Should Apple buy Disney? Plus: Apple's $1B blockbuster bet and more with Lon Harris | E1831

0:00I don't even know how some of these budgets are getting as high. like Secret Invasion, that Marvel show that didn't even look very good. People are saying it costs over$200 million to make. It's getting crazy. I mean, that's the number one thing. All of these budgets need to come down. You can't make that much on these kinds of projects. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Masterworks is the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class. Twist listeners can skip the waitlist by going to masterworks.com slash twist. Codecademy. Build the future you want to see with Codecademy.

0:39Codecademy Pro helps you learn everything you'll need to shape what comes next in the tech space. Try it free for 14 days at codecademy.com slash twist. And LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. It's been a while, but Lon Harris is back. We're doing this week in streaming again. There's so much going on in the streaming world. And you know what? Always we talk about the technology behind this. We talk about the media. We've really widened the discussion out to talk about technology in relation to entertainment.

1:22So consider this your entertainment technology media episode. altogether altogether and then also at the end of the show lon and i tend to uh trade recommendations and you know everybody's always looking for a good show so at the end of the show we'll trade some recommendations but let's get right into it uh i know apple has i think done a really great job in terms of building content i thought this was going to be a disaster for them but it seems like they've done a pretty good job and there's rumors they're going to buy disney that rumor's been out there since you know steve jobs sold pixar and now with i your back there's renewed focus on maybe espn getting spun out and the nfl nba maybe apple investing in it and it becoming a standalone company and who knows with lena khan in charge they're going to fight every sale but i just want to ask you up front before we get into apple in detail what would that look like if apple to you owned disney would that be good for the creative community would that be good for consumers would that be bad have you given it thought of a company like apple owning a company with the ip of disney i mean what we've seen is fewer players when these companies consolidate it doesn't it doesn't usually work out the best for those of us uh like viewers and fans i mean If you look at Warner Brothers Discovery being the most recent example, you see a lot of layoffs when these groups combine.

2:50You see a lot of the new company deciding it doesn't really need to focus on things that the old company was focusing on. So Cartoon Network kind of gets shelved and all of these things. Batgirl isn't going to come out anymore. And so I think there would probably be more stuff like that. having said that um i think apple has been doing a really good job in terms of curating its streaming content there's there's not as much content that goes out on apple tv plus as most of these other big platforms but the quality level the consistency level has been a lot higher so what do you attribute that to what do you attribute apple being good at this why are they good at it is because they don't care about making money, where they just have a good philosophical approach to making quality products?

3:41What do you think? I think it's that. I think Apple's approach to tech, to hardware, to everything has always kind of mirrored old school Hollywood's approach, where it's a focus on quality, it's a focus on individual products, and it's a holistic kind of thinking, not just thinking about here's the specs, here's the specs, here's how we're going to promote it. Here's what celebrities are going to be in the ad. Here's how the keynote's going to sound. It's looking at it from all these angles. It's thinking about it in terms of the branding, in terms of the marketing, all that's baked in from the very beginning.

4:14And I think that is also a good way to approach films and TV shows and that kind of content, taking this very specific, very hands-on approach really thinking about it right thoughtful and long term that they're coming in they're not going to make like let's make one season of foundation this big epic isaac asimov show we'll make eight episodes and then see where we are they came in and said like we're going to dedicate ourselves to this for three four seasons we're going to give david goyer a really long time to figure this out which is the old hollywood approach and or you have an orator you had somebody like the kid stays in the picture um um bob evans and you you put an orctor in there who knew what art was and had a point of view and then you see where they take it right and the same thing with the pixar guy who got ousted but yeah and uh yeah and uh yeah and foundation season one it didn't necessarily strike a core people didn't really discover it it was one of those like they didn't spend as much as amazon spent they only spent 60 million on that first season instead of 120 plus million got it but by season two starting to get some critical acclaim i saw more people talk about it this year i did i forgot that it was there my wife wanted to watch it was another one of these uh streaming uh couples issue where she wanted to watch it i'm on a plane i watched the first episode i'm like this is really interesting it's terrific and then i really like myself you know and this is the problem see you're lucky because you're single i think i don't know if you're still single ladies it might be elon might be available swipe right uh in raya if you see him there but uh if you want a really great uh uh sweet sincere hard-working guy that is your lon harris ladies you're too kind you're too kind well you know if you i mean also a guy might take you to see a really intellectual movie and uh i just want to you know uh remind me uh past lives and it's going to be one of my recommendations at the end but i want to talk about past lives i haven't actually seen that yet i gotta i gotta get around to that yeah okay so here this is super timely because you and i are both both i would say marty scorsese is in both of our top three to five directors oh yeah i already have my tickets for this one i'm going on thursday uh yeah i'm gonna be traveling internationally so i won't be able to see it but i cannot wait to see killers of the flower moon martin scorsese uh scorsese leonardo dicapria robert de niro uh the kid from breaking bad uh jesse flemmons lily gladstone big cast big cast big cast and um this is supposedly um a great film very critically acclaimed very very positive yeah uh i'm excited i'm excited to see it's a real history like a fascinating true story i think most people don't know which is amazing and i hear it's a little violent which you know sometimes happens in his films but um i hear a very important film as well there's a little bit of uh you know uh a little bit of importance to the film i think to some folks and it's something that you know will make people discuss but would that film have been made by anybody other than apple and then how do you think apple looks at backing because this was backed by apple correct yes and so it's in theaters first and then right it goes to apple apple's doing the strategy where they're they're opening the films theatrically for a few weeks and then like a month later they'll come to tv plus and the the old school like in the early days of streaming there was this zero-sum kind of approach like well wherever the movie goes first that's where everybody's going to watch it and then it's useless on every other platform i think the i think bootlegging was very at the top of everybody's mind they were like just like piracy if the movie gets pirated then nobody cares when we bring it out officially and they were there was a lot of fear about that and what we've now seen is i don't really think that's true in fact the more places something is available the more heat and buzz it can build up we've seen this happen over and over again we're actually opening in theaters makes people want to see a movie more when it comes out and streaming yes it increases the value because the the movie the theatrical run was a was marketing for when the movie pops up on streaming and who still goes to movie theaters who still goes to movie theaters like like younger people hardcore fans like a smaller right and and and we we know they are vocal in their group chats they're vocal on social media they're the ones like you and i who their friends come to and say what should i watch next it's yeah it's it's exactly what we're talking about like it's buzz it's heat it's it's now it's in the discourse and people are talking about it and the more people are talking about something the more people want to see it and that's just so true that that outweighs any kind of platform exclusivity at least from what we've seen the so this is the anti-netflix approach to be clear right it it's the anti-everybody approach it's it's all of that stuff about only you can only see this on pecan it's only on netflix that that ended up being not there's a one great example uh so hbo warner brothers discovery a few months ago zazlav made a ton more enemies he he infamously general zazlav he infamously announced we're gonna we're gonna keep hbo shows on max but we're also gonna start licensing them out to other platforms and people at hbo were very upset they were like this is the whole thing we can't let hbo that's our that's our bread and butter that's our life foundation we can't let hbo shows be viewable anywhere it's not tv it's hbo that was the whole thing and what ended up happening ballers and insecure they're now on netflix you can go watch those on netflix and more people went back and started streaming them on max after they popped up on netflix so netflix is marketing hbo max right people saw ballers on netflix started tweeting about going back and watching ballers and then people who had max were like hey you know what i'm gonna watch ballers and so it spiked on both platforms We saw as well with Suits.

