NBCUniversal Chief Content Officer Donna Langley spoke on a wide range of topics of interest to Hollywood, including the state of theatrical filmmaking, how artificial intelligence will be used in the entertainment industry, and the relationship between developing original storytelling and the desire for franchise IP.
Speaking at a Bank of America conference on Thursday, Langley was asked whether Hollywood studios should invest more in original projects, rather than relying on franchises familiar to consumers.
“This is a great paradox, because the short answer is 'Yes.' I think what we're seeing with audiences is that the pandemic has taught them to stay home and watch streaming, and we need to retrain them to go to the movies,” Langley said, noting that people used to go to the movies on Friday nights, then choose what they wanted to see when they got there. “That's not the case anymore, it's really destination viewing. We'll think about that in advance. Oppenheimer it's opening, Barbie is opening. Let's go see that movie.”
“In terms of that question, we look at originality, but then if it's too original and it doesn't feel familiar, then it's harder to market and it's harder to get people to try it, right? So we talk a little bit about that kind of familiar surprise, you know? So you take something that's familiar and you put a little bit of topspin on it,” Langley added. “An example of that is a competitor this year, Disney-Fox with Deadpool and Wolverineputting those two characters together gives everyone a little bit of what they want. They understand what it's about. There's a value proposition there, but putting them together, you've never seen that before, so we're constantly challenging ourselves to think outside the box.”
He also spoke about his views on Universal's film catalog and the role that intellectual property plays in it.
“I wish there was a formula, right? I wish it was like all the IP makes a hit movie, or all the talent puts out a movie, and it doesn't really work that way,” he said. “So the way we look at our slates and how we build them is really almost like an investment portfolio. It's very diverse across multiple genres, budget ranges, and it appeals to all different audiences. There are kind of pillars in there, whether it's animation or all-audience hit movies like Fast and furious OR Jurassic. And then we kind of wander around a little bit, but we have our specialty division Focus Features, and then you have the main slate of studios, you know, again, doing everything from Jason Blum horror movies to catering to a female audience. But we kind of really look at it in its entirety.”
That said, Langley also showed a hint of pessimism about the future of theatrical entertainment, given the radical changes the entertainment industry has faced in recent years.
“The challenges in the headwinds are clear and obvious and again, just go back to what I was talking about earlier, which is that the habit that we all had as moviegoers has dissipated. I think the volume in the marketplace picks up on that. But to what extent is the big question?” he said. “I can say that because we want to be very open about our challenges and not Pollyanna at all, we are kind of mapping our business on the assumption that we are not going to get back to 2019 levels, that we are going to stay kind of in the range that we were in '22-'23. I think '24 is an outlier year in that the impact of the strikes can't be overstated. It was devastating because we just didn't have the volume that was necessary for the audience to feel like there was something worth seeing, you know, so they just fall out of the habit.”
Bank of America analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich also pressed Langley on generative AI and the role it could play in the company’s future content.
Langley stressed that this technology has been around for a long time, although it has seen exponential growth in recent years.
“It's really important to us, though, that content creation is human-centric. The storytelling, the storytelling, the making of anything, it has to be human-driven,” he said. “And so if there are products being developed out there that can enable efficiency, great, we'll all jump on that. But it's really important to us to protect our filmmakers, it's really important to us to protect our intellectual property.”
As for how Universal will use AI: “Right now, it’s mostly about efficiencies and we’re looking at different ways it could enable post-production processes like, say, voice acting, some of the visual effects that we do in post-production and things like that,” Langley added. “So it should be very similar to when computer-generated imagery, CGI came along… in the animation world, instead of doing hand-painted drawings that would take five years, you could do it a lot faster. We’re looking at all those kinds of innovations to enable efficiencies, but we want to keep the quality obviously.”
He then talked about NBC's $2.5 billion-a-year deal with the NBA and what it could mean for the future of NBC's content.
“I’m really excited, mostly because it seems like the NBA audience is different than the NFL audience,” Langley said. “It’s going to open up new opportunities, or a bunch of opportunities, to invite new audience members, and figuring out how to cater to them, how to keep them there after games and use that to our advantage is really exciting, actually.”