Allow me to introduce my client, the devil. I'll be representing him in the following few bullet points. Mainly as an intellectual exercise, but hopefully, a wo

Allow me to introduce my client, the devil. I'll be representing him in the following few bullet points. Mainly as an intellectual exercise, but hopefully, a worthwhile exercise. - First: This is a very thoughtful and well-written article, and it raises some very valid points. Sequelmania is a creatively bankrupt strategy in the long run. (That being said, I'm a big fan of what Marvel has been able to do with its franchises, and I'm not convinced that its films are the sort of anti-creative schlock it's become trendy to describe them as. Full disclosure: a good friend is fairly high up the food chain at Marvel, and he's a brilliant and awesome exec.) - Second: It's also a monetarily lucrative strategy. More important, it's a de-risking strategy. One sees the same pattern in the video games industry, where the decision to churn out Call of Duty 327.5 is a no-brainer, destined to reap at least a billion dollars in revenue, and the decision to make a daring, idiosyncratic, artful, niche game is liable to get a studio head fired. - Third: In the good old days, studios were a total mess. They took wild swings in profitability, their shareholders were often fleeced, and their executives lived high on the hog. This was generally accepted as the cost of doing business in a creatively driven industry. Today, not too much has changed: but the execs currently in power are much more adept at managing brands and franchises. They're also better businesspeople (with some notable exceptions). This is actually a good thing, if you're a shareholder in a movie studio. - Fourth: About those shareholders. Over the last 20-odd years, and especially over the last decade, Hollywood has received more and more investment capital from hedge funds and i-banks. What do finance guys want to see? For one thing, the books. "Hollywood accounting" is actually on the wane, and that's a good thing. They also want to see results. ROI. Predictable ROI, if at all possible. This goal often stands at odds with free-reined creativity and risk-taking, with plenty of the unfortunate consequences that the author points out. But it also forces studios to think more like businesses, and less like social clubs. Executives should be held accountable for their financial results, not their popularity at Soho House. - Fifth: The indie film, the risky film, the daringly trashy film, and the eccentric film are far from dead. Big studios aren't making them anymore, but as means of production and distribution continue to democratize, especially at the small-time level, you'll see more and more true indies step in to fill this gap in the market. My off-the-cuff prediction: big studios double down on the franchise business—which, when you think about it, is probably what a "big" studio should be focusing on. Little and mid-sized players, in addition to foreign players, focus on the niche and arthouse fare. Globalization, plus interesting new distribution technology, allows these players to punch above their weight as never before. - Sixth: By FAR the best combination creative/business executive Hollywood has had in my lifetime was Michael Eisner. This guy gets a lot of shit for the whole Michael Ovitz debacle at Disney, and it's tarnished his legacy considerably. But he almost singlehandedly revitalized and rebuilt the Disney machine. Disney is the Apple of the movie business, and he was (kinda sorta) its Steve Jobs. (Steve Jobs himself was later involved in Disney, as we know.) He had his misses, as well as his hits. But he's the sort of exec Hollywood needs more of, not less. Its development and production aspects should be run by creative executives, and its overall business units should be run by true business executives. Whenever the twain shall meet--very rarely--these people should run the shop. I'd love to say that Hollywood selects for combination creative-business people, but it doesn't. It selects for good politicians on the creative side, and good bean-counters on the business side. It needs to rethink its talent-cultivation pipeline, and I'd be lying if I said I knew where to begin.