth of quality content sooner than we can possibly imagine. Companies like TollBit are working hard to ensure publishers are able to monetize AI bots scraping their content. We are hopeful that an increased industry focus on this space will result in a sustainable solution.

How does the creator economy evolve from here? 

There remains tremendous upside in the creator economy. It’s a natural corollary to our thesis that content production will continue to shift to individual talent and solo practitioners. In other words, AI will serve to amplify what social media started. More and more creators will feel empowered to produce the sort of high-quality, hyper-personal content that commands a returning, sticky audience.

Lerer Hippeau recently raised a new fund. Can you talk about your plans for it? 

With our ninth seed fund, we’ll do what we’ve always done: support early stage founders by serving as their first and most aligned institutional partner. Fund IX is $200 million focused expressly on early stage companies (pre-seed and seed), which we’ll deploy with a singular focus on “finding the best founders before they’re famous,” as we like to say. Though Lerer Hippeau remains well known for our success in early consumer investments, we have always invested across the enterprise and consumer landscapes. With Fund IX, I expect us to invest more in healthcare, fintech, dev-ops and infra tooling, robotics, climate, defense and a number of other sectors. As always — if you’re building something interesting and early, we’d like to know you.

The post Veteran VC Eric Hippeau on What He’s Looking for in AI and Creator Startups appeared first on TheWrap.

Brenner joined the company in 2018, and at first it seemed like a surprising fit. Brenner had cut her teeth working for Miramax in the 1990s, later serving in executive roles at 20th Century Fox and Relativity and producing indies like “Dallas Buyers Club.” Perhaps it’s exactly that foundation that spurred Brenner to enthusiastically hire Greta Gerwig to co-write and direct “Barbie” – and, crucially, to give Gerwig the freedom to make something truly unique.

“For me, I feel like if we’re not trying to raise the bar on every single movie that we’re doing, if we’re not doing something that feels unexpected and that has a reason to exist, then we shouldn’t be doing it,” Brenner told TheWrap for our latest Office With a View. “We want to set the bar really high. And we’ll take swings, and sometimes maybe they won’t work, but at least we’re taking a swing and we’re making bold choices.”

So with Oscars and box office records in tow, Brenner – who was promoted to oversee both film and TV for all of Mattel Studios earlier this year – has set about crafting a slate that is filmmaker-driven, dramatically diverse in tone and has projects set up at just about every major studio in Hollywood.

2026 will see the release of “Masters of the Universe,” a fantasy action epic directed by Laika founder and stop-motion filmmaker Travis Knight. The Amazon MGM Studios release will be anchored by “The Idea of You” heartthrob Nicholas Galitzine and is a “huge spectacle” that “deals with masculinity in a very fun, funny way.” After that is “Matchbox,” a gritty and grounded take on the toy car brand starring John Cena and directed by stuntman-turned-filmmaker Sam Hargrave. That one will stream on Apple TV+.

There’s also an A24 “Barney” movie written by Ayo Edebiri, a “Hot Wheels” movie from “Wicked” director Jon M. Chu and producer J.J. Abrams that’s set up at Warner Bros. and a “Monster High” adaptation at Universal that just tapped “M3GAN” filmmaker Gerard Johnstone to direct.

And, just announced, the “Barbie” craze will continue with an animated film at Illumination Entertainment. “For 66 years, Barbie has been a canvas for girls’ imagination, showing them they can be anything and inspiring their limitless potential,” Brenner said. “Chris Meledandri and the Illumination team are the North Star of animation — visionary storytellers with a remarkable ability to create worlds that are wildly inventive and emotionally rich. We are thrilled to partner with them to bring Barbie’s animated theatrical debut to life in a way that will resonate with audiences of all ages.”

Mattel doesn’t self-finance its projects (yet — Brenner hinted that may be in the cards in the future) so its slate can afford to be diverse and robust.

“To be able to be diversified and to be working in all sorts of places just gives us an opportunity to really move things down the field simultaneously,” she said. “I think it’s a great way to do it, because some people do certain things better than others.”

Through it all, Robbie aims to empower each project’s director to find something unique to say with their respective Mattel property and, hopefully, offer audiences something unexpected.

Read our full interview below to get a look under the hood of how Mattel Studios aims to make-good on the “Barbie” promise of thought-provoking blockbusters.

You were running production at Relativity and producing Oscar-nominated films and indies. What spurred you to join Mattel in the first place?