10:16Suits had always been available on Netflix, but when it popped up on Peacock as well and more people started watching it. Yes, everybody's going crazy for Suits. Isn't that show off the air? And it's been off the air for a while. That's a 10-year-old USA Network legal drama. When it was on TV, nobody cared. So that one, there's a second issue, which is Meghan Markle. Meghan Markle was just a TV star when Suits was first on TV. Now Meghan Markle is royalty and much more famous. And so people are curious to go back. But I don't think you can entirely attribute it to that. I think people just didn't know about suits and then they discovered it because it was readily available.

10:52What I love about Apple's approach to Apple TV Plus is I think that they don't care on the margins if this makes any money or not. They care if it's incredibly high quality and it speaks to their audience. apple's revenue um is in 2022 was five times greater than the revenue of the entire film industry apple revenue last year 394 billion dollars total global film industry revenue global global with a g 77 billion apple generated 394 billion in revenue on about 100 billion in profits in other words the profits at apple are greater than the sum of the global film that includes bollywood that includes china that includes all that so um if apple does spend a billion dollars on these theatrical releases etc that's about one percent of its annual profits 25 basis points of its annual revenue that is a no-brainer for them to do even two or three percent if it brings the halo effect and keep people on their devices like iMessage does and now Apple TV is included with every phone or is that a do you have to pay for it because I pay for it I believe you get like six months free every time you buy a new Apple hardware item so if I get an iPhone this year I get the next three or six months free and then I might have to start paying my five or six dollars a month but i think at that point they i have a bundle i don't know what's called apple one or whatever the bundle is i think it is called apple one i have apple one because now i have three daughters as you know three wonderful daughters and then i have my wife i just did it for storage so that all their devices i could share the storage on it but then it was like oh you could have news and arcade and apple plus and music arcade is a good one yeah and arcade's a great one for the kids because it has non-ad non-mana begging for money games which is great for a parent also news is kind of nice to have on the margins and music is delightful to have um and obviously you know apple tv and then we buy some new device but i don't know if they credit you for it i don't care but apple should make it do i think because you're you're all of those payments are happening on your apple id it's all one account so i think that yeah they just give you if you're paying for it you just get three months of it for free and if you weren't paying for it you can use your apple id to log in for three months or however long the period it would be great if they just made it so any apple device they know it's an apple hardware device even if you got it a hand-me-down could just get into apple tv plus for x number of hours per year you just got a certain amount of research they're already playing around with that because they're they've got this like major league soccer pass and they're thinking about doing more sports like formula one is a big one right now there's a big maybe apple's going to jump in in 2025 and grab those F1 rights.

13:49And so those they're going to make some of the content free for everybody, and then some of it behind the paywall. Listen, public markets can be volatile. Don't I know that Uber shares 15 Oh, 60. That is why many people like to diversify their assets to be safe. And if you're looking for a unique asset class to diversify with, hey, what should you do? Take a look at blue chip art I have I have some investments in art. And I do those investments through masterworks. Blue chip art has historically been uncorrelated with the stock market. Okay, and Bloomberg reported that as equities dipped last year, our prices and expenditures actually increase.

