THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
“I always wanted to leave when I felt like I still had it in me to do more, but that things were good and I didn’t want to tempt fate. And I also didn’t want to get to a point where people at the company were saying, when is he finally going to go. And there are couple of other factors. One, I think change at the top has value. Bringing someone in with a fresh perspective is like opening the windows and letting fresh air blow in. Secondly, I was starting to get a little bit arrogant and a little bit overconfident in my own instincts. And what I mean by that is, … I was becoming a little bit more impatient or a little bit more intolerable, I should say, of other people’s ideas. I think because subconsciously, I felt like I was always right, or I knew it all. And things had been quite good at the company in the period of time that I was CEO And so I think that resulted in my believing in my own instincts so much, that I was becoming a little bit less open to other people’s.”
Exiting Iger Offers Audience To Kara Swisher At New York Times
-30-
May 1, 2022
"Netflix, the great disrupter whose algorithms and direct-to-consumer platform have forced powerful media incumbents to rethink their economic models, now seems to need a big strategy change itself. It got me thinking about the simple idea that my film and TV production company Blumhouse is built on: If you give artists a lot of creative freedom and a little money upfront but a big stake in the movie’s or TV show’s commercial success, more often than not the result will be both commercial (the filmmakers are incentivized to make films that will resonate with audiences) and artistically interesting (creative freedom!). This approach has yielded movies as varied as Get Out (made for $4.5 million, with worldwide box office receipts of more than $250 million), Whiplash (made for $3.3 million, winner of three Academy Awards), The Invisible Man (made for $7 million, earned more than $140 million) and Paranormal Activity (made for $15,000, grossed more than $190 million).From the beginning, the most important strategy I used to persuade artists to work with me was to make radically transparent deals: We usually paid the artists (“participants” in Hollywood lingo) the absolute minimum allowable by union contracts upfront, with the promise of healthy bonuses based on actual box office results—instead of the opaque 'percentage points' that artists are usually offered. Anyone can see box office results immediately, so creators don’t quarrel with the payouts. In fact, when it comes time for an artist to collect a bonus based on box office receipts, I email a video clip of myself dropping the check off at FedEx to the recipient."
Jason Blum Sees Room For "Scrappier" Netflix
| April 30, 2022
"As a critic Gavin was entertaining, wry, questioning, sensitive, perceptive"
Critic-Filmmaker Gavin Millar Was 84; Films Include Cream In My Coffee, Dreamchild
April 29, 2022
| January 24, 2022
DP/30 Audio: Bombshell, Jay Roach
| December 13, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jonathan Majors
| December 4, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Mustang, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
| December 4, 2019
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