The movies that I produced and made are movies that are either true life stories or just stories that I feel like for myself need to be told, so the last thing that I was thinking about in my life was coming to Mattel. It really kind of fell out of the sky. I had just met with Risa Gertner, who was at CAA, and we were having a general meeting and she connected me with (Mattel CEO) Ynon Kreiz. We had breakfast one morning and we just really hit it off. I met somebody that was really a kindred spirit, we really saw eye to eye creatively. At one point he said to me, if anybody could be Barbie, who would you imagine it could be? And I said, “Well, Margot Robbie,” and he was like, “That’s so funny, because we’ve been speaking to Margot.” We just really had a shared vision. After more meetings with people at Mattel, I took the job and started two months after he did. My first day, I was looking at all these incredible titles, we have a list of like 200 titles that sit in the Mattel library. I spent the first week that I was here distilling this larger list down to a smaller list of the 40 or 45 movies that I thought can have a real theatrical experience, and then I kind of built from there.

The first film out of the gate is “Barbie” and it’s not only a massive hit, it’s a cultural phenomenon. Did you have an inkling it’d be that big?

Well for starters, that was the last movie that I thought we would make first, just because everybody has a relationship and a touchstone with Barbie. We would have to thread the needle so perfectly. Before even meeting Greta, I think we had heard like 40 different pitches of Barbie and none of them quite got there. Margot brought Greta to the table and I was like “Are you kidding me? If we could have Greta Gerwig direct this movie, forget it. That would be amazing.” We met with Greta and Noah Baumbach and she talked about her love and affinity for Barbie, and she had this idea that it lived in between a Birkenstock and a high heel. I thought that was just so genius. It’s definitely one of the most memorable moments of my life, reading that script. I’d say seeing the movie for the first time, I think we knew how special it was going to be. You could just tell by the visceral reaction to the movie from the very beginning that we had something that was unique.

It’s a great film but it’s also delightfully strange. I have to imagine there was a lot of trust put in Greta that paid off, and looking at the movies and filmmakers you’ve announced, it feels like you’re continuing to invest in artists to paint a unique canvas. Is that something you’re cognizant of going forward, and one of the takeaways from “Barbie?”

Absolutely. For me, I feel like if we’re not trying to raise the bar on every single movie that we’re doing, if we’re not doing something that feels unexpected and that has a reason to exist, then we shouldn’t be doing it. There’s too much noise in the marketplace, you have to give people a reason to want to get off the couch and actually go to the movies. I always like to use the words sticky and different and authentic. We don’t want to create mediocrity. We want to set the bar really high. We want to do things that feel different and unexpected. And we’ll take swings, and sometimes maybe they won’t work, but at least we’re taking a swing and we’re making bold choices. 

I feel like that’s the way we’ve approached the entire slate, whether it’s “Barney” with Ayo Edebiri writing and Daniel Kaluuya producing. And there’s “Masters of the Universe,” which is the complete antithesis of what “Barbie” is. “Barbie” was all about femininity and embracing feminism and the issues around all of that, and “Masters” is fun and it’s a huge spectacle and it’s something totally different. It deals with masculinity in a very fun, funny way. [Director] Travis [Knight] is just a visionary. He’s an incredible filmmaker. I think that people are going to be so delighted with this new rendition. I think people are kind of over swords and capes, and we need to find something different. This movie is heartfelt, it’s fun, the action is amazing. It’s inspirational, it’s aspirational. It’s a coming-of-age story with an amazing, colorful, insane backdrop.

You have so much in development right now. What pushes a project to a greenlight? What makes it a “go” movie for Mattel?

Well, we’re not a studio. We don’t finance our own movies. So we’re somewhat dependent on the studios that we’ve set the movie up at. So it’ll be a combination. For “Barbie,” we were partnered with Warner Bros. and we happened to get a great script in, and so they basically greenlit it from the onset. We’re so excited about “Hot Wheels,” which we also have at Warner Bros., and Jon M. Chu is going to direct it. We’re collaborating with J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot and that script should come in soon, then hopefully we’re going to be off to the races and prepping that movie. We do have limited development funds, and some we decide to work on internally and get a great script, and then attach elements and then go out with it. At this juncture, we’re not financing our movies. I think it’s something that will be in the cards for us in the future, but that’s not something we’re doing. So that greenlight process depends on a third party.

