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Hollywood Wants Numbers on the Digital Box Office

September 15, 2013 by

The business has long used box-office numbers, which are publicly sliced and diced ad infinitum. Similarly, disc sales and rentals for years have been monitored by the Rentrak data company and others.

But as consumers shift to new channels like Netflix and Amazon, there are no generally available industrywide data on the digital performance of individual movies.

While the studios get some information, it isn’t widely shared with filmmakers, agencies or the public — and those who hold the data have a distinct advantage when it comes to making deals or deciding which movies to back, or what to spend on them.

By and large, public reports of digital performance are currently limited to a handful of films, or they simply report rankings without numbers. As of Aug. 27, for instance, Rentrak’s public listing showed “The Great Gatsby” to be the top performing on-demand film as reported by its participating services, but it offered no stats.

In an address at the Toronto International Film Festival last Tuesday, Liesl Copland, a digital media expert from the William Morris Endeavor Entertainment agency, told a small group of documentary filmmakers about this large, if barely visible, problem.

Movies tumble into “analytic black holes” when they are viewed on subscription services like Netflix, on-demand providers like the cable companies and iTunes, or an advertising-driven distributor like SnagFilms, she said.

“Reporting hasn’t evolved with the rapidly increasing viewership patterns,” Ms. Copland noted. “There is still no uniform reporting system that aggregates all data on, say, a film or documentary across all of its platforms.”

This wasn’t some data lover’s plea for more, more, more. A former Netflix executive who now helps to package and sell films for one of Hollywood’s largest agencies, Ms. Copland comes to her topic with an insider’s sense of both the problems and the possibilities in movie data-sharing. In her current role, she desperately wants to know more about the digital audience, whose behavior is now crucial to structuring deals and advising clients as to whether a particular project will fly.

“Richer content and more engaged audiences” she posited, might result from access to shared data — and, of course, more deal-making leverage for agents.

Digital distributors, she pointed out, may know infinitely more about their customers than studios could glean from their box-office analytics, even when bolstered by focus groups, exit polls, prerelease tracking interviews and close monitoring of social media.

It is no trick for a subscription or on-demand movie service to figure out what you like, when you like to watch it, how much you’re willing to pay and even whether you are — i.e., sneaking a peak at a film or show, though you’ve promised to watch with a mate.

In making decisions about whether to back series like “House of Cards,” Ms. Copland reminded her listeners, Netflix relied heavily on its enormous bank of largely private information.

In truth, on-demand distributors share a great deal of data with the studios from which they’ve purchased films. For the last several years, moreover, the studios, large and small, have been sharing title-by-title information about digital downloads with one another via an arrangement with Rentrak, which collects the data and circulates it among roughly 170 entertainment company clients.

The studios also receive reports with some information on the streaming of individual titles from the NPD Group, another data company. But detailed streaming data are not routinely shared with filmmakers, agencies or news organizations.

Bruce Goerlich, Rentrak’s chief research officer, noted that the wall around digital performance information was simply an extension of confidentiality strictures that have long surrounded video performance numbers.

“Measurement can equal monetization can equal a fight,” he said of the entertainment industry’s tendency to conceal data.

Mr. Goerlich, who spoke by telephone last week, seconded what Ronald J. Sanders, the president of worldwide home entertainment distribution at Warner Brothers, had to say about the public availability of box-office numbers (which are also compiled under an industry arrangement with Rentrak, then distributed to the press and others), compared with the digital numbers.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/business/media/movie-industry-wants-to-get-a-handle-on-the-digital-box-office.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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‘C.S.I.’ Gets a New Financial Partner

March 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Content Partners, a financial boutique that buys the future cash flow due stars and others from their screen and musical work, said on Wednesday that it had agreed to acquire the half of “C.S.I.” owned by an affiliate of Goldman Sachs in a deal that makes it a co-owner, with CBS, of the long-running series and its spinoffs.

Terms were not disclosed. But it was reported that Goldman had sought more than $400 million for the 50 percent interest.

Goldman’s GS Capital Partners investment arm had acquired the stake through its purchase, in 2007, of an interest in Alliance Atlantis, a Canadian entertainment company. Early this year, GS Capital Partners and others sold the Alliance Films unit to Canada’s Entertainment One.

As co-owner of the series, Content Partners will now own half of the production company revenue from old episodes, as they continue to be sold abroad or through home entertainment and other media, and from future episodes, as they are created.

When completed, the “C.S.I.” transaction will become the largest purchase for Content Partners. The company was created in 2006 by Steven H. Kram, a former William Morris Agency chief operating officer who is now the Content Partners chief executive, and Steven E. Blume, who was previously chief financial officer of the Brillstein-Grey management company. The entrepreneur Todd Wagner and the investor Paul Wachter are among its partners, and Mr. Wachter helped structure the current deal, Mr. Kram said.

“This proves the value of liquidity in an uncertain economic environment,” Mr. Kram added. He spoke recently by telephone of his company’s ability to use resources from its investors and lenders to buy an asset of the kind that is usually owned by large media companies. Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase provided financing for the purchase, he said.

Leslie Moonves, the president and chief executive of CBS, declined to comment.

For more than a decade, the “C.S.I.” franchise has been among the most profitable of television properties. According to the firm Media Metrics, the original “C.S.I.,” which is now in its 13th year on CBS, was the most-watched television show in the world last year, the fifth time in the last seven years that it has earned that ranking. And in one of those years, its spinoff, “C.S.I. Miami,” was the most-watched show. The worldwide audience for the original “C.S.I.” has frequently surpassed 70 million.

