UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer urged Hollywood’s creative community to rethink their approach in order to help audiences rediscover their passion for film, TV and streaming.
“We have to encourage some of the best creators and the best writers to be a little bit more daring in the work they want to do because it’s gotten a bit repetitive,” he said during an appearance Thursday at the FT Business of Entertainment Summit. “The audience gets a little weary of the same thing over and over again.”
With studios and streamers “narrowing the target of what they want to make, there will be an opening of the aperture around those targets,” Zimmer said. That could then initiate “a new cycle of creativity and disruption in terms of what we’re trying to do.” Well-funded and purposeful independent entities could well arise in the next cycle of the industry’s evolution. (Not for nothing, he noted, does A24 have a $3 billion valuation.)
The streaming boom between roughly 2019 and 2021 saw huge spending outlays and created opportunities for a range of creatives, Zimmer said. At the same time, “It disrupted the financial system in such a way that studios became so focused on building their own streaming platforms and all of the attention and appetite and financial resources got diverted from a diverse plate of options into very narrow selections. … Everything people had already heard of was all they wanted to make movies about.”
For a typical executive at a studio or streaming outlet, he said, “‘You’re not thinking, ‘Oh my God, I saw this incredible show and I really think it could be a movie or a TV show,’ what you’re thinking is, ‘I want to be an executive on Spider-Man 5.’ There’s nothing wrong with that from a career point of view,” he clarified, but it has detracted from “the art of discovery and development and reintroducing a hunger for new ideas and, honestly, quality.”
Zimmer also registered some worry about artificial intelligence, noting a recent deal between Lionsgate and AI firm Runway to use the studio’s catalog to help train generative tools. The idea of a studio giving an outside company “tremendous access to all of their library” is “concerning. I’m an artist and I’ve made a Lionsgate movie and now suddenly that Lionsgate movie is going to be used to help build out a [large language model] for an AI company – am I going to be compensated for that? I’m sure that my friends at Lionsgate are going to be annoyed that I’m mentioning this, but that’s show business.”
When moderator Christopher Grimes told Zimmer the scant 20 minutes allotted for the session had expired, the exec replied, “That’s all the time we have? Is it true that the William Morris guys got 90 minutes? I just want to know. Just kidding.”
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