You’re working with pretty much every studio in town. How does that fit into your overall strategy for Mattel’s film slate?

First of all, every movie should live in a different place, right? So “Barney,” the perfect home for it was A24 and we set it up there, and luckily they embraced it and they love it in the way that we do. I think every movie, when you think about it, has its own sort of natural home, and the great thing is that I came up in the business with all of the people that are sort of at the top of all these studios now. It’s so great to have friends and peers everywhere, and I think it really gives us the ability to be nimble and to be able to not be dependent on one financing source, one release calendar. It just gives us more flexibility in terms of the way we navigate through such a robust slate. To be able to be diversified and to be working in all sorts of places just gives us an opportunity to really move things down the field simultaneously. I think it’s a great way to do it, because some people do certain things better than others. 

There’s also no unifying universe. “Barbie” and “Masters of the Universe” don’t have to connect or be in the same style or tone, which feels smart as audiences now seem to have cinematic universe fatigue.

No, I think each property should exist and live on its own. I mean, will there be interconnectivity at some point in the future? Who knows? Would it be fun to make a movie with all of our different brands, like a “Toy Story”-type movie? Absolutely. But we’re not there at this point, I think right now we’re just trying to tell the best possible stories we can to make premium content with the best filmmakers, best in class writers, and just tell exciting stories that bring people joy and warmth, that are family-oriented and that can exist theatrically.

Granular question. I’m excited for “Matchbox” directed by Sam Hargrave, but you also have “Hot Wheels” directed by Jon M. Chu. How do you differentiate between the two?

They’re actually really different. I think with “Hot Wheels,” it’s sort of like a fantastical universe, because you have those amazing orange tracks that go off into nowhere, and it’s really a fantasy play. “Matchbox” is much more grounded, like you have the helicopter driver and the ambulance driver and the policeman. It’s a completely different play pattern. But the “Matchbox” movie, wow. Sam Hargrave is the real deal. He is amazing. He did such a fantastic job. I mean, the stunts in this movie are crazy. I was in Morocco and there were 700 or 800 people working just on one stunt that we were doing. They were driving this car, flipping it over, having it hit 10 cars. And he does these real in-camera. He likes the actors to participate as much as humanly possible.

As you alluded to, it’s a challenging marketplace. “Barbie” was massive. But superhero movies have hit a bit of a ceiling. As you’re plotting out your slate, what makes a Mattel movie stand out? What levers are you pulling to set the films up for success?

I think it all comes back to the filmmaker. It’s finding filmmakers that have a unique and individual voice that sets them apart from anybody else. So that’s the first thing that I’m going to gravitate towards for our movies, is finding interesting voices, and then it’s just finding the most unique way into these stories. Nobody wants to see something that they’ve seen before. They want to feel like it’s unexpected and that it feels different, and that it’s an interesting, different interpretation of what they ever imagined that could be. I think that you’re going to see that in all of our movies. I think that’s the throughline. That’s what we’re aiming for. If you’re not doing something great, then let’s not bother doing it. Movies are very, very hard to make and hard to do well. There’s so many things that need to be aligned and to go right. But I think if you start with a solid foundation of that great story and then you have the vision, then you’re setting yourself up for great success.

You recently got promoted to oversee all of film and television. What’s your approach with the TV slate?

It’s such an exciting time at Mattel Studios just to have television and film under one umbrella, because content is content. Whether it’s short form or long form, it’s just about telling great stories. So it doesn’t matter if it’s gonna be on Peacock or Netflix, or whether we’re going to go consume it at the movie theater. Let’s approach it in the same way. Premium storytelling, great filmmakers, great stories. We just hired Jennifer Breslow who’s running scripted and unscripted TV. She’s fantastic. In the next couple of months, we will be announcing certain shows that we’re putting together with A-list writers and A-list talent at different studios around town for scripted television. Our unscripted business is great. We’re doing lots of fun reality and game shows, and then we have a lot going on on the animation side.

So “Masters of the Universe” is next, and I assume “Matchbox” is after that. Do you know what’s next in the pipeline for film? What’s coming up right behind that?

I’ve got some pots on the stove that are boiling right now, and I have to see which one’s gonna happen. We’ll have one or two that will be going next year that we’re kind of figuring out now. 

Rapid fire round of questions here. Is “Barney” a thriller or a horror movie?

No, no, God no. It’s a beautiful, life-affirming, incredible story. It’s just unexpected and delicious in every way.