14:29Very interesting. With masterworks, you can invest in fine art without needing millions of dollars and you don't need to know anything. They do all the work, they research it. Basically, they've securitized blue chip pieces of art and then they sell shares to investors like us. Every painting masterworks has sold to date has delivered a positive return to investors including annualized net returns of 10 17 and even 35 % this year according to masterworks and they just completed their 16th exit a few weeks ago from a kusama piece ah very nicely done shares of each offering all limited but twist listeners get special access and they get to skip the waitlist so go to masterworks.com slash twist that's masterworks.com slash twist to skip the waitlist past performance doesn't guarantee future results see important disclosures at masterworks.com slash cd talk to me about the budget for killers i'm just curious like what this film would have cost if apple wasn't doing it and if apple wasn't in market who would have paid this i mean is this higher than you think yeah i think one of the brothers would have spent or whoever scorsese I doubt anybody's going to kick Scorsese to the curb and say, we're not interested just because his movies are you're all you're automatically in the award season talk and festival discussions just because of his name.

15:52It's the budget. I think if he wasn't working with a prestige player like Netflix or Apple, he might have to make more concessions in terms of the budget. Like the Irishman famously got pushed way over budget because of all the digital de-aging stuff they were doing on De Niro and all those scenes. that adds up over the course of a three plus hour movie this one you know it's period a lot of location work you gotta you know dicaprio alone is 25 million right off the top and then he's getting the chunk of the back end too so yeah you know these these costs add up and i definitely think that if he was making a more conventional studio movie he'd have to probably think about those margins more than he does he could just call tim cook and say hey i need 20 more million I mean, Wolf of Wall Street, just by comparison, $100 million in 2013, which is about$130 million in today's dollars a decade later.

16:48Yeah. And he did The Irishman with Netflix last time, and that had the de-aging and everything. So that is interesting. He used the, I think it was the Singaporean, that very famous brouhaha where the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund backed Wolf of Wall Street, but it might have stolen money or something. Yes. that's why dicaprio had to like uh yeah he testified at that at that trial at that celebrity irishman 159 million so if you look at that 130 and um you know today's dollars 160 and now i think 250 with killers of the flower moon probably i mean we are also coming out of an era where those budgets got massively inflated i i don't i don't even know how some of these budgets are getting as high like secret invasion that that marvel show that didn't even look very good people are saying it costs over 200 million to make like yeah it's it's getting crazy i mean that's the number one thing all of these budgets need to come down and you can't make that much on these these kinds of projects you need to bring the budget somewhere down and it was the malaysian sorry it was malaysian so malaysian right the malaysian singaporeans would have never fallen for the singaporeans got a pretty serious no i'm dead serious singapore is a very hardcore uh country when it comes to capital allocation i think that they have a very sophisticated group they probably wouldn't have uh gotten scammed um yeah but apparently malaysians did so netflix is not doing this with their movies they want everybody to get right to the you know yeah so ted sarandos very specifically has said like we don't want people to watch our movies on in theaters we want them to watch it on netflix so they're if they're opening things in theaters at all it's like it's a stunt or it's just to get attention or it's for an award qualifying run qualify they don't they don't want people to pay and go see movies conventionally in theaters in fact if you think about it ted serrata didn't say this out loud but if you think about it it benefits netflix if movie theaters go out of business like yeah whereas a lot of these legacy entertainment companies your disney's your sony's you they warner brothers discovery they need movie theaters amc theaters is a vital link between them and their audience but if you're apple if you're net especially if you're netflix if you're amazon it benefits you if those movie theaters go away forever the trend of people wanting to watch it on their phone wanting to watch it on their ipad wanting to watch it on their flat panel which are now it's unbelievable every time i buy a flat panel tv i have like this cognitive dissonance because i'm like i paid two thousand dollars for that previous tv and now i'm paying 800 for one that's 10 times better than twice as good as the last one i feel like an idiot now i gotta throw away it went from throwing away or gifting a four thousand dollar tv to a two thousand to a thousand and now you replace it and you're like yeah you can replace it for 800 with something much better and i'm just like yeah i just i hate the um consumption trend of it but i love the fact that it's so cheap to have something epic now i don't even know if you could spend five thousand dollars on a flat panel tv now i think you need to get into those like foldable 8k like they're still at ces every year you could go see the big new tvs but i think we've already reached the point where it's about as good as your eyeballs can see like we're we're at a point of clarity and brightness where i don't know how much better it could even get let me ask you a question you and i have been talking about the sequel nonsense and how literally like the last couple of sequel things are just not either not worth watching where the audience has burned out on it they've obviously gotten burned out on the marvel series they did too many there's still interest it's just it doesn't have that oh i gotta see this opening weekend in the theater we've trained people like look if you hang out disney plus all those marvel movies are going to end up there eventually maybe you could wait to see blue beetle flash everything is coming up like not even covering their budgets now yeah transformers didn't do that well this year indiana jones was a disappointment that mission impossible movie was kind of a disappointment which is crazy but then here we go so mission impossible uh and then let's put those all on the side and then we look at something like um barbie which is based on ip but it's the first time they've ever done that so i consider it kind of newish i guess and then oppenheimer if you think about that's all the summer yeah they had to sell people on barbie people know the doll but it wasn't like a sequel to a big movie that they were introducing this whole world so i i do think that counts as something different than the franchise model they've been going with so my question to you we're watching apple uh they're going full auteur they got uh killers of the flower moon and then what i'm really looking forward to i know one of your favorite directors is my favorite director really scott i think it's my favorite director of all time i love their strategy here i think their strategy is fascinating napoleon right in november we're gonna get the two and a half hour theatrical napoleon cut it is gonna go on apple tv plus probably december they haven't announced a release date yet but probably december but that they're getting the four hour director's cut they're gonna get both versions so you will be able to watch the theatrical cut on apple but ridley scott's also making a four hour director's cut that will be exclusive to tv plus that's genius so now you get people seeing it twice because people are going to want to go to the theater to see it on the big screen the theatrical cut but then you got to watch it again because you want to see the full four hour version interestingly yeah if you remember really scott did that director's cut of kingdom of heaven and people say it was amazing it is the actual cut was better i'm going to watch that that happened you know i never saw that one to kind of slip by me oh man i'm gonna watch it the director's cut is i have a movie theater in my ski house so this is the great thrill of my life to be a kid from brooklyn who has a movie i got a proper movie theater it's pretty nice uh like in the snyder cut i thought was really good um you know for an imperfect film i like that too so this is great i mean i i love the fact that the director's cut is baked in we're baking in the director's cut that is a power move yeah the superpower move and i didn't get to see oppenheimer in the theaters because it was literally every time i went to buy to buy tickets to the 70 millimeter it was sold out now yeah i can watch it on streaming i guess but i'm kind of feel like an idiot watching it on streaming i mean i feel like that's one of those things where what we're seeing is it's harder for hollywood to release you know 18 movies at a time that people want to go see fill up all of these multiplexes so i think a smarter thing to do and it's already happening to some extent some of these multiplexes use some of the screens for new stuff and then use other screens for like well let's bring back oppenheimer and imax for a few weeks or like yeah that's what i want the back to the future trilogy or you know it's halloween so we're going to show scream movies or saw or whatever like it you know and i think that's what people want too is make it eventize it more so it's like not necessarily only things that opened this weekend in theaters but it's like things i want to go see with my friends who did barbie warner warner bros so zazlov did barbie was originally going to be amy schumer he and she dropped out zazlov didn't green light barbie himself he inherited the project but that did the budget on that was 140 it did 1.4 billion dollars so i mean original i mean a lot of the credit there has to go to to margot robbie she was very behind this project and was was telling them like here's how to do it i have a vision she's got her own production company lucky chap that produced it and like so she was really the driving force of like going into order brothers like this could make a billion dollars you got to put muscle behind this and she was the one who had the vision i think speaking of wall street yeah well done and then the budget for oppenheimer's only a hundred million uh and it did a bill so yeah i mean a a very thoughtful historical three-hour biopic doing that kind of money is like we haven't seen stuff may i ask you a leading question please if oppenheimer and barbie have shown this that original ip done well with auteurs uh can win the day why isn't disney and other folks getting the memo on this why have they not gotten the memo i mean to do more original ip instead of doing toy story 7 give us something new it's it's always you know are they going to take the right lesson from their successes is always the question and so i think i think there there are a lot of wrong lessons i think you could take one is we gotta like come up with viral memes of two movies opening the same weekend you already saw that they were trying to figure out what two movies can we open at the same time against each other right but that's a one-time that's a one-time marketing experience that's not going to happen over and over again right and that's not something studios didn't create that the public created that You can't force that to happen.

