A fantastic, wide-ranging interview in honor of Columbia Pictures’ centennial! I was lucky to learn most of these lessons in my years at Columbia (I was a company historian at the time, among other Communications tasks that required me to understand the breadth of our corporate operations/strategies), and from many of the same people as Mr. Rothman. Here are two, great takeaways from his conversation with Deadline’s Mike Fleming, Jr: “I’m a student of Hollywood history, and you’re right, audiences affections have always gone in large trends. I mean, Columbia is 100 years old, but we’re on the old MGM lot. For 20 years, the MGM musical was a success simply because it was that. And then it came a point where it was not a success simply because it was an MGM musical. Those trends have always continued. The trends in audience affection we’ve had the last 15 or 20 years has been the great IP era, where everything is a movie of something else. A movie of a comic book, a movie of a video game, a movie of a toy. And yet most of the movies that really register and really move the culture are movies. They’re not really movies of something. My instinct about the audience is that last year, I’m talking about 2023 now, 24 of the 25 top movies were all IP based movies. I think three or four years from now, that is not going to be true. It will be maybe half. I think we’re exiting the era of the tyranny of IP, if I may coin a phrase. Having said that, our biggest movies this year will be IP and the biggest movies in the business will be IP. Still in all, I think that the audience is hungry. Hungry for new, hungry for originality, and you’re going to see more and more of fresh experiences that break through. At Sony, we’re certainly making that bet. Now, I believe that for those to succeed, they have to be great. And it’s only great filmmakers who make great movies. And so we have right now probably the largest number of really top directors making films for us than we’ve had at any one time in a studio maybe ever.” — Tom Rothman AND: “The trick, as I have said before to you Mike, is to be creatively reckless, but fiscally prudent at the same time. Fiscal discipline is often misunderstood — employed appropriately, it’s a creative tool, as much as a financial one.” — Tom Rothman #entertainment #movies #film #storytelling #columbiapictures100 #history #trends #audience #evolution #cycles #filmmaking
An incredibly insightful interview with Tom Rothman, CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, as he discusses the centenary of Columbia Pictures, new movements in streaming, and bringing young audiences back to cinemas. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gKPsMvce #sonypicturesentertainment #sonypicsemployee 🌈 #columbiapictures
