Times are tough for our industry, and getting tougher. But this studio, home to beloved, timeless stories for over a century, won’t fold while I’m CEO. With a few strategic innovations, we will start the next chapter stronger than ever, ready for any challenge. Except for the challenge of releasing good movies.
I have bold plans for this company, like changing the name of our streaming service, green-lighting so many spin-offs that even I can’t keep track of them, making our theme parks more expensive and difficult to navigate, and inflating share price by announcing confusing, honestly illogical mergers. Also, I recently found out about video games, and they sound very promising. I’m open to novel revenue generators and blue sky ideation—anything to avoid making a good movie.
Movies are hard. There are a lot of lights, I think, and sometimes men with belts operating cranes? I don’t even know where you get a crane. So how about this: instead of releasing something fresh to reinvigorate a franchise everyone’s gotten sick of, I’ll say that previous, more interesting work is now part of our thing. It’s called optimizing. I haven’t read a script in six years.
I’ll do whatever it takes to stay competitive. I will bravely lay off staff from under-utilized departments, even if it turns out later we really could have used them. I will valiantly throw our writers under the bus to mollify conservatives who’ve been threatening toothless boycotts since the ’90s. If there’s one thing I’ve got in spades, it’s courage; you’ve gotta admit it takes balls to be a movie studio CEO who blatantly refuses to put out a good movie.
I don’t hate filmmakers. I love the people who do the work that pays for my yacht. (The “Yachta Yachta Yachta”? My idea. And they say MBAs aren’t creative.) What I hate is movies themselves. So even after you make one, I might chuck it for a tax write-off without even watching it. And don’t think that because your project “already came out” and “was good,” I won’t write that off too. (Unless everyone gets mad; I don’t really know what I’m doing.) We’ll never replicate the Golden Age of Hollywood, so why try? Instead, let’s kick off the Golden Era of Borderline Fraud.
Complain if you want. My job isn’t to make everyone happy; my job is to oversee an army of bitchy fake Twitter accounts run by my underpaid staff.
(And have you noticed that in movies, the CEO characters are always weirdly callous and out of touch? It’s insulting enough to make me never greenlight anything but tired rehashes of well-worn IP with bloated budgets.)
The business is just too risky. When a studio puts out a solid, original movie, it might not make a billion dollars the first weekend, and I’m certain it won’t recoup later on.
Oh, it can? It can actually make so much money?
Right, sure, okay, but it’s way easier to shuffle the same two hundred or so popular titles from platform to platform to create the illusion of continual output, like the thing where a guy puts a card under one of three cups and moves the cups around until you can’t tell which cup has the card under it and which cup you’re still subscribed to because your mom uses it to watch Suits.
My plan may be unpopular, short-sighted, inimical to art itself, but the bottom line is, none of that matters as long as it works. So please disregard the fact that it does not.