Disney has an interesting money making scheme. Well you are not.
Keeping the family means nobody.
Gets They just produced movies that everybody wants to see. Although this Lelo and Stitch movie came out, my kids just kind of missed it. My daughter was born in two thousand and two, so this kind of predated her, and then my son had no interest in watching. I'm sure they've seen it, but it was not one that was on heavy rotation at my house. And honestly, it didn't do great in two thousand and two when it first came out. It wasn't really the it wasn't really
the kind of Disney mold of a movie. One of the movie posters they actually put out for Lelo and Stitch was other classic Disney characters, Pinocchio, Bell, Jasmine, all recoiling from the look of Stitch, this alien or I don't know, rabbit, that God was something, whatever it is, they were recoiling from it in horror. Ticket sales not great. They did a couple of directive video sequels. There was
a cartoon in the two thousands. There was a Disney World ride for Leilo and Stitch in two thousand and four, but it closed down. There was a lot of I mean, they sold some stuff, but it wasn't their biggest by a far, wasn't their biggest franchise. So they make a live action Lelo and Stitch that's going to be released. I mean it is released now, but that would have been twenty three years later and they weren't quite sure what to do with it. Necessarily, they made it for
one hundred million dollars. It was originally planned to go straight to Disney Plus, but after just ten days in the theaters, it brought in six hundred and ten million dollars. It cost about seventy five million to market. It's probably going to come in when it's all said and done, somewhere around a billion dollars.
They say.
The biggest factor in that is going to be how it does the Japanese market. So Disney is going to make about three hundred million dollars or more or more profit just from the box office. That validates this u turn that they took a couple of years ago. Now Bob Eiger comes out of retirement, he goes back to the Helm of Disney. He cuts back on the originals that they were putting straight to streaming and reprioritizes releasing
straight to the theater. So if you remember last well, last year in November, Mwana II was originally going to be a TV series. They were originally going to just put it straight to streaming as a series, but that brings in, oh, I don't know, one point one billion dollars in theaters. A co chair of Disney Entertainment said, going theatrical, getting that footprint across the entire world lifts everything. It lifts streaming, it lifts consumer products, it lifts the
theme parks. It's harder to do that when you start with just streaming, when you start on a service. So they figured out nine months ago they finally made this decision, we're going to put it in theaters.
We're going to put it on Memorial Day.
And they had been promoting this thing, this live action movie, which boosted all of the Leelo and Stitch merchandise, I mean tenfold from five years before that, because there were people in their what mid twenties, late twenties, early thirties who did remember this movie when it was animated and did want to bring their kids to it. They were nostalgic about it, even though it may not have been the greatest box office success that Disney had. These people
love that movie. Here's the problem. Then they were going to go up against Mission Impossible, the final Reckoning, and Disney was like, oh, great, of all the things we don't want to go up against, it's Tom Cruise and the end of the Mission Impossible series. And there was just a there were a couple of people around the board table at Disney who said, no, no, I think we're okay. I think it's counterprogramming. I think we're gonna do fine. And in the end, Memorial Day wasn't even close.
Leilo and Stitch took in one hundred and eighty three million over the holiday weekend, more than twice what Mission Impossible brought in. Oh and Mission Impossible exponentially more expensive to make. Disney did everything right on this. They made a movie that people love, or I should say remade. They made it for the right price. They picked a release date, the marketing, the publicity, the social campaigns, everything fall and fell into place for Disney in this case.
But that doesn't mean that all of these big production houses are going to get back to strictly theatrical releases. I have one example coming up actually later this year. That as one studio in kind of a conundrum. They still have time to make a decision about this. But we'll talk about that other big release that's coming out that might be a theatrical release, but definitely will be on the streamer.
We'll tell you which one and what movie it is.
We've been talking about movie studios and there are decisions about when to stream a movie versus when to release it theatrically. The traditional movie theaters think Paramount or Warner Brothers or Disney or something like that, and then the other ones like Amazon, Apple, Netflix obviously, and what you would prefer. Would you want to see a movie at home or would you want to see it in a big movie theater.
Good morning Gary, without Shannon today. This is Vick in Glendale. And in regards to what movies I like to see in the theater, I enjoy going to classic theater to view classic movies like Robin Hood or Frankenstein or whatever. My be reliable modern movies I prefer.
To stream interesting. I know the technology is different, Hey.
Gary, Me personally, I like to go to the movie theater. It's just the whole experience. I take my kids to movies.
I'm just a movie buff.