25:50It sort of has to happen organically. The other thing is, of course, Mattel and Hasbro are now fast tracking 100 toy based movies each. So we're going to get the Barney the Dinosaur movie, the Stretch Armstrong movie, the Hot Wheels movie. And again, I don't necessarily think that's going to work either. I agree with you. The right lesson would be you got to find interesting projects from notable filmmakers, put a lot of marketing muscle behind them and come up with. creative ways to make people feel like this is something i gotta see opening weekend with my friends this is a social experience that i want to be part of with this crowd do you remember last year when that minions movie came out yes and everybody wore the suits did that it was a very good was that organic or non-organic did we ever get that it was called the gentle minions meme and just kids on tiktok were like you know what would be funny when then you had the megan dance the megan which was actually like as far i'm not into the horror genre but i am into the ai genre uh-huh and i liked megan i enjoyed it oh i liked megan too yeah yeah we were talking about that like just before the show if you can come up with a dance like wednesday that netflix show had that viral dance as well and then became one of netflix's biggest shows of all time my daughters were doing it yeah if you exact exactly If you could come up with something like that, or there was that Peaches song from the Super Mario movie that all the kids went crazy for.

27:17If you could come up with something like that that sticks in people's heads and grabs their attention on X or Facebook or TikTok or Twitch or wherever they're hanging out, that's how you make a hit movie. The idea that part eight or part 12 or it's based on this thing you remember, we're sort of that era is done. And now you've got to figure out how to eventize everything. How do we make this the Taylor Swift eras tour of this genre? All right, everybody. We all know technology is moving at a blistering pace. We talk about it here every week, especially AI. And Codecademy's goal is to help you stay ahead.

