Archives for June 2022

This can be seen in, for instance, the company’s marketing budgets. In 2019 — when Disney+ and Apple TV+ were just getting started and HBO Max did not exist — Netflix spent $2.6 billion on marketing. In 2021, when competition greatly increased, it spent $2.5 billion.

Most shows on Netflix still appear on the service with relatively little outside promotion. And the streamer’s movies still receive only nominal theatrical releases. For instance, “The Gray Man,” an expensive, summer blockbuster-style film starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, will debut in select theaters on July 15 before becoming available on Netflix a week later.

And, according to two people familiar with the talks between Netflix and exhibitors, there are no active negotiations regarding other potential theatrically exclusive releases. The much anticipated “Knives Out” sequel, scheduled to be released this year, will appear on Netflix after its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. An exclusive extensive theatrical launch appears unlikely. Netflix declined to comment on its theatrical strategy.

But company executives have become much more sensitive to bad reviews, which have lately been appearing in high frequency as Netflix struggles to find a new hit on a par with “Stranger Things” or “The Crown.” (Newer content like the film “Spiderhead” and the series “God’s Favorite Idiot” have been critically derided.) A producer who works with Netflix said the word “quality” was being bandied about much more often in development meetings.

Emily Feingold, a Netflix spokeswoman, disputed the idea that focusing on a show’s quality was somehow a change in strategy, referring to such disparate content as “Squid Game,” the reality television show “Too Hot to Handle,” and movies like “Red Notice” and “The Adam Project.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/business/media/netflix-streaming-business.html

You’ll never hear the name TikTok on “Dancing With Myself.” (“We didn’t want to be ‘the TikTok show,’ because we thought this movement was larger than that,” Irwin said.) But TikTok culture, shined up for television, shapes many aspects of its format.

The 12 contestants on each episode learn a series of routines that resemble social media dance challenges in their brevity and relative simplicity. They perform in square “pods” that suggest the boxed seclusion of phone screens, unable to see each other for most of the challenges. Like many TikTok dance creators, Jonas, Koshy, Kostek and Shakira are not experienced choreographers, but all demonstrate and help teach the show’s routines. Though judges have opportunities to save favorite dancers, “likes” are the currency of the competition, with winners determined by audience votes that are animated onscreen as showers of hearts.

The “Dancing With Myself” approach to casting is perhaps most in line with TikTok’s ethos. “On the app, what leads to success is not necessarily good dancing, but, really, the personality of the performer,” Boffone said.

Though some “Dancing With Myself” contestants are gifted and highly trained dancers, the show makes a point of including charismatic competitors of all skill levels. Many are already TikTok standouts: the dancing flight attendant, the dancing police officer, the dancing dentist. (And the dancing TikTok scholar. Boffone, who posts routines with his students on Instagram and TikTok, was cast as an alternate for the show’s fifth episode.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/arts/dance/dancing-with-myself-nbc.html

“Champion were obsessed with sweet and sour, they called it,” StoneBridge, now 60, recalled via phone from his studio in Stockholm. He dialed his Korg M1 synthesizer to the next preset, landing on Organ 2, and replayed his bass line. That was the bouncy, sweet part. The sour was the grinding sound that opens the song, a product of his DX100 Yamaha synth, which he played in the red to distort it. He dusted it all, as well as Robin S.’s vocal, with some delay. The result was minimal like early house music out of Chicago, but shimmering with novel sounds. StoneBridge was not sure about his concoction, but deadline compelled him to turn it in.

When Robin S. heard it, it blew her away, she said in an interview last week. Finally her song was complete.

She had recorded her vocal years before in one take (not counting the ad-libs) while suffering from the flu, she recalled over the phone from her home in Atlanta. She was initially unimpressed by the song; and then, years later with StoneBridge’s revision, its popularity exploded on a global scale. “Show Me Love” was not the first house song to feature the M1 Organ 2 sound, but it hit bigger than any that came before it.

Earlier last week, Robin S. got a call from her son informing her that she was trending on social media as a result of the apparent “Show Me Love” reference in Beyoncé’s song, which replicates that M1 Organ 2 sound (in a different rhythm). She and StoneBridge both said they had no idea what was coming. StoneBridge discovered the connection while searching for his name on Twitter.

“I didn’t know whether to laugh, to cry,” Robin S., 60, said. “Out of all the songs she has access to, out of all the songs her team has access to, she chose mine.” The singer said she was particularly touched because she’s felt that dance artists like her “don’t get their props” despite their hard work.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/arts/music/beyonce-break-my-soul-robin-s-show-me-love.html

A little over a week ago, Drake announced a surprise new album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” and released it online a few hours later. Just like clockwork, it has now gone to No. 1, becoming Drake’s 11th album to top the Billboard 200 chart.

“Honestly, Nevermind,” Drake’s seventh studio LP — and his 17th full-length release overall, counting compilations and mixtapes — opened with the equivalent of 204,000 sales in the United States, including 250 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Those figures were enough to send the dance-heavy “Honestly” to No. 1 by a comfortable margin. But they were low by the standards of Drake, who for more than a decade has routinely posted gigantic numbers for new work.

The album’s 204,000 equivalent sales — a measurement that reconciles streams with downloads and any traditional album purchases — are a fraction of the 613,000 that Drake posted for the opening of his last studio album, “Certified Lover Boy” (2021). And they are Drake’s lowest since “Care Package,” a compilation of previously released tracks, which opened (at No. 1, naturally) with 109,000 in 2019. Apart from “Care Package,” no Drake album has begun with fewer than half a million equivalents since “What a Time to Be Alive,” a mixtape with the rapper Future from 2015, when streaming represented a minority of overall music consumption. (As of last year, streaming makes up 83 percent of recorded music sales revenue in the United States.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/arts/music/drake-honestly-nevermind-billboard-chart.html

Ms. Dakhil, however, decided to investigate for herself. “I made a concerted effort to get to know Kareem and have been pleasantly surprised,” she said. “He is brimming over with high levels of EQ” — emotional intelligence — “and yet he doesn’t pretend to know everything. He’s curious and listens. And most of all, I am convinced that he really does love movies.”

Movies have been a passion for Mr. Daniel since childhood. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where his mother was a nurse and father a professor. He spent most Saturdays at the Evergreen Plaza multiplex, once taking in back-to-back screenings of “The Empire Strikes Back.” When it came to picking a career, however, his parents insisted on practicality — hence his dutiful decision to study electrical engineering at Stanford University.

At Disney, he is known for peppering conversations with movie lines, sometimes playfully testing subordinates to guess their origin. He collects original movie posters. Over dinner with a reporter, he discussed the plot intricacies of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” about a couturier in 1950s London, and recited lines from “The Breakfast Club” and “The Color of Money.”

He has attended the Sundance Film Festival 21 times. “He sees more movies at Sundance than almost anyone, and he does it because he loves it,” said Sean Bailey, president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Production.

Much has been made, both inside and outside of Disney, about the ways in which Mr. Chapek’s 2020 restructuring took away power from some (the people running the company’s moviemaking and television production divisions) and gave it to others (Mr. Daniel). Not helping has been confusion in the broader industry about how it all works.

Under the new setup, Mr. Daniel’s group sets a spending budget for Disney’s content factories. Using data and research, his teams also determine what type of content is needed (genre, length, targeted demographics) to drive growth on the company’s various platforms. “We share that with them so that they can go create against those needs,” Mr. Daniel said. “We don’t go to a hyper sense of specificity, of course, because we want to inform the creative process but not try to algorithmically program.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/business/media/kareem-daniel-disney.html