“Barbie” sequel. Have there been discussions? Is that happening? Are Greta and Noah working on something?

We all want to make the “Barbie” sequel. When you have such great success, we certainly talk about it. At some point maybe. I don’t know, we will see. There have definitely been discussions.

Ryan Gosling Ken movie?

We would love a Ken movie. We love Ryan.

What can you say about the “American Girl” movie?

The idea is so good and so unexpected. It’s set up at Paramount and it’s gonna be really good.

“Bob the Builder,” which is your first animated theatrical film.

Yes, with Anthony Ramos as Bob. He’s super passionate about it. We’re getting a script in and developing that, and that’s coming along really well.

“Monster High,” what’s going on with that?

Gerard [Johnstone] is directing that, I absolutely love him. He has an unbelievable take. We’re fast-tracking it. We should be getting a script and hopefully we’re making that movie soon.

Is Tom Hanks still attached to “Major Matt Mason?”

Yes, it’s in the works. I love that script. I think it’s so beautiful. Hopefully we’re going to make that. Tom’s just a busy guy and has a busy schedule.

The post How Mattel Studios President and Chief Content Officer Robbie Brenner Is Crafting a Post-‘Barbie’ Slate appeared first on TheWrap.

Point Grey’s relationship with Lionsgate goes back to 2019, when the production studio signed a multi-platform content deal, and then strengthened with the extension of Point Grey’s first-look deal with Lionsgate TV in March 2024 — just as production was beginning on “The Studio.” Before then, Lionsgate and Point Grey had partnered on “Paul T. Goldman” for Peacock and “Santa Inc” for HBO Max.

“[Those] were a little more niche, smaller passion projects, but [I] was always waiting for, ‘what’s the thing that the guys want to do?'” Herbst told TheWrap for the Office With a View interview series. “When ‘The Studio’ came about, it was a great extension of the relationship we already had going.”

As the Hollywood satirical series follows newly appointed studio head Matt Remick (played by Rogen) botching the careful balance between the art and business of filmmaking, “The Studio” is a wink to industry insiders — and triggering for executives like Herbst — but the team tried their best to ensure “The Studio” was relatable for viewers coming from all sorts of backgrounds, similar to “The Office.”

“We’re sitting in a conference room. There’s a Cisco telephone in the middle of the table. We could be anywhere in the world, and the people we’re talking to happen to make entertainment and not sell a product,” Herbst told TheWrap for our Office With a View interview series. “Everyone understands getting your dream job [and it turns out] it’s not what you thought it was going to be.”

“The Studio,” which was ordered to production by Apple TV+ just from a pitch, paid off tenfold for all involved parties, debuting to critical acclaim and this week scoring 23 Emmy nominations, breaking the record for most comedy nominations in a single year and becoming the most nominated freshman comedy.

Six of the 23 nods were for the guest acting, granting Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard their first acting Emmy nominations, while guest stars Bryan Cranston, Anthony Mackie, Dave Franco and Zoë Kravitz also scored nominations. Herbst recalls Howard, who played a mean-spirited version of himself in what Herbst calls “the anti-Ron Howard role,” being one of the first to sign on while Apple TV+ was instrumental in bringing in Scorsese, kickstarting a wave of stars coming on.

“For the most part, we got everyone that they originally wrote into the script … we got a dream cast,” Herbst said. “I know the guys are just so thrilled that we got so many nominations for those guest actors and actresses, so it wasn’t like everyone came and did something that you know wasn’t worth their time. Hopefully [for] Season 2, it’ll be even easier.”

The writers’ room for Season 2 is already underway, with Sarah Polley, who guest starred in Season 1 — (Herbst said Polley not scoring a guest acting nomination was the show’s biggest Emmys snub) — joining the room. “It will be bigger and better than Season 1,” Herbst said.

And, in the meantime, Herbst and his fellow executives working on the show are trying their best to ensure nothing they do gets written into Season 2, with Herbst joking, “That’s the only goal of being an executive on the show. How can I get through this notes call without doing something that’s Episode 4 next year?”

TheWrap: “The Studio” adds to Lionsgate TV’s roster of unique shows that have led the way for the industry, like “Orange Is the New Black.” How do you spot what projects might have that certain something that might push the envelop?

