If even a respected director like Luca Guadagnino can get his film binned, what does that say about the state of Hollywood? Nothing good…
Last year, Skydance bought Paramount. This year, in all likelihood, Paramount Skydance will buy Warner Bros. There have been rumours that Netflix wants to buy Lionsgate. And on and on, the big fish eat the smaller fish until there’s just one rather rotund fish, alone in a tank, burping.
In the midst of a self-cannibalising film industry, last week brought with it the news that Amazon MGM has decided to dump Artificial, director Luca Guadagnino’s biopic of OpenAI founder Sam Altman.
We won’t claim to know why Amazon, despite releasing several Guadagnino films in recent years – including the acclaimed tennis drama, Challengers – has taken one look at Artificial and decided that it “will be better served if it were released by a different studio.” As we wrote at the time, it’s possible that Amazon sees nothing of creative worth in Guadagnino’s film and has opted to cut its reported $40m worth of losses.
Or, alternatively, the mega-corporation is somewhat spooked by what the film contains. The word from Puck is that the film offers a less than flattering portrait of Sam Altman, depicting him as a manipulator who’ll say anything to get what he wants – interestingly, a character trait also highlighted by multiple sources who spoke to journalist Ronan Farrow for a recent piece for The New Yorker.
Amazon has made billions of dollars’ worth of investments into OpenAI, and we’ve seen before how the former company’s executives prefer to keep the rich and powerful on-side. Earlier this year, Amazon spent $40m on acquiring the ‘licence’ for a fly-on-the-wall vanity film about Melania Trump, then a further $70m on marketing it for a cinema release that was never going to get anywhere.
Even if Melania, directed by disgraced Hollywood filmmaker Brett Ratner, did manage turn a small profit, it probably served a broader purpose: it kept Donald Trump, a US President who responds well to flattery, on the company’s side. And keeping Donald Trump on side is good for business if you’re a massive, union-busting corporation.
What Artificial highlights is a problem that will only get worse as Hollywood shrinks to three studios, each owned by a vast corporation with interests that go far beyond the entertainment industry. It means there are fewer opportunities for filmmakers to get things made, certainly. But corporate interests and a shrinking number of avenues also makes it much harder for filmmakers to create things that make those in power feel uncomfortable.
Last month, we ran a piece about Hollywood in the 1970s, and how the studio system in place at the time – although far from perfect, let’s be honest – allowed filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to make two original films that went on to become huge hits. Lucas, after a lot of shopping around, finally found a haven for Star Wars at 20th Century Fox. Spielberg, despite scaring the bejeezus out of studio heads by spending so much time and money, got Close Encounters Of The Third Kind made at Columbia.
Back then, there were far more major studios than there were today. In 1976, while Star Wars was being shot, there were Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Columbia, United Artists and Disney.
Today, that number has shrunk and will, in all likelihood, continue to shrink. We currently have Paramount, Warner and Universal. Then there are the tech companies that either own traditional studios or are now huge platforms and production companies themselves: there’s Disney, Netflix, Apple, Sony (which owns Columbia, TriStar, Screen Gems and more) and Amazon (which owns MGM, United Artists Releasing and the James Bond production company, EON).
Within the next few years, it could be that there are only three legacy studios left in what still goes under the marketing term Hollywood. But it’s not the smaller number of creative outlets for filmmakers that is so worrying, but who controls them.
Paramount will still be referred to by that nostalgic studio name, partly for brevity, but in truth it’s but one facet of a vast conglomerate. Its CEO is David Ellison, the billionaire son of the Trump-supporting founder of tech firm, Oracle. David Ellison was previously the boss of Skydance Media, and was able to buy Paramount because of huge sums of money flooding in from investment firms. If and when Paramount buys Warner Bros, it’ll see 15 percent of the merged company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which is set to throw in $10bn towards that takeover deal.
Studios are now in the hands of billionaire investors from all over the globe, and even smaller, trendier production companies aren’t out of the reach of the one percent; A24, for example, is financed by Thrive Capital, an investment firm founded by businessman Joshua Kushner – younger brother of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
All of this billionaire ownership will inevitably have an impact on what those studios do and don’t greenlight. We’ve already seen how wealthy tech bros can shut down stories they don’t like; Palantir mogul Peter Thiel, angered by Gawker’s reporting, bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s court case and ensured that the outlet was bankrupted. We’ve seen how, with Paramount now being run by right-leaning men with Trump on speed-dial, Brett Ratner has emerged back into the daylight with plans to make Rush Hour 4.
As the past few months have proven, Amazon isn’t above spending millions on a documentary designed to appease a US President who cheerfully slashes corporate tax rates. Nor, it seems, will it release certain films if they look as though they might make things awkward for their strategic business partners. In February, Amazon Web Services announced a massive partnership with OpenAI, with the former investing $50bn into the latter. Whether or not deals like this have anything to do with Amazon’s attitude to Artificial, we couldn’t possibly say.
In all likelihood, Guadagnino will find a new home for his Sam Altman biopic (MUBI is said to be interested) and we’ll eventually get to see the film that Amazon decided to cut loose. But as Warner Bros gets absorbed and the industry as a whole shrinks, filmmakers like Guadagnino are likely to find it harder than ever to make movies that bring CEOs and billionaires out in a cold sweat. And if movies can only tell stories that appease corporations, then that’s not just bad for cinema – it’s bad for democracy as a whole.
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