I love movies, and there's certain movies like like the twenty eight years Later, that I just want to see in theaters. Like if I can catch certain movies in theaters, I'd rather see them there. It's just like the whole thing about just being out and getting popcorn and doing everything at a theater. Just this is not the same at your house, you know.
That's what I prefer.
Yeah, I agree, there is a romanticized version of it. It brings back memories of movies you saw in the theater as a kid or whatever. So it's funny that that guy mentioned Frankenstein because Netflix is out with its first trailer for the Guillelmo. It's hard to say his name,
Guillermo del Toro's version of Frankenstein. I didn't realize that since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, there have been two hundred film versions of Frankenstein or some version of Frankenstein, two hundred of them almost, And the one that is produced by Netflix and Guielmro del Toro looks like a full fledged old fashioned blockbuster of a movie. It is massive, and when Netflix makes a movie like this, they could
be criticized for not releasing it in theaters. There's actually a Hollywood reporter refers to that as the roadhouse paradox, which means released movies that are perfectly watchable but mediocre. So on Sunday, Netflix releases the first trailer for Del Toro's longtime passion project of Frankenstein.
And it's pretty amazing.
You've got Oscar Isaac as Doctor Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi is Monster, Mia Goth as Victor's fiance, all of this incredible Arctic imagery, because there's a whole North Pole section that's in the book that doesn't appear in many movies, Victorian imagery as well.
And there are already people who.
Are demanding if you can do that that Netflix released this thing in the theaters November ish, probably a Thanksgiving release is what they're looking at. And here you got to think of the again, the math that goes into this. I just explained how when Malana II and Leelo and Stitch go to movie theaters, Disney makes hundreds of millions of dollars more than they would have arguably, and you can then turn that into merchandise and theme park rides
for years for years. This is a little different because it's a story that everybody knows. Granted, Lelo and Stitch was a story everybody knew, but this is Frankenstein. Well, almost two hundred film versions of Frankenstein in some capacity have already been out there, so this one is arguably the most expensive could be and it is going to be dramatic and fantastic. But is it enough to get
a film theater release. A couple of comments on YouTube that I was looking through when I saw the trailer last night, Guillermo del Toro is too good for Netflix.
This needs a theater release.
Another one says, I think we can all agree that this should be released in released in theaters. Guillammere del Toro is for theaters, not for Netflix. All that man makes is art. Now listen. He is a Best Picture
Oscar winner. The Shape of Water in twenty seventeen was a really incredible movie, and he has been on record saying that this Frankenstein story is something that he's wanted to make for twenty years, and it includes things like the North Pole sequence that again that exists in the book but does not exist in many of the film versions that we would see whether it's Peter Boyle and Young Frankenstein, whatever it is. But he said, this is
the pinnacle of everything. Again, this is del Toro speaking. Part of me wants to do a version of it, part of me has twenty four of twenty five years chickened out of making it. And he says, I dream I can make the greatest Frankenstein ever. But then if you make it, you've made it. Whether you did it
great or not, it's done. You can't dream about it anymore. So, to be technical, Netflix is going to release there's almost an absolute guarantee that they're going to release it theatrically somewhere for some amount of time because it has to be released in theaters for it to qualify for Academy Awards consideration and Screen Actors Guild and things like that. So it does have to be released in theaters for
a time. But is that their main plan? Are they looking for a multi hundred million dollar film in Frankenstein or are they just going to use it to drive people to their service like they have in the past with other movies. We talk about it because that is the business of this town, specifically here in Burbank. But obviously in production studios across this city and across the county is where the vast majority of TV and movies are created in the world. And we've repeatedly talked about
the industry itself struggling. One of the indicators of that is studio space sound stage for film and TV production and whether or not they're busy. And I ran into this article on vankler dot com a n k L E. R Ankler dot com by Elain Low and it says that the current state of our sound stages in LA kind of remind us of the failure of retail malls
throughout the country over the last few decades. And Elaine is joining us now writer and host for The Anchlor, one of the top business publications on Substack, taking time for us this morning. Elaine, First, thanks for thanks for carving out some time in your day for us.
Thanks so much for having me really appreciate it.
Sure I read with great interest this piece on the state of where we are in terms of sound stages. So why don't you just kind of put it in a nutshell for us In terms of the square footage that exists for production in this town, it's not being utilized right now.
No, there's something like two point eight million square feet of studio space. You have the largest operators, which are you know, when you count all of their stages together, you have Warner Brothers which is thirty six stages, Universal which has thirty, Sony has eighteen, Paramount has twenty nine. You know, you look at Radford Studio Center, twentieth Century Studios.
