Donna Langley, Chairman, NBCUniversal Studio Group & Chief Content Officer, sees original movies as a key ingredient in Universal’s film slate, but applying “topspin” to familiar titles can also pay box office dividends.
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The longtime film executive, who was promoted last year to a larger role with TV and streaming oversight, shared her views of the business in an appearance at a conference in New York hosted by the Bank of America.
Asked whether it’s important to continue backing original film projects, she replied, “Well, this is a great paradox because the short answer is yes. I think what we’re seeing with the audience is that the pandemic taught them to stay home and watch streaming and we have to habituate them back into going to the movies.”
Moviegoers, she added, used to show up at multiplexes and then decide what to see. “Maybe you’d heard of one or two that you wanted to see. That’s no longer the case. It’s really destination viewing,” she said. “‘We’re gonna think ahead of time – Oppenheimer is opening, Barbie is opening, we’re going to that movie.'” She continued, “We do look at originality but then you, if you go, if it’s too original and it doesn’t seem familiar, then it’s harder to market and it’s harder to get people to sample it.”
NBCU, she said, strives for a blend of originals and franchises that she described as “familiar surprise.”
The recipe calls for taking “something that is familiar and you put a little topspin on it. An example of that is a competitor’s movie this year is Disney-Fox with, with Deadpool & Wolverine . Putting those two characters together, gives everybody a little of what they want, they understand what it is. There’s a value proposition there, but putting them together, you haven’t seen that before.
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Langley was asked about the outlook for the theatrical business, which is down 16% from last year’s pace due to the impact from the dual strikes but also off 30% from its 2019, pre-Covid level.
“The challenges in the headwinds are clear and obvious,” she said. “The habituation that we all had as, as movie goers has, you know, has dissipated. I do believe that volume in the marketplace gets that back. But to what extent is really the big question, I can, you know, say that, you know, because we want to be very sort of eyes wide open about our challenges and not Pollyanna-ish about it at all.”
At NBCU, she said, “We’re sort of mapping our business to the assumption that we are not coming back to 2019 levels that will, you know, will, will sort of stay in the range that we’ve been in, you know, ’22/’23. I do think ’24 is an anomalous year, that the impact of the strikes cannot be overstated. It was devastating because again, we, we just didn’t have the volume that is required for the audience to feel like there’s something worth showing up to see, you know, so they just get out of the habit.”
Despite that uneven output, she said, there have been “some very good signs this summer with our own movies with Minions and Twisters and with, with Disney-Fox, with Wolverine & Deadpool and Inside Out 2 .
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