Hollywood is feeling the lure of Saudi Arabian money (…)
Saudi money is also behind a portion of Paramount Skydance’s more than $60 billion bid this week for Warner Bros Discovery, according to Variety, which cites multiple sources, and Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the discussions. A spokesperson for Paramount declined to comment.
Additionally, the kingdom is backing a $1 billion new independent content studio called Arena SNK launched in October by former Lionsgate executive Erik Feig, and a $55 billion deal for video game maker Electronic Arts announced in September. A representative for Feig declined to comment.
Executives from Sony traveled to Saudi Arabia this fall for meetings, a spokesperson confirmed. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts also traveled to the country this fall to attend a conference and view a potential theme park site in Qiddiya, a tourism megaproject in Riyadh province, according to a source with knowledge of Roberts’ trip who was not authorized to speak on the record about it. (Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is the parent company of NBC News.)
The Red Sea Film Festival 2025 is going on right now (Dec 4-13). The glitterati are partying with Saudi royalty & following the money while blithely ignoring Saudi human rights abuses
Me thinks the problem is that very few people go to the movies unless there’s some kind of hook, e.g. their favorite actor or a known franchise.
Direct to streaming movies seldom make Hollywood money.
Well the real problem is that what you’re saying does exist to some extent, and it’s a very easily controlled variable
So when execs and investors look at marvel, they learn the wrong lesson. Endgame threw in an insane number of expensive actors and made an insane amount of money
Instead of looking at the years of setup and buildup of characters in this grand artistic vision, they’re working with spreadsheets to try to min-max the actor to box office numbers
It’s why everything just keeping getting worse. The finance brained people are running the world, and you can always count on them to learn the wrong lesson
I think though that theater tickets being expensive and nice TVs getting cheaper is probably also a reason.
I just feel there is an entire history of movies to prove you fantastically wrong.