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28:56How do I get their job? Well, it's going to be experience and it's going to be skills code academy is going to help you with both of those start your free trial today visit code academy.com slash twist to try code academy pro free for 14 days that's code academy.com slash twist tell me about what's going on with the strikes the the rider strike ended they seem to have gotten some good concessions yeah ai became a lot bigger of a story in that than i think people anticipate it i think with good reason because ai is great already in year zero here for ideation it's not going to replace a human that's obvious yeah but it's great for ideation it's great for spitballing you would agree i mean like i i don't i don't personally love it because i think so many of its ideas are derivative feel a little recycled feel a little derivative and the whole idea in brainstorming is you want to go as far outside the box not deep inside the box but listen lots of people have lots of different ways of working and far be it from me to tell another writer i do know a lot of writers who do enjoy brainstorming with ai and i don't want to say it's it's bad or you shouldn't do it like more more power to them uh but right so i think they really kind of kick the can down the road on the the most complex issues that the thing that we agreed on is ai can't write a script and we can't hire a writer to adapt an idea that ai came up with like ideas have to originate with human writers yeah but the really difficult stuff like training like is it okay to train an ai app on somebody's writing we kind of didn't we're like the wga kind of reserved the right to object to that later yes didn't object to it yet so how would you feel if you know a young person could come into disney plus's app in let's just pick a time frame you know five years from now ten years from now and i could open up the disney plus app and say i would like a story about ashoka becoming friends with captain marvel and it's an alternative universe and then they go fight thanos and darth i don't i don't think this produces some little short video for you i i mean maybe a little short purely visual you know maybe a little exploration like a fan like a like a little showcase demo reel or something sure but do you think consumers would be interested in that i'm curious i think that's a i think that's a gimmick i don't i don't think to me the stuff that ai is like like code like when you're talking about like i need help writing this piece of code and ai can help you figure it out it's obviously perfect for that or i was reading something about broccolini they're using it to to come up with the next genetic strain of broccolini that will be hardier grow faster and in more harsh climates perfect exactly that's exactly the perfect use case for it creative stuff i think it's just it's just not a good fit creative stuff is what humans are very good at that's that's the word we should have ai do all the data entry stuff that we're bad at or that it's hard for us to focus our minds on so that we can be freed up to be creative and to think about things outside the box in a way that ai yeah so that's what i think is my point about this uh choose your own adventure type experience so imagine you watched the obi-wan series which we had mixed feelings on but generally i i really like that that existed i liked it yeah i liked it yeah so if you could say though hey i would like to see a version where you know the uh fight scene was a little more dynamic right or something or i wanted to see a little bit more of this part of the story and it filled in that part of the story or gave you some options um that to you feels does it feel offensive to you i don't do you feel you do you feel disgusted by it in some way you seem to resist it as a humanist i'm i'm i'm pigeonholing you as a humanist i wouldn't say i'm disgusted by it but i do think that not no not even offended but i do think that it's just that's it's all it's really doing is is mashing things up is mixing things up it's not it's not bringing anything new to the table so sure if you tell stable diffusion i want to see an image of ahsoka next to another you know Optimus Prime and have them fight.

33:25Sure. It can sort of roughly assemble that and you can see that, but your imagination can do that too. And the, the cleverness that a writer would add, or that a director would add, or that a creative person would add, they're the ones who are going to have, because the computer doesn't, it knows what Optimus Prime looks like because we've trained it. We've shown it a hundred pictures of Optimus Prime and said, this is Optimus Prime. Then it goes, okay, I understand the term Optimus Prime. It means this image, but it's, it doesn't know what makes optimist prime cool like yeah like why is a truck that turns into a big guy with guns cool like well we know why that's cool because we're people and we have life experience with trucks and guns and robots and that informs our decision that that's cool a computer doesn't understand that all it knows is this is what it looks like this is what it looks like when it transforms what's going on with the actors then so the writers have settled they seem to be somewhat content they have some sort of back ends here they're going to get some data because the big thing is also they're going to get data some kind of sharing on how a netflix show did they're going to get some metrics right they're they're going to get some limited metrics but they're going to get the the people who make the the biggest netflix shows are going to get a little a little taste now they're going to get a little kickback based on the success which they should of course that's in the best interest of netflix by the way like for netflix that made all these millionaires and billionaires here in silicon valley to not get that people will do better work and they'll invest more in their careers if all of a sudden a residual check comes in like oh wow i get thirty thousand dollars a year yeah because i did this hit show i'm gonna hire you for six weeks and i'm gonna give you this set amount you're gonna do a good job because you're a professional and you want to earn that amount but if i'm like i'm gonna hire you for six weeks you're gonna get this set amount and then you got a shot at also getting a seventy five thousand dollar check next year if your show's a big hit that's a big incentive that's a big incentive so yeah like a little taste get a tasty i think that is gonna gonna motivate people and it allows more people to turn tv writing from a hobby and interest into a real career and that's good you want you need the next generation of people who are going to create netflix shows 10 years and you know what you have intellectuals you have powerful people who then have the choice i can go work at goldman sachs i can work in silicon valley uh or i can work in hollywood and if you make hollywood you know like you're going to be a monk you're going to be living on this like pittance and you have no chance of building any kind of wealth for your family your future your retirement then people are just going to take the goldman sachs option or they're going to take the you need the next generation of bill lawrences who made scrubs and uh you know you need you need shonda rhymes and you need you need taylor sheridan's like you need those people and you need to have a path where we take the people who are getting started today and turn them into those people one day and so that's really a lot of what we did but yeah the hope was after the wga resolved big why is optimus prime cool powerful abilities moral integrity lots of good things pretty good i mean i don't think any oh powerful abilities deep voice memorable quotes protective nature rich backstory diverse adaptations childhood nostalgia great and that's all the oh take the ideas that make optimus prime cool and create entirely new character with different modality with a different modality but similar traits that make them resonate like optimus character name luminous that's the worst name ever ethereal guardian of a cosmic library sure what kid doesn't want to play with a ethereal librarian yeah it does exactly yeah wow exactly way to go jackie pt you just ruined our childhoods but no that's a great it's a cool example because because they it doesn't coolness it's that you can't how do you define it how do you teach a computer what it is you you can't that that well look at her rich backstory once immortal from a forgotten planet luminaria's thirst for knowledge led her to the cosmic library oh but i mean again like it's just it just heroes journey like every time you ask it for a story joseph campbells you because of course it does that's what it you know That's what it learned from.

