IP Picks🔎: A Coen Brothers-esque Hollywood Noir
âž• The first Native American Medal of Honor winner and a prep school #MeToo scandal
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
I want to flag a trio of articles from The Ankler and its extended universe this week that were really illuminating on the state of the business. If you haven't checked them out, they're worth a read.
Ashley Cullins' Dealmakers column on first-looks is an excellent survey on the art of the deal. (It follows a piece she wrote a few weeks ago on overall deals.) It's chock full of great information: A rundown on who is set up where; the pros and cons of first-looks vs. overalls; and a sense of the range of money being offered. It's packed with the kind of granular detail that geeks like us love.
Speaking of granular detail, no one interprets the fine print better than The Ankler’s data columnist Entertainment Strategy Guy. On his own Substack, his streaming-ratings reports are also appointment reading. This week's edition features a discussion that I've been thinking about a lot recently as I put together The Optionist: Binge vs. weekly releases. This spring has given us several successes (and misses) for each model. ESG's deep dive into this topic provides a lot of food for thought about which kinds of shows are bingeable and which do well with a rollout every seven days. I like the one-size-doesn't-fit-all approach. Lately I've been thinking more and more about the value of a weekly rollout for a show — the way it helps create sustained interest and builds buzz and audience as it did with Shogun. There’s a lot of other useful data as well — theatrical and streaming numbers, plus the biggest flop of May (which isn't necessarily the one you think) and more.
Another great data dive came courtesy of Sean McNulty's Wakeup column, where he analyzes the performance of Netflix’s film slate for 2023. (I know we're halfway into 2024, but Netflix released the data just before a somewhat rainy Memorial Day weekend on the East Coast and Sean needed something to do!) He breaks it all down by categories — originals, animated, international, prestige, the Sony theatricals that debut on the service, Christmas and library titles. He also gives numbers for the top performers and looks at the tail for older releases. There's a lot to absorb here and something for everyone's specific interests.
A few nuggets that caught my attention: The value of old-school theatrical marketing over an algorithm, the mixed performance of awards-bait prestige pictures, and the numbers on older Netflix originals (2021's Red Notice, for example, was the top performer in the library category).
I always joke that the meanest thing that one of my friends from my academic days said about me was that I loved ‘process,’ because I always pepper people with questions about how stuff works. I always considered it a backhanded compliment. (He swears it wasn't). But the truth is I do love process. We never have enough data, and these pieces are stuffed with information and the kind of hard numbers that can really help you understand the biz.
Onto this week’s picks:
A WWII drama about the first Native American sailor to win the Medal of Honor
A lighthearted whodunit about a cad, a murdered bride and the three jilted women suspected of knocking her off
An offbeat murder mystery set on the margins of Hollywood about a fake psychic accused of murder
A rom-com that reworks Jane Austen in modern Delhi and could be an Indian Crazy Rich Asians
A dark drama about a popular prep-school teacher accused of sexually abusing his female students