While “C.S.I. Miami” was canceled last year, the original and “C.S.I.: N.Y.” remain on the air. The latter is considered a show “on the bubble,” which means this could be its final season. But the original “C.S.I.” still generally wins its 10 p.m. Wednesday time period, and even after 13 years, averages 11.2 million viewers a week. A 14th season is all but certain.

In terms of historical value, the “C.S.I.” franchise, which includes 724 one-hour episodes, is almost surely at or near the top among television series, having generated billions in profits. That outcome makes it one of television’s cautionary tales because the show was originally the property of the Walt Disney Company, which walked away from ownership in the series when it landed at CBS. At the time, some Disney executives did not believe shows on CBS could attract the kind of young viewers needed to be successful.

CBS needed a last-minute partner to pay half the production costs before “C.S.I.” could go on the air. Alliance Atlantis became that company and gained a half share in one of the greatest gold mines in entertainment history.

By the nature of its business, Content Partners has been an unusually quiet operator in Hollywood. Mr. Kram declined to identify individuals who had sold interests to the company, or which titles were among the 119 movies and five television series to which it now holds rights.

Sellers to Content Partners, Mr. Kram said, receive cash from their work immediately, rather than waiting years for revenue to arrive from television, video and Internet sales. Mr. Kram and his partners profit when they bet correctly on the future value of entertainment.

The newly purchased stake, he said, does not include revenue participations that may be owed to the “C.S.I.” stars or creators, whose ranks include the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Such rights are still owned by actors or others and are not part of the production companies’ share of revenue.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/business/media/csi-gets-a-new-financial-partner.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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In Movie of Mine Rescue, Producer Looks to His Roots

July 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Fifty-four years later, Mr. Medavoy, who grew up in Santiago, is going back with a film project that will test his skills as a moviemaker and will close a personal loop in his life. It is a drama about the Copiapó mining accident, in which 33 Chilean miners were trapped deep underground for 69 days last year, finally to emerge alive.

Mr. Medavoy has acquired rights from the miners, who jointly sold their story in a deal brokered by William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.

Mr. Medavoy will also have rights to a book that is being written about the incident by Héctor Tobar, and is commissioning a script by Jose Rivera, whose screenplay for “The Motorcycle Diaries” was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. A Chilean businessman, Carlos E. Lavin, will help to finance the film — in Mr. Medavoy’s photo, Mr. Lavin is the jaunty guy kneeling on the viewer’s left.

But there is no Hollywood studio yet involved, at least in part because Mr. Medavoy — who as producer or executive has been involved with films as complicated as “Black Swan,” “Shutter Island” and “Amadeus” — has been around long enough to know that difficult stories, at least in their early stages, are best fostered outside the studio walls.

“I had the same reaction I think most people here do,” Mr. Medavoy said of his initial reluctance to tackle the miners’ tale, with its multiple characters, underground setting, and almost universally known outcome. “Do I really want to make a picture in which everybody knows the end?” he recalls asking himself.

On further consideration, though, Mr. Medavoy decided that some of his biggest mistakes occurred when he said no to a movie because the underlying events seemed too familiar. While he was a production executive at United Artists in the mid-1970s, for instance, Mr. Medavoy passed on a Watergate project being offered by the director Alan J. Pakula. Warner Brothers went on to make what became “All the President’s Men,” which won four Oscars in 1977.

The miners, seven of whom joined Mr. Medavoy for dinner in Beverly Hills recently, bring a plethora of personal stories that Mr. Rivera hopes will contribute to a film that satisfies both the audience and the survivors.

“From my personal experience in dealing with the miners, they all think this is a story of unity, this is a story of coming together,” said Guillermo Carey, a spokesman for the group. Mr. Carey, who spoke by telephone from Chile, said all of the miners had pooled their interest in the film rights, and would share equally in any proceeds. He declined to say how much they were being paid for an initial option on the rights, or how much they would receive if the movie is actually made.

Mr. Medavoy, meanwhile, is frankly eager to bring his experience in Chile and elsewhere to bear on a professional life full of movies that have been as fanciful as “RoboCop,” or as real as “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” but have only rarely been personal.

That changed last month, when Mr. Medavoy joined the Shanghai Film Group in announcing an intertwined feature film and six-hour mini-series set in Shanghai during World War II. The idea, he explained during an interview this month at his hillside home here, was to connect with his own roots as the Shanghai-born son of Russian Jews who emigrated to the Chinese city in the 1920s.

Mr. Medavoy lived in Shanghai, speaking Russian and Chinese, until 1947, when political turmoil finally persuaded his parents to leave for Chile. There, his father worked first as a car mechanic and then as a jewelry wholesaler, while his mother became a buyer for a department store.

As a camp counselor in his teens, Mr. Medavoy was helped by a camper’s father, an American, to get into the United States with both parents. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, he said, and in 1964, at the age of 23, he was hired in the mailroom at Universal Studios.

As the movie business emerged from a slump that was provoked by the boom in a competing medium, television, Mr. Medavoy matched its rising curve in successive jobs as casting director, agent and production executive at United Artists, Orion Pictures and Sony. A shake-up at Sony knocked him out of a perch as the top executive at its TriStar Pictures unit.

But he quickly established Phoenix Pictures, and proceeded to make movies that dealt with almost anything but the colorful backdrop to his own life — until the current projects, in Mr. Medavoy’s view, seemed to bring him full circle.

“Who am I? What am I doing here?” he remembers thinking.

“My Chinese identity, my Chilean identity, they led me to reach out.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 24, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated who has bought the rights to the miners’ story, and who owns the rights to a related book. Mike Medavoy has acquired the rights to both, not Phoenix Pictures.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e05cd910b0b83e78695bca93199b9a90

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