Herbst: As an independent studio, we always hold ourselves to the standard of, why is someone going to make this show from us? If you look at the perennial hits that Lionsgate has, whether it’s “Mad Men” “Nurse Jackie,” “Weeds,” “Orange Is the New Black,” the “Power” shows or “BMF,” these are shows that probably weren’t being pitched by somebody else. We need to be that much more thoughtful, put that much more TLC into a project, and make it that it’s undeniable. Obviously, when we go out, not every show is going to be for every network, but we at least want the networks to know, “Oh, it’s coming from Lionsgate. It’s going to be well-thought through. It’s going to feel like a TV show, whether that TV show is right for that specific platform.” That’s the game.

How did Apple TV+ emerge as the right home for “The Studio?”

We took it to a handful of places — there were only two places that we would have done it that didn’t hear it, because they had shows that fit into the same world of something in entertainment. We had four production offers off a pitch. Everyone says, don’t pitch something about Hollywood, but … coming from Seth Rogen, and “This is the End,” as different of a movie as it was, it proved that when the guys want celebrities to play themselves, they can have a super fun time doing so. We really leaned on that, like, “hey, if you like that movie, and you saw what we did with it, we’re going to recreate that here in an even bigger way.”

What upcoming projects are you excited about?

We have a show called “Hunting Wives” coming out on Netflix next week that’s even soapier and much sexier than “Desperate Housewives,” we have John Grisham’s “Rainmaker” coming out with USA and Peacock in August and then we just did a “Spartacus” reboot for Starz. We did a “Robin Hood” show for MGM+ and “Midnight Sun” for Netflix, which is “Twilight” in adult animated form.

Being an independent studio, we work with all different types of buyers — I think everything I mentioned is at a different network. For us, it’s about being the best independent supplier outside of their home studios that they can get a show from, and it’s certainly working with MGM and USA, two networks that we hadn’t done a ton of business with, and to get two shows on with them that are both coming out within the same year. We’ll do anything for anyone. If we make a good show, the audience knows a way to find it.

You mentioned the “Spartacus” reboot. There’s a handful of reboots across the industry right now that, some are working and some aren’t, like “Suits L.A.” Where do you see reboots and spinoffs’ place in your programming strategy?

Titles give you a little leg up. It’s a little easier to sell. But if I think about my favorite shows, there’s a lot of great original shows also. All the shows we just mentioned that Lionsgate had hits with before, are original, but am I lucky that we have “Twilight” in the library and Stephenie Meyer said, “I would love to do this as adult animation?” I said, “great, let’s make that the next iteration of what that franchise becomes.” We’re kind of agnostic, but, of course, if you can get a big piece of IP, it just makes the sales process a little easier. But I don’t think any show ever gets made because it’s just a hot title. I know there’s some titles that we’ve developed a couple times over that I know everyone wants to make … but the right show just hasn’t presented itself yet. Maybe, if you’re internal somewhere, and your network says, “Well, this title makes sense. Let’s make it,” maybe you rush something. I don’t feel, as Lionsgate, we ever get freebies, and I think that’s good, because it keeps us to a certain standard of the high quality that we want to be doing.

What gaps in the types of projects are you seeing right now in the industry?

Everyone’s making less [and] I think comedy has taken a hit. Because of that, we feel very lucky to have “Ghosts” on CBS, which got renewed for a fifth and sixth season, and “The Studio.” We feel very lucky that we’re one of the players who has having success there right now. The word that I keep coming back to when I’m thinking about pitching shows is entertainment — there were shows that were being made for a while that were chasing something going on in the world and were dark for the sake of being dark. I think now, everyone realizes when you sit at home, you have so many choices of what to watch and ultimately, I think people want to be entertained.

What advice do you have for young people starting out in the industry?

The No. 1 one thing I tell young people is networking and human connection in our business is so important. Even in the Zoom world, though, if you can sit and look at someone on Zoom, it’s better than just having an email relationship with them, but even more so, sit and go have coffee with someone, get a drink, have a meal. Just be in person, because so much of what we do when you’re talking in a creative landscape, it needs to be about two people connecting over the thing. The human connection of the industry is really what it runs on.