37:50Yes. But that's not interesting every time. What's interesting is how you modify it and tweak it and make it your own. And you could, just so we know, like you can beat a dead horse. Okay. Creating a job post and finding your qualified candidates, that can be time consuming unless you use LinkedIn jobs. They are closing in on 1 billion users. The march to a billion continues and they're almost there. Think about how many insanely qualified people are out there looking for work right now. And if you go post that open role on LinkedIn, you're 100 % certain that you're going to get the most qualified candidates available.

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38:54And when you are hiring, you get the purple ring on your profile. What does that mean? That means everybody in your LinkedIn network knows that you're hiring. So when you interact in the feed, you're commenting on other people's posts, then they see the purple link and they go there. So that's why I participate. You see me commenting all the time on LinkedIn and on my friends and my networks i do that because i want to give a hi-fi to people in my network but also i want that purple ring to be out there so i can find the best talent and the best talents on linkedin linkedin.com slash twist linkedin.com slash twist to post your first job for free terms and conditions do apply because they're giving you something for free tell me about actors what's going on with the screen actors guild known as sag i am a member of sag or i was after my amazing performance in center of the world that's right film august so yeah sag actor jason calacanis wants to know how he's doing my sag is uh well there was hope that after the wga strike resolved that sag might might wrap up quickly now there's fire there there's momentum we want to get this finished up so we can get back to making stuff uh but that that's kind of come totally derailed this week uh it seems like it's mostly again about residuals and profit sharing uh so the actors apparently had suggested two percent of overall revenue from these platforms go to actors the streamers said that works out to 2.4 billion over the course of a three-year contract or 800 million per year that was too much the streamer said that the streamer said that the studio said that was too much two percent is too much they said two percent was too much so then the act so then And then SAD came back and said, okay, if revenue is the wrong basis for profit sharing, let's switch over to subscriber count.

40:38So you could pay a levy based on Netflix's total subscriber count or whatever your platform's total subscriber count. And at that point, Sarandos said that was a bridge too far to bring up this late in the negotiations. And that's what caused apparently the AMPTP to exit the negotiation, walk away from the table. This is so dumb. Ted Sarandos is making a stupid mistake. He's going to be the most hated guy. Everybody's going to go to Apple and Amazon because they're working with orators. Well, it's that CEO. So the AMPT, Carol Lombardini, the head of the AMPTP, she's working with the CEO gang of four, they're called.

41:12That's NBC Universal's Donna Langley, Zazlav from Warner Brothers Discovery, Sarandos from Netflix, and Iger from Disney. So they're the four CEOs. This is so dumb. By putting a number, a percentage number on it, it frees them. this frees them from having to keep negotiating and two percent is a perfect place to do it in the nba it's like 51 percent go to the players or something it's crazy right literally half of revenue goes to the players you know what's happened in the nba more people want to become nba players nba players spend a million dollars or two million dollars of their own money to keep themselves healthy like lebron james does and they really take their career seriously now because they know there's a 250 million a 350 million dollar supermax contract out here if they did this two percent now you got all the actors saying you know what i'm gonna show up on set and take this seriously i'm not gonna be like i don't want to pick anybody but like johnny depp like whatever causing chaos on set they said or yeah you know whatever drinking red wine all day you know like that stuff's gonna go out the window because johnny depp's gonna be like you know what and netflix has had this specific problem regis on page became a huge star in season one of bridgerton didn't want to come back for season two millie bobby brown today we've got the headline and inside streaming is complaining about having to come back for one more season of stranger things she wants to go make film she's a huge famous actor now but imagine if you were going to give her yeah show me the things revenue show me the devil she'd be like let's make 10 more seasons that's how you keep these actors on sitcoms for 10 years you know who did this tony stark iron man and he knew right exactly he knew because his career hit the rocks iron man they marvel didn't want to bank on him he had to take out his own insurance and he bet on himself and what did he get in that last contract it was absurd it's hundreds and hundreds of millions of millions of dollars for showing up for 10 minutes like two days on set whatever it was good for him famously george lucas too where nobody wanted to come in on him with these deals and so he was like all right i'll take i'll take almost nothing you don't have to pay me to direct the movie i'll just take the merch rights and the studio was like are you crazy you're dumb who's gonna buy the toys of these furry how about todd phillips i mean there's one film i'm looking forward to it's the new joker joker 2 is gonna be i don't know cannot wait for that uh joaquin phoenix i'll see anything he's in and and lady gaga and i'll see anything todd phillipson and you know what lady gaga crushes it stars born you know she's she's amazing who who isn't curious to see joker too i think we're all curious to see what they've got a billion dollars on like a 75 million dollar budget or something crazy golden lion at venice that's crazy well here it is orters and so you got to give the warner brothers folks because they also did the batman barbie they did the batman yeah they they understand orters can take ip in a direction that the formulaic thing now listen marvel did do a great job on phase one two and three or whatever but would it kill marvel to do something outside the canon with one of the characters or you know whatever and not have a phase five six and seven like what would you think that was a good idea if they said hey we want to let somebody do something interesting yeah the hulk i mean i i it's it's it's so hard to say because i do feel like we're seeing the dc movies suffer right now because they're not audiences have lost that continuity sense and so when blue beetle comes out there's nothing making people feel like oh i need to see this because it's part of this overall story i like it's just hanging out there on its own and i actually thought blue beetle was pretty good but i watched the first 20 minutes i got bored it's not enough to grab people's attention totally flying blind on its own did they have any other dc characters in it did anybody show up or is it just him alone no it's i mean there's shout outs and mentions but no it's pretty much just blue beetle and james gunn has said he's going to bring that kid jolo maradwenius or i think i'm saying it right uh that the cobra kai kid who plays blue beetle he's going to come back in more dc movies as jaime reyes but i don't i don't think the movie the movie doesn't really feel like everybody else is out gal gadot she's gone they're saying momoa might come back and play lobo or a different character but he's not aquaman anymore cavil's gone affleck's gone all all of the ezra miller gone all those people are not gonna be back the only exception is peacemaker so viola davis is going to stay on as amanda waller john scene is still peacemaker that whole group is is sad but anyway that has definitely hurt them so i don't think marvel necessarily wants to throw the whole idea of continuity away but i do think that they're kind of they're kind of pushing the brakes a little bit on it less focus on the constant releases that are all part of the one interconnected story because it's not paying off at this point it's hurting them more than helping i think in some ways people have just burned out time for recommendations what do you got okay what do you got wow i watched a lot of good stuff lately i really liked uh fall of the house of usher that new netflix mike flanagan how is that what is it how is it uh so mike flanagan he's the guy who did the haunting of pill house and haunting a blind manor and also midnight mass.

