AGC Studios chairman Stuart Ford, one of the independent film sector’s longest-standing and most influential financiers, offered a blunt assessment Friday of Netflix’s potential takeover of Warner Bros. Asked during a keynote appearance at Berlin’s European Film Market whether such a deal would be good for the film business, Ford didn’t hesitate.
“Probably, no,” he said.
The former Miramax executive and producer of Hacksaw Ridge, Silence and Hit Man acknowledged that one potential safeguard would be ensuring Netflix commits long-term to releasing Warner Bros. films theatrically “in a proper manner, with proper windowing.” That, he suggested, could help avoid “one major pitfall.”
But Ford argued the more “existential threat” posed by a studio-streamer mega-merger lies in a somewhat less attacked issue: Netflix’s longstanding business model of excluding producers and talent from meaningful backend participation tied to a film’s financial performance.
“If the culture becomes one of everybody’s an Uber driver, and we’re all just working for the big guy, we’re going to lose talent coming into this business, generationally — whether it’s film, television, micro dramas, or internet content creation,” Ford warned.
He said the industry is only now beginning to feel the downstream effects of the streaming model’s growing dominance over the past decade.
“We’re only just now starting to feel the effects in the industry of the flow of money having become interrupted, if not completely cut off, over the last 10 years as a result of streaming becoming such a major part of the distribution pipeline,” Ford said. “I’m not just talking about me as a financier, getting overages. We’re talking about the talent getting participations. We’re talking about residuals. We’re talking about the pitter-patter of money that would flow through the entire system and recycle.”
For Ford, restoring that circulation of revenue is critical to the business’s long-term survival.
“The biggest single thing that the independent film business — and the film business, per se — could do to revive itself, and I’m talking about the studio business as well, is to fight tooth and nail to preserve the business culture of money flowing through the system, as opposed to someone playing poacher and saying, ‘Ha, I got it all now. Thank you. Go make something else.’”
“If we do preserve it, I think film will continue to attract ambitious, idealistic talent,” he added. Without such a shift, he argued, the industry risks a generational brain drain.
Ford was speaking to a packed room of international producers at Winston Baker’s annual Film Finance Forum, co-sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter and held alongside the Berlin International Film Festival. His remarks were warmly received, with several lines drawing sustained applause.
Ever the operator, Ford was also careful not to vilify his partners at Netflix.
“There’s no great conspiracy here,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anyone sitting in a room at Netflix going, ‘How do we stick it to the film business?’ Certainly, the executives that we all deal with day to day — some of them are people I’ve known in the industry for 20 years — they’re real cinephiles. They do a great job, and the deals they make day to day to pre-buy movies are vital, actually, to keeping the business afloat right now.”
“But there needs to be some kind of bigger philosophical realignment within the tech sector and the media industry,” he went on. “How do we continue to attract talent into this sector? It’s a fundamental issue that people somewhat overlook.”