A rundown of which studio upfront presentations to advertisers hit and missed this week, followed by some thoughts about the culture war backlash to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
LOSER: Warner Bros. Discovery Presentation. “That’s it?!” said attendees at the conclusion of WBD’s presentation, which was heavy on familiar clips and light on substance, stars, news and everything else. It was like HBO’s The Sopranos cut-to-black ending in upfront form. CEO David Zaslav? Absent. HBO boss Casey Bloys? Not on stage. Warner Bros. Discovery advertising president Bobby Voltaggio opened the show by pledging, with not-entirely-convincing cheerfulness, to address “the Ellison — I mean the elephant — in the room,” and then proceeded to essentially not do that (“We’ve been through change and challenges before,” he optimistically said of the pending Paramount merger).
It was surprising to see a company with so many hugely popular streaming franchises — Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC, Dune — not advance the conversation about any of them. The biggest reaction from the stoic Madison Avenue audience was when three puppies were brought out on stage, infusing some oxytocin into the crowd’s upfront-numbed brains.
Winner: Disney’s Presentation: The Devil Wears Prada 2 star Anne Hathaway introduced Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro by saying “the new boss claims he is nicer than Miranda Priestly” which had to make the audience think, “Wait, didn’t this guy just lay off 1,000 people?” D’Amaro then tried to ingratiate himself with the New York crowd by playfully noting he’s a Boston Celtics fan, which went over about as well as you’d expect. At that point, I conspiratorially wondered if Disney’s upfront writers were deliberately sabotaging this guy. Then D’Amaro smartly noted how the brand appeal of Disney — it’s magic, if you will — is “what every audience, every sponsor, every brand in this room is actually trying to buy.” Basically: We own entertainment culture.
The rest of the Disney presentation was heavy on sports, especially with ABC getting the Super Bowl next year. Dwayne Johnson promoted the upcoming live-action remake Moana that somehow still looks like an animated movie. The trailer for Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel The Shards looks exactly like something his fans will enjoy. Battle-scarred Jimmy Kimmel’s roast of the industry was even stronger than usual (the best bit: “I cost our company a lot of money this year, billions. It is very possible that no employee in the history of any company has cost their employer more than hiring me 24 years ago. Just from a purely mathematical standpoint, it was the worst personnel decision that Disney Corporation has ever made”).
WINNER: Netflix’s Presentation: The streamer won social media with red carpet pics of Millie Bobby Brown, Florence Pugh and Jennifer Lopez and a firehose of press announcements (such as an adaptation of the Barbaric comic series and Kim Kardashian producing a sure-to-be-classy teen drama titled, naturally, Calabasas). Netflix’s ad-tier plan now reaches a staggering 250 million users globally, and they pledged to keep finding more nooks and crannies during your viewing experience to shove ads into. Netflix remains a streaming rabbit everybody is chasing.
WINNER: Amazon’s Presentation: With its deep pockets, Amazon loaded up the stage with Oprah Winfrey, Chris Pratt, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael B. Jordan — Jordan has three projects with Prime Video (including a Creed spin-off series). So what if Arnold was there to promote the same movie, The Man With The Bag, that he promoted last year? Surprisingly, nothing on Blade Runner 2099, which has been in the works for four years and is (supposedly) debuting this year. After some rough times, Prime Video feels like it’s been getting some momentum.
Draw: YouTube’s Presentation. Yes, YouTube ate TV, then podcasts, and is now the dominant streaming platform. Yes, they ponied up for Chappell Roan to perform. But YouTube remains a content creator platform without a personality — sort of the anti-Disney. It’s brand is … a video player. The most compelling thing YouTube star MrBeast has made, Beast Games, is over on Amazon. This is, admittedly, not a business problem for YouTube. But while some mock Warner Bros. or Paramount these days, those studios still feel like companies you can root for rather than an algorithmic digital appliance.
LOSER: NBC Universal’s Presentation. Upfront presentations should not be two hours long. It’s like somebody handing you a six-page résumé — with two pages devoted to hyping Peacock, the streaming service that lost $432 million last quarter. NBC otherwise had a huge ratings season thanks to the Olympics and Super Bowl, and now faces the unenviable task of convincing those viewers to stick around (joked Seth Meyers: “We have taken down CBS. Well, the Ellisons did, but I like to think we helped”). Perhaps the biggest headline was Vin Diesel announcing four Fast & Furious shows in development, which feels less like … a lot? Fitting for a company living one quarter mile — and quarterly report — at a time.
Draw: Fox’s Presentation: The trailer for the Baywatch remake admittedly looked fun (lifeguards battling plane crashes, tornados, wildfires — typical lifeguard stuff). Toughest sell moment: “In the battle for attention, passion wins” — while promoting Tubi, the streaming app you have never once clicked on first (though, admittedly, has rather impressive ad stats). Gordon Ramsay came out to alarmingly bark, “People really like watching other people doing some stupid fucking shit!” — which is one way to promote your content. What was striking is how Fox, a decade or so ago, was still considered a relatively youthful network, but there was a CBS-level of gray hair among its showcased talent. When an anxious-looking teen came out to promote a sitcom, one feared she would be sacrificed for her collagen.
LOSER: The Odyssey Race Critics. Shifting gears here. So, believe it or not, there are people looking at The Odyssey — a movie starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson and Jon Bernthal — and going, “Nope, still not white enough!”
The backstory: I wrote a story Tuesday about Lupita Nyong’o being confirmed as Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra in The Odyssey. Then Daily Wire’s “I’m not racist but…” podcaster Matt Walsh screenshot the story and wrote: “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’ But Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave ‘the most beautiful woman’ role to a white woman.” The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, amplified the tweet and wrote “True.”
Thoughts: There’s an ironic lack of awareness to declare that you know real beauty while saying something that any healthily socialized person would consider so ugly (especially over something as trivial — yes, trivial — as a movie). The line I italicized gives their game away — they assume the most beautiful woman role should go to a white woman. Because … why? And the story of Helen is partly a love story. You know who finds Nyong’o — or literally any woman, for that matter — “the most beautiful woman in the world”? Somebody who loves her. That’s part of what love is. One suspects many chronically online men, sadly, haven’t experienced this. Nolan, for his part, smartly isn’t being drawn into this culture war.
Lupita Nyong’o
Frazer Harrison/WireImage
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