OMHP on Big Industry News: Mergers, Closures, and Changing Locations

Welcome to the latest episode of One Moore Hollywood Podcast, newsflash edition! In this episode, our esteemed hosts, Chris Moore, Katie Marpe, and Dennis De Nobile, discuss the most noteworthy industry updates of the week. These include significant mergers, closures, and the possibility of the Sundance Film Festival leaving its historic Park City location. Our hosts talk about what these big shifts mean to them and why they should matter to you, the audience!

Is Sundance Leaving Utah?

Sundance, the independent film festival based in Utah since its inception in 1978, might be moving locations. This week, Sundance asked cities to submit proposals to host the festival. Don’t worry; this shift won’t happen until 2027, so the tiny ski resort town of Park City will still host the next two years of the festival. As of now, both Atlanta and San Francisco have sent in proposals. 

So, what does this potential change of location mean for the festival? What does it mean for those attending the festival? Our hosts, particularly Marpe, who worked for Sundance years ago, have conflicting opinions. On the one hand, having attended last January’s festival, all three of our hosts wouldn’t mind a warmer climate for waiting outside in 45-minute lines for exclusive screenings. On the other hand, Sundance is a nonprofit film festival focused on preserving independent film, so the idea of hosting it in a huge city almost feels antithetical to its purpose. This particularly applies to San Francisco, which Marpe declares an unacceptable location for the independent festival (hello, Silicon Valley). “Maybe a smaller big city!” she suggests.

De Nobile feels Atlanta makes the most sense of the two cities that have sent proposals to host Sundance thus far. Not only does Atlanta have better weather than Park