46:29He does these like horror drama kind of series. He also, he's directed, he directed that film, Dr. Sleep and Oculus, a few other horror films. So his new show is it's sort of based on the Edgar Allen post short story, the fall of the house of Usher, but it's really a remix. It's based on the entire collected works of Edgar Allen. So there's pit in the pendulum stuff, murders in the room or the Raven gets shout out. Like it's really this kind of like entire career of Edgar Allen Poe put into one story, but really great cast. It's kind of a mix of funny and spooky, but it's also got this kind of succession.

47:06Who's going to take over this pharmaceutical company storyline. I really enjoyed it. I think it's a fun mashup. I will watch that for sure. Styles. And then I also liked there's this movie on Hulu. It's a little silly. It's a little bit of a one off, but it's quick. It's called The Mill with Lil Rel Howery. Set in the near future, this guy is a middle manager for a tech company called Mallard. And then one day he wakes up and the company has imprisoned him in this cell with this mill in the center of it. And they're like, this is your new employee training. 16 hours a day, you've got to work this mill.

47:42Whoever rotates it the least in a day, whichever one of the employees gets killed. And he's just a prisoner now in this weird cell. and it becomes like a thriller of like how is he going to get out of there what's going on i have two for you i got two that's on hulu that's on hulu the diplomat yes i enjoyed this was a huge hit among uh like the government like politicians and everyone in washington was watching the diplomat i like terry russell a lot um she's fantastic in this i will watch her do anything and uh you know it's like taught thriller type thing and she's amazing and i think it's a little bit timely um if you like geopolitics and that kind of stuff and then my other one i'm catching up on but this could be i think my favorite series in a long time mr in between which stars a guy named scott ryan yeah it's from australia it's from australia and i think it's hulu it's on hulu It was an FX show when it was on TV.