And then the other thing I always tell young people is, you want to be aggressive without being annoying, and that’s a very fine line to figure out what that is. I remember when I was going for my first job, the head of HR was who you had to get through to get a job in the CAA mailroom. And I remember saying to her when I was graduating college, I’m going to email you every week until you make me a job offer, you don’t have to respond, but every week you’re going to see an email that I’m thinking that this is the job I want. And after four emails, I had a job offer, and ultimately I didn’t go there, but it was, in my mind, a perfect way to be aggressive without being annoying.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Lionsgate TV Development Head on ‘The Studio’ Success and Finding Perennial Hits appeared first on TheWrap.

Melanie Fletcher, whose production company Done + Dusted has been putting on live events across comedy, sports, gaming, music, specials and awards shows since 1998, tells TheWrap’s Office With a View that costs can range from as little as $1 million to as much as $50 million in any given year.

“It’s hard to conceive and stage and produce an event that’s also a livestream of any scale for under a million dollars,” said Fletcher, who serves as Done + Dusted’s North America CEO. “But the smaller events are no easier. You still have to apply all the same energy and love into it.”

The company’s notable live events have ranged from the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which generated 1.2 billion engagements, 22 million live viewers and a combined reach of 305 million to Riot Games’ League of Legends World Finals 2024, which became the most viewed esports event ever with 7 million concurrent views.

Fletcher got her start in Australia as a producer for Saturday morning television programming before moving on to MTV Australia producing for the news division, where she developed a passion for live event storytelling.

“I like to call it the University of MTV, because there were no rules. We we’re making things up as we went and learning on the job every day,” she explained. “I was interacting with MTV offices around the world and very quickly knew that I wanted to go join MTV in America and work on award shows. I just loved the spectacle and the scale and the celebrity of those programs.”

By the late 90s, Fletcher was living in Los Angeles working the award show circuit on programs like the Video Music Awards. She subsequently moved to England to join MTV London, where she worked on the Europe Music Awards and other music specials, and would meet Simon Pizey, Hamish Hamilton and Ian Stewart.

The group would leave MTV to start Done + Dusted, which began producing specials in the music industry when audiences were still buying DVDs of concerts. But as that business shrank, they pivoted their expertise and passion toward other forms of programming. In 2003, they won the contract for the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which was making the transition from internet to broadcast for the first time.

“We helped shape what the format for the worldwide broadcast would be and would go on to produce 16 of those, including last year’s comeback special after a hiatus,” Fletcher said. “As our genre ability broadened, we were able to attract some interest from clients in the US, particularly after Victoria’s Secret.”

Done + Dusted has gone on to build a scaled business in the U.S. in the years since, adding additional creative partners Guy Carrington, Katy Mullan, David Jammy and Adrian Pettett, which gave Fletcher the opportunity to move from hands-on producing into an executive position as North America CEO. 

When asked about the biggest lesson she’s learned in her career, she said being open to learning and willing to adapt – both from a creative and leadership standpoint.

“What I’ve seen around me is those that aren’t able to be agile and flexible and open in their learning, to change, to conversation, to making space for newcomers and listening to new, young, opinionated people, will very soon be irrelevant,” Fletcher explained. “If you don’t love learning, then this isn’t the industry for you. Every day I learn something big and important and new that I need to then apply going forward. And that’s what excites me and gets me out of bed, actually.”

Read on for the rest of TheWrap’s edited conversation with Fletcher below.

You’ve gotten to work on a wide range of events ranging from the Emmys to Beyonce concerts to speeches by President Barack Obama. What was the process like and the challenges of securing those opportunities?

When we first moved here, whilst we had a body of work and a history of some really solid work, we were the outsiders. I really saw us as the underdogs, not the least because we’re a group of different nationalities – there’s Australian, Kiwi, Scottish, South African and then some Brits in our mix – but it took quite some time to get respect from clients.

Our clients have always been quite broad, even more so now, but it’s been the networks and now the streamers, but it’s also been brands and gaming publishers and heads of state and royal families and so on. So to get respected here was just a slow process of producing very premium work and, over time, that work got noticed.

The superpower of Done + Dusted is the eight of us. It’s quite rare to have a group of eight people who run a business together. We can separate and work on a lot of different things at any one time. It gives us a volume, which in turn gives us quite a lot of publicity. One minute, it’s the Emmys, and then the next minute, it’s an inauguration. So just that breadth of work enabled our reputation to spread.

What’s the most difficult or challenging aspect of the work you do in live storytelling?

There’s always a risk with live and we as creatives and producers always want to push the innovation boundary. So we make it even riskier by using new camera technology or doing live demos for tech brands or whatever it might be. We don’t like repeating ourselves, so there’s a high risk that needs to be managed.

