A year and a half ago, Time Studios had already cemented itself as a cornerstone of the media company’s portfolio. Time CEO Jessica Sibley told The Hollywood Reporter at the time that it was bringing in about 25 percent of the company’s revenue, or about $100 million since launch.
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Since then, Hollywood budgets have been reoriented in the wake of the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and Time Studios itself turned to Dave O’Connor , the former co-CEO of Majordomo Media, to be its new president following the exit of Ian Orefice.
In his first interview since taking over Time Studios last year, O’Connor says that he has reorganized the division, which now has 18 employees and nine film and TV projects in various stages of development. When he joined the company, there were different executives tasked with overseeing genres like kids, sports, and scripted. Now it is one team, trying to adapt to a market where intrest in both scripted and unscripted content has cooled.
“It made a lot of sense when it was set that that way to push hard into all those directions simultaneously given the conditions that I joined in, which were very different,” O’Connor says, speaking to THR in Time ‘s office overlooking New York’s Bryant Park. “It felt intuitively both from a market response and from my personal desire on how to how I like to work, that bringing the team together into a more nimble unit where everybody was marching towards the same goal was important. We’ve done restructuring to make that happen.”
Among other changes, Time has folded its branded content division, Red Border by Time, into Time Studios, with hopes of working with brands to break into original programming.
“I think branded content is in many ways, kind of the bridge between big Time and Time Studios,” O’Connor says. “Time has been an advertising platform for over 100 years. And as we’ve seen the waters shift here, I think we’ve noticed more and more brands moving into longer-form entertainment and different versions and verticals of entertainment. We think that’s going to increase over time.”
It also means that Time Studios is going to spend more time leaning into what O’Connor calls its “core”: “Our base has always been premium, high end documentary projects, and that’s going to continue to be the strength of this company for the foreseeable future,” he says. “Like I think we can do a lot of things adjacent to that to expand outside of it. But we have to protect that core and protect it in terms of how we resource our time and energy to continue to deliver to the market.”
One of those “core” projects debuts on Netflix today. Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam , chronicles Lou Pearlman, who “created the biggest boy bands of the ’90s — and one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history,” per the logline.
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“That’s a project that I think speaks to this sort of Time 100-esque big name celebrity,” O’Connor says. “A lot of great music, a nostalgia bomb of recent past and an element of really interesting, true scam that runs at the core of it. So I think that project is one of those unique projects where it scratches off a lot of the boxes that buyers are looking for.”
Indeed, celebrity, fame and the undercurrents of those worlds are at the heart of a number of Time Studios projects. And the studio benefits from the relationship with Time and its franchises like the Time 100 and Person of the Year, which when it comes to its subjects “largely gives them a fair shake, which builds some trust,” O’Connor says.
“If I drew a broader conclusion from it, it was that about 80 percent of our revenue historically has come from the names of people that you would see on the Time 100 list or the Time 100 Next, or some extension of that,” O’Connor adds. “And it led me to think like, okay, that’s one of the verticals that we know works in the marketplace right now. Big name celebrities with great access, telling a unique story in a very different way. And when you look at our successes from the past, that’s been a huge driver for us.”
And while the overall market may have cooled, there is still demand for projects that feature those big names. Two years ago, Time Studios began production on a documentary following Megan Thee Stallion, and the company says that it has been sold to a major streamer for a fall debut.
“We’re trying to tell these stories that are sort of provocative, poppy, big, broad and fun, but still have this, this real exploratory journalism at the core of it,” O’Connor says. “And that’s how I think we can meet those market demands.”
The current market has also benefitted Time Studios in that it means “there’s never been as much talent in the freelance pool as there is currently,” O’Connor says.
“And when you are smaller and more nimble, it allows you to make deals with those key talented people, whether they’re filmmakers, directors, editors, producers who are running their own small enterprises to kind of scale up for a particular project and do deals where everybody has an opportunity to still succeed,” he adds. “When you’re bigger, it makes less economic sense for you to make those kinds of deals because you need to funnel everything through your systems and make sure everybody’s working on everything.”
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