48:46So now it's on Hooper. This show, Mr. Inbetween, is kind of like Sopranos meets Breaking Bad kind of situation. It's about a hitman from Down Under who's just unflappable. And it reminds me of The Shield, a show I always liked. And in fact, actually, that guy, who's the showrunner guy, creator of The Shield? Oh, it's... Ryan something? Yeah, he's Sean Ryan. because he's the guy who did the night agent yeah so i just started the night agent that's a little unrealistic i'm like two or three episodes into that but i still like it i love sean ryan i've played poker with him a couple times that's a great example because sean ryan is a guy who went to netflix but he was like i don't like your model i want to i'm going to make shows for you but i want to do the network way of doing things and they said okay so he's had writers rooms all along he kind of convinced them to do things the old-fashioned way even before the wga yeah so i that was one of my favorite 10 top 10 tv shows of all time but this new one the night agent i love the actor in it he's pretty good um and uh but you know it's a little bit noah noah centino is it him oh no this is a different guy this is gabriel basso never mind it's a it's a interesting concept uh it's pretty good but i do want to give a shout out you know i do like indie films and um you know there was this uh film after sun oh last year yeah that was in 2022 again this a24 is a really great or tour i don't know why somebody doesn't buy a24 that company seems to understand a great business model here it's it's part of something no but um but it's it's one of those things you the rumors are always around like who's gonna who's gonna buy a24 because they're also very savvy in terms of branding and marketing like they've got a lot of merch that they sell like they've kind of made themselves a little bit of a lifestyle brand in addition to being a film studio so after sun and past lives both very deeply personal films these are dramas they're slow they're meaningful if you can put your phone down give yourself over to the films they're not for most people but for me i like thoughtful dramatic films um and this one past lives uh is about a boy and a girl who are in school together and then their lives separate and then their lives intertwine uh every 10 years or so and there's they're obviously like um in love in some very deep way but you know it's kind of like um missed um connections you know the craigslist misconnections kind of thing yeah kind of like that and uh it's so well acted and directed and paced uh that i just think it's a very special film and i understand this is the director's debut uh both of these amazingly both of the films you've mentioned are directorial debuts because after sun i believe is charlotte wells uh it is yes debut as a writer director as well and then people really didn't get after sun you know this is like a coming of age kind of drama about a dad and a daughter i don't want to spoil it for you they're on vacation so it's sort of like yeah this this kind of travel log almost but i would i i don't want to give it yeah we don't can't give it in the way but you know as a father of daughters like this trying to connect with your child yeah and this meaningful adolescence and then the challenges of also being an adult and being a parent very very heartfelt films so if you were a considered sensitive person i think it's a great double feature for you to get you out of you know the uh you know exploding transformer things are moving so fast on the screen that it's just a giant freaking blur yeah after sun is on after sun is on paramount plus right now if you have the if you have the showtime you have to have the showtime add-on or just you know like i say you know like if it's if it's a really good film just pay for it on whatever service it doesn't matter on past lives is on vod so you have to you have to pay to rent or buy it just it's okay to pay to rent these things like 20 bucks or 30 bucks to pay or rent something it's well worth it folks i know that we live in this disposable age but just think if you want to have workers make films just just buy it it's fine you know you know it's it's it's a pittance you know it's given inflation it's like movies become such a good deal you have any films that you actually like that are in um sure you know more a non-obvious film i would say or an obvious well i uh sure on amazon prime right now it just came out uh last week there's one called the burial with uh jamie fox and tommy lee jones i just watched this last night yeah it's a it's like a courtroom comedy drama based on a real case from the 1990s uh tommy lee jones plays the owner of a few funeral parlors in southern mississippi uh and he's it gets into a fight with a huge canadian funeral corporation and he hires uh this guy willie gary who is a uh personal injury kind of a flashy tv personal injury lawyer to manage his case he's played by jamie fox uh it's a lot of fun i mean it's a little silly but it has that throwback like it feels like a 90s courtroom courtroom comedy drama that would just come out because he's old tom he's getting up there you know it's really about like he and jb fox very different guys but they kind of come together and become friends over the course of this trial it's it's they're very charming together it's really well years old wow tom he's 77 years old man uh so that one and bill camp is the sort of fugitive if you're a young person you haven't seen the fugitive and that's that's as good as it gets on a thriller that's his big oscar role right there yeah the fugitive yeah forget about men and black no country for all men and the fugitive is where you want to go i think he's also in that amazing uh movie rolling thunder from the from the 70s with william devane one of what uh that's why uh tarantino named his company rolling thunder pictures uh i didn't know that yeah i i um i listened to the first book of criticism quentin tarantino did you know it's good and i like his podcast that he does um so shout out to both of those uh any other films devane plays like a traumatized vietnam vet and then he comes home and bikers attack his family and then he just goes in this really gruesome crusade of vengeance gets them that is uh that is one of tarantino's big things is the gruesome revenge genre which the 60s and 70s had this whole revenge genre well yeah rolling thunder was part of that whole like like all those movies about all the guys coming back from from vietnam being just like super messed up and uh you know having trouble reintegrating into society so it's from that era cutter's way another great movie from that era video archives podcast is the uh the videos archive podcast is i i love it um but he does very weird weird movies but he did manhunter um which is a with roger ever he did manhunter which is a film i like yeah he did a really weird thing of like i had to like go really seek this out there's like a bunch of planet the apes it was a tv show yeah and then it was terrible but there was like a couple of interesting moments about it and i didn't even know there was a thing um what else did he do on the first season i know sometimes he does stuff on that podcast and then they screen them at the new beverly after which i've always been to go yeah it's just really good because you can see how this stuff he did straw dogs which is like the ultimate sam peckinpah revenge film and that's a really difficult film to talk about in today's era um so i would start there if you're going to listen to his podcast like listen to the straw dog ones and watch straw dogs uh with dustin hoffman i think um in the lead role and really it's like that's a challenging one i won't spoil anything for you but that's a very challenging film when the when it came out and he goes through the what i love about what he does in this um video archives podcast is he talks about the reaction to those films at that time um and he did the film star 80 which i remember when that came out bob fossey did this and um i actually watched the film star 80 based and then listened to his criticism over and then he did two episodes on it uh last year in november and um you know that was also like a really great walk down through town so like i think if you can listen to bred east and alice or roger avery and quentin tarantino and then hear their takes on films that's how i got into tar because bredy son alice didn't like tar and then everybody loved it and he went to see it again and he was like you know what on second viewing i actually really do like this film and i wasn't in the right headspace when i watched the first time and he changed his opinion on it i mean that was like really interesting yeah like that that definitely happens like that's happened to me several films yeah you have a film in mind that you sure change your thinking on yeah uh it happens a lot with uh with paul thomas anderson where i'll see the movie the first time and i'm like i don't really know like the master is a great example came to mind immediately which i didn't i saw it i was like i don't really know how i feel about that but by the second or third time i was like well this is the greatest thing i've ever seen i love this it's my favorite paul tamas anderson film really i think every time i see there will be blood or yeah they're all i just flip flip my order we talked about this before all right one other one i was gonna mention yeah one other one uh it's also on showtime right now if you pay for paramount plus you got to pay for the showtime add-on uh the last william friedkin film just went up the cane mutiny court martial it's it's a it is purely courtroom i mean it is just a filmed version of that play if you have not seen the movie the cane mutiny and you don't know the story at all i might be a little it's a little weird at first but really great performances what the one of the final screen performances sutherland wow keever sutherland plays queeg who's that's the uh humphrey bogart role from the original hi cannot wait and then land the one of the final performances from the late great lance reddick he plays the uh the sort of general who's overseeing the hearing uh you know obviously worth watching very interesting jason clark also really good in that one lewis pullman who was great in top gun mavericks in that came out the cane mutiny the k mutiny was that world war ii novel by herman woke woke i don't know how to pronounce w-o-u-k yeah have it everybody thank you lon and we'll see you all next time in the service bye-bye

59:11Thank you.