The other challenge is the purpose of live. We wrestle with that often. Does it need to be live? Should it be live? Why is it live? Are we the brand and the audience benefiting from this being live? I think it is quite hot right now to be live and sometimes shows are better not live, actually, as an experience to the viewer. So it’s walking that line, and really, if you can go live, make sure that actually there’s a real reason for it.

What do you make of the shift in live storytelling moving from linear TV to streaming as the former’s ratings decline?

Our philosophy has always been quite simple: our work and output always has to be premium, regardless of where it’s going, and we have to have a broad client base and we’re a volume business, which means we should produce the networks, the streamers, the digital platforms and creators and artists because our skillset is tapping into entertainment as a format to solve a problem for someone.

We’re always obsessed with who’s watching this, how are they watching it, when are they watching it, what are their watching habits, is it solving a problem for them, is it engaging them, would they respond to comedy or something intimate or something deep and telling or do they need spectacle to get them off their doomscroll? That mindset takes you out of what can be quite a depressing thought that ratings are dropping and people are not watching live entertainment in the way that they were.

The only true part about that story is they’re just not watching it the way they were. Everyone still loves live and then you get these random rating spikes on some shows and you’re even seeing it on networks. I think live is actually quite protected in that it generates virality, conversation and community discussion. Even if we’re doing it via text or sending memes about a show, however it is, we want something to grab onto to generate conversation with our friends, our colleagues and our families.

On the topic of premium content, what do you make of the rise of YouTube and creator content in the Hollywood ecosystem?

Most creator content, despite its authentic nature, will not be premium and will remain user generated. It will do the job it has set out to do, which is to engage and entertain and often to sell and there’s space for that, and that is proven by the growth in that creator economy.

I’m obsessed with creators. I like to see them as authors and even broadcasters of our content. We see creators as a channel, so we take over their feeds or their handles, and we pump our content through those pipes, get into their subscriber base and it’s proven to be extremely effective, maybe more effective than being on a streamer, because you’re really getting to the consumer or customer base of that brand or artist.

So there is an exciting intersection between creator world and Done + Dusted world. But I don’t think we need to compete and I don’t think we need to compare. I just think we’re really different and we can benefit each other.

As you look ahead, are there any areas you’re not already in that you’re looking to expand into?

A couple of years ago, we took on another partner, Adrian Pettett, who runs a new vertical for us in the immersive experience space. We just thought it was such an interesting and clever way to entertain people and we really saw a future in it. So we invested heavily into that and it’s taken many, many years, but we’re about to open our first original immersive experience later this year in London. 

All good producers are actually entrepreneurs, because they’ve got to be able to take risks. But there’s one thing taking risks in a writer’s room and then there’s another thing taking risks with your bank account, so at some point you have to find out what’s right in the balance for you. 

Are there trends that people should be paying more attention to than they are already?

There’s no question that AI won’t change our business, it will. I’m very interested in trying to understand the best use cases for AI in live and how we can interpret those into our workflow without being obstructive and negative to change. That feels like a big proposition.

I think, particularly with live, how can AI make it cheaper? One-off live events that are from the ground up with no pre-existing event to bounce off are traditionally quite expensive and I would love to figure out a way to produce big spectacle cheaper, because it will help the business as a whole.

I would say we’re still in baby steps of how we apply it, certainly to the administrative business and some of the creative work and using Midjourney and and other design tools. We do a lot of stuff in Canva, which we love, their AI tools are really clever, and obviously ChatGPT. There’s new technology around Cue Pilot, which is how you script camera shots and so on. That’s still in the early days of figuring out how to implement that in a live situation, because it is high stakes when it’s live. That naturally makes you a bit of a control freak, so handing over the reins to AI is still a bit scary for us, but we’re open minded. We want to figure it out.

What’s your advice for someone looking to break into the industry?

My number one piece of advice would be when someone asks you to do something, regardless of what it is, to absolutely nail it, and then the next thing they ask you to do is going to have a bigger outcome, and then absolutely nail that, and then keep going until you’re sat at the table that you want to be at being asked to do the things you want to be doing.

Hard work is unavoidable and you need to turn hard work into something you love. Otherwise, it’s an uphill struggle. Young people need to really figure out what they’re good at and what they want to do and hopefully those two things align. And then they need to work really, really hard because there is no shortcuts.

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