You know known as the Fox Lot.
There's a lot of sound stage space in LA And you know, when we talk about soundstages, we're talking about things like Gray's Anatomy, things that are you know, inside when they're in a room, you know, sitcoms, game shows, not we're not talking about on location like when you see a shot out on a street or outdoors. But it is a good barometer for how much production is happening. And the numbers are pretty stark.
When you look at.
Film LA's figures, and that's the official La County Film Office, the numbers in twenty sixteen, when things were humming along,
soundstage space was at a high ninety six percent. And then obviously that figure dipped during the pandemic when all of production was halted for some time, but then it bounce back and around, you know, twenty twenty two or so, you know, you were looking at at about ninety percent occupancy again, and that was during the peak of peak TV, right when there were six hundred scripted TV shows on
the air. But that number has come back down again after the WGA and SAG strikes of twenty twenty three, amid a broader industry wide contraction where they've all just been pulling back on their budgets and the number of TV series that they're producing and the complements of those factors has brought soundstage occupancy down to sixty nine percent
in twenty twenty three, which was a strike year. But the more stark number is that it's actually down to sixty three percent in twenty twenty four, a year that wasn't impacted by labor stoppages.
And that's what's remarkable.
That part of it, the strike part of it, I think is what intrigues me because when those were going on writers strike and the actors strike, they were just coming back from COVID and all the production that was shut down, and I had this gut feeling like this is not the right time to do this, because you're already dealing with an industry that's been punched in the face and the guts and then kicked in the crotch.
It was in a bad space at the time. Is there any blame that can land on the unions for those for those work stoppages.
From the union's perspective, It's look, streaming has so severely disrupted the industry, you know, and you kind of look back to the two thousand and seven two thousand and eight writers strike when when people refer to streaming as like new media, and it was kind of like, well, what do.
We do about this new media?
And over the years, you know, the economics of TV have really changed so severely, and you know, writers and performers really felt like they weren't able to, you know, to reap the gains of you know, the many different streaming shows that are on you know, massive platforms like Netflix and Disney Plus and all of that, And so
that was the reasoning behind those strikes. You know, certainly the town has still been in recovery mode over the last couple of years, and I think, you know, talking to people I talked to a lot of age and producers and showrunners, there was a lot of perhaps misplaced optimism going into twenty twenty four, coming right out of the strikes, thinking that things would bounce back, but that
didn't really happen. It really didn't pick up again until the back half of twenty twenty four because the largest guild IATSE, which represents you know, something like one hundred and fifty thousand crew members, was in negotiations in the top half of the year, and so there was some apprehension about going back into production when there was potentially a third strike around the corner. Now that didn't materialize. They came to an agreement.
This year.
There's been a lot more optimism about the state of production though, but it's still kind of notable to see how much sound stage use has moved out of LA and outside of the strikes. A lot of.
People would point to the tax.
Incentive issue, the fact that there are just more appealing tax credits and tax incentives outside of California and outside of the country. You know, it's interesting when you think about game shows, like you know that low game show the Floor, which is thought I saw that in Ireland.
If that was that's an amazing the idea of taking everything that you have here flying it to Ireland. I mean, I know they use some of the people there, but still that idea that that's a cheaper move for the studios than to produce it down the street here in Burbank or something is mindful.
Right, Yeah. I mean a lot of game shows film out in Ireland. It's it's wild and I don't think many people, you know, know that the average American viewer and they're watching a show like The Floor or something.
Else, well if they maybe if they had Irish accents, that'd make a big difference. We're talking with Elaine Lowe, writer for The Ankler. You can find her work at Theankler dot com a n k l e r and specifically this story regarding sound stages and stage occupancy down to sixty three percent in twenty twenty four, down even from the year that they were the writers and the actors were on strike.
And I wanted to ask you, Elane.
You mentioned that obviously a lot of production has gone to places like British, Columbia, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee is now getting into this.
Game as well.
What are they doing right that either California or La County specifically is doing wrong.
Regardless of who I talk to, it always comes back to the tax and Senates and the tax credit, and California lawmakers are looking at potentially, you know, there's a proposal to more than double that tax credit from three hundred and thirty million to seven hundred and fifty million right now, but some people say that doesn't even go far enough. You know, the way it's structured, you know, the intricacies of it just aren't as appealing as other
states and other places out of the country. And you know, it doesn't apply to above the line salaries like you know, actors, and you know, non scripted you know, we.
Were talking about game shows like The Floor, you.
