Hang out long enough in LA, and you could be forgiven for thinking that Hollywood is an approximation of hell – people without talent chasing people with money without heart. Fortunately, it also happens to be a highly efficient machine for the creation and exploitation of
entertainment franchises. But as many are finding out the hard way – the Web, like love, changes everything. And the film industry will be no exception.
This is the way it works. For all their glitz and glamour, Hollywood Studios are just financial clearing houses for cash generated from the rights exploitation of blockbuster movies. Although box office receipts are an important source of revenue, theatre exhibition is really only a big advertisement for the money that Studios stand to make in downstream revenues from DVD retail, rental, Pay TV, and the sale of film related merchandise. As a Studio Mogul, you can afford to spend a fortune on marketing leading up to your box office opening, because you are powering up a locomotive which will drag along a whole range of related revenue opportunities behind it. In other words, the tail wags the dog.
Not surprisingly, your average Studio Suit’s view of the future deviates little from their current reality. For the incumbent optimist, the Web will be nothing more than a glorified pay per view channel. That is a bit like saying that computers are just calculators with extra memory. And as the music industry has already discovered to their detriment, when technology collides with entertainment, the result is unlikely to be business as usual.
So what are the alternatives? I caught up recently with Joi Ito in Tokyo and we chatted about his latest passion – World of Warcraft – and the significance of online multiplayer games. Joi’s perspective is that the blockbusters of the future won’t be feature films, but rather platforms that neatly balance the high production values of Studio style content with the engaging realism of user generated material.
The entertainment platform theory is an exciting one. The current Hollywood model is about pushing audiences through a series of events (box office release, DVD release, Pay per view) which combined with merchandising sales add up to a total spend per viewer. Sure, when the franchise is Lord of Rings, and you have three chart topping films on your hands – that is great news for the bean counters. But compare that to the Blizzard business model – nearly 4 million subscribers paying $15 a month to play in a Tolkien style world every day. Unlike a movie, where you have to worry about marketing each release independently, with a multiplayer game universe you just need to make sure that you keep your players happy with new engaging material.
Still – keeping up with the fans is harder than it looks. There are enough World of Warcraft players reaching such high experience levels that they are now running out of things to do. Which is why Blizzard are taking a closer look at letting the community self-generate content and activities. The best examples of self generating communities are games like Second Life, backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, which are entirely user driven. Filled with community designed architecture, clubs and clothing – the result is a kind of kooky emergent chaos in which users truly make their own fun.
Platform entertainment products are likely to be somewhere in between the highly structured action of World of Warcraft and the anarchical freedom of Second Life. Even though users will ultimately contribute much of the in world content, expensive content production costs will still be incurred in the creation of the visual environment, video sequences, and the writing of the world back story. However that is just the starting point.
Multiplayer games are a good but not complete analogy for how entertainment platforms might work. For the viral spread of the product, it has to be very clear how users should interact with the franchise. Arguable some of the best examples of transparent interaction models can be found in anime platforms such as Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh.
The premise of a young boy solving an ancient Egyptian puzzle that spawns a trading card game in which the illustrated monsters come alive may sound strange, but the merchandising logic is flawless. With Yu-Gi-Oh, watching the movie and playing the card game are inextricably linked. Whereas Pokemon was arguably just about selling lots of small furry toys, Yu-Gi-Oh has created a relatively sophisticated game universe. The model is instructive. Instead of making a movie and then figuring out how to merchandise it later, the entertainment platforms of the future like their anime ancestors will seamlessly integrate the experience of content and interaction.
Of course, there will always be a role for linear narratives. Genre and franchise type films (science fiction, comic book adaptations, action) translate well to the platform model, but romantic comedies and character dramas are likely to continue being produced in the traditional style. For these titles, the Web will still play a transforming role. Once they swallow the bitter pill of DRM ambiguity, studios will realise that online distribution will allow them to open up their back catalogue, deliver programming on demand and thus free themselves of Walmart’s tyranny over retail merchandising.
It is still far from clear how the mash up between Hollywood and Silicon Valley is going to play out. Certainly, there are lots of web infrastructure style services to handle secure distribution, community management and content creation yet to be invented and funded before we get too far along the track. But it will only take a digital Blair Witch or two to trigger California’s favourite pastime. Gold rush.
