Every Summer, since 2010, I take the month of August as a break from all social media, and I take the latter two weeks of it and into Labor Day as a Holiday from email and any phone calls except from my immediate family (or emergencies). It’s always the most creative time of my life. I take all the time I would be spending on social media and put it into something creative, and I’ve learned that even in those times when I might be staring at the wall, or the floor of the subway (oh, to do that again), I’m allowing my brain to get the little vacations it needs in order to be more creative. I’m about to do this again, and I am suggesting some of you might want to experiment with doing the same. (Got no interest in that idea? Click here to skip to the news.)
The big media news this week was that Amazon might buy AMC, but the problem was – no one was sure whether that meant AMC Theaters or AMC Networks. For an entire day, Wall Street and Hollywood were prognosticating on what it meant for Amazon to buy one of the biggest theater chains, and then…whoops, it might be that a reporter made a mistake on whether it was the stock ticker of AMC (theaters) or AMCX (Networks) about which they were reporting. (!!!) What’s even crazier is that both moves would make perfect sense, and that shows just how seismic are the potential changes coming to the media industry – neither case would be surprising, and we all expect deals like this to happen almost daily as the economy rearranges the business.
I’ve been predicting that Amazon or Netflix would buy one of the major chains for awhile now, and in that same linked post, I also predicted that IFC – which is part of the AMC Network – would be acquired soon, too – and that was BC. If you look back at what happened after the 1918 flu, it was a lot of consolidation, with the big studios getting bigger and the little guys disappearing. I suspect we’ll see the same as a result of this pandemic, and in addition to one or both of these AMC’s getting bought, I predict a lot more mergers and acquisitions soon.
Some of this will be bad for indies, and consumers, but when it comes to the situation in the world of theatrical, I can see some silver linings. The first reaction to any consolidation is negative, because it would mean Amazon (or some other conglomerate, but Amazon is the biggest one) would be swallowing another part of the world. But while I’m not usually an Amazon-apologist, I don’t think their taking over AMC Theaters would be half-bad, and it might even be good for both makers and consumers of film. Sounds crazy, I know, but bear with me.
Last week, I ran my predictions for branded content, both here and in a guest post for Brand Storytelling. This week, I’ve got my predictions and wishes for indie/arthouse films in 2020. I say wishes, not just predictions, because as you’ll see below, some of these are clearly more about what I wish, or hope, will happen than what I predict with any certainty. Not that I hope all of my predictions come true either – in fact, I hope I am wrong about the more pessimistic predictions. I’ve been writing predictions for the film world since 2006, and while I haven’t kept a running total, I’ll admit that some of them have been dead-wrong, while more than a few have been pretty accurate, if sometimes off by a year. So I freely admit in advance that I might be wildly wrong. At any rate, here goes:
This week, the NYT reported thatFemale Artists made little progress in Museums, based on research from ArtNet. The study showed that while the perception is one of growing gender equity in the art world, the reality is that just 11% of museum acquisitions were of female artists in the last decade. And women artists make up just 2% of the global auction market.
Every brand is now a studio. Every day, a new brand enters
the fray of content creation. They all want to be filmmakers. And I obviously
think that’s a good idea in general, or I wouldn’t advise brands on how to do
it, smarter. But at a time of superabundance, when the last thing the world
needs is another movie, smart brands should be thinking more about curation
than creation.
Mind you, I didn’t say every brand. People trust certain
brands and not others, and curation only works when there’s trust
involved. But for those brands that have
built such trust and have the following to prove it – there’s a unique
opportunity, and a glaring gap in the market for smart curation.
As
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Joe Marchese wrote about curation and
the attention
economy for Redef recently, and pointed out: “…The brands, retailers, and
media companies that understand how to operate in the current Attention Economy
will become trusted curators and shape the future of culture
and commerce.” (emphasis mine).