Know, anything that's a non scripted reality show, game show, documentary. Those are all not even for the tax incentive right now. So there's an entire part of the industry, you know, that would love to be able to be a.
Part of that.
And you know, there's a huge stay in LA production campaign to try and keep more production local to southern California. But again, it all just comes back down to that tax.
Conversation outside of AI, which brings with it its own set of problems for actors and writers, et cetera. Will will technology make these sound stages obsolete at least the way we've used them for the last one hundred years.
These are pretty old sound stages, a lot of them, but a number of them are being outfitted for virtual production, you know, when you have like a giant led wall and you can do things more digitally. And you know, I've talked at some folks who are optimistic about repurposing sound stages, you know, outside of TV and film use.
You know, they're they're being leased out for like commercial usage or like magazine cover shoots or live events or boarding events, you know, but in order to actually keep production here. I was actually at this AI on the Lot conference last week talking to the CEO of light Craft Technologies, and you know, there's somebody that have a background, they have an engineering emmy, you know, and are working on AI and virtual production technology, and you know, you
can do a lot with just a green screen. And I said, well, doesn't this, you know, disincentivize somebody coming to a traditional sound stage, and you know, they're there's thee I was telling me, Actually, you know, I really
hope that this actually creates more opportunities. You know, if you divvy up a traditional sound stage, you know, put up some green paint or a green screen, and then maybe you can actually have more occupants in a you know, traditional large sound stage setting, you know, with that's rigged up with all the lights and acoustics and everything.
You know.
So people are trying to get creative with alternate usage. But you know, episodic TV, which is really the lifeblood of the industry in you know, that's down to twenty percent soundstage use here, down from thirty percent.
Year of a year.
I'm also curious, I don't know if you saw this story about actors and producers demanding that their shows be shot in la Zach Braff has finally signed on to reprise his role as JD on the Scrubs reboot, and there was there was a going back and forth about whether or not they would. When he signed on, he said, I'll do it only if it's filmed in LA despite the original plans it to have it moved off to
Vancouver and produce up there. Do you think that's a trend that we might see as some of these people saying, some of the actors saying they believe so much in keeping production in southern California that they make these demands.
We've certainly seen that from high profile showrunners and producers and on screen talent, but it's a very small a part of a population that has the leverage to be able to do that, to be able to say, you know, no, we'd like to keep all production here, although certainly it's something that a lot of people would like to be able to have the power to do, especially again, there's this big stay in LA movement to try and keep
production here. But again, that conversation keeps coming back to the tax incentive more than anything else.
I know you've been writing on TV for a long time. What do you watch? What's your favorite show right now?
Oh?
Gosh, what am I watching? Just finished watching the four seasons that new Tina fe Steve Carell series from Tracy Bigfield on Netflix. That was fun, And just actually watched the season two with Squid Game.
I know season three's coming up soon.
You got to get caught up, Get caught up.
I know there's too much TV out there.
Well there's not too much, but.
Well there's a lot of shows to catch up on.
And it's funny that you mentioned that.
I know that in your piece, you mentioned that peak TV probably was twenty twenty two when you said, what six hundred script television shows?
The TV series we're on the air, I mean a lot of people call that a bubble. You know, we're unlikely to see that level of TV again because you know, there are only so many hours in the day.
But we've we've broken away from I feel like we've broken away from the usual, you know, pre you know, season premieres in the end of September. Obviously they're still available, but now it seems like every.
Three year around the industry.
Yeah, I love it.
Listen, my couch loves it as well, because because it gets it gets a lot of good use. All Right, Elaine, what a wonderful conversation. Thanks for taking time for us. We'd love to have you back on because we know that this, this business of show business is UH is top of mind for so many people here in southern California.
Absolutely, thank you so much for having me on.
You bet Elaine Lowe, writer for The Ankler. She also hosts the podcast at The Ankler. So go to The Ankler t h E A n k l E R Theankler dot com UH and find that podcast and listen to her talk with a bunch of these industry head honchos, etc. Yeah, I mentioned, and I was going to do this a little bit earlier in the show. But Zach Braff, if you hadn't seen, he was the doctor in Scrubs. He's
been doing a lot of directing recently. Did I think ted Lasso for a couple He did some shrinking episodes, but he signed on to reprise his role for the TV show Scrubs. If you remember that comedy about a hospital in the valley, and it comes after these negotiations that hit major hurdles over money and his request that the series be made in la not Vancouver as they were originally planning, so they finally came to an agreement. Scrubs is still in development, but no filming location has
been announced. So good to see that somebody like that can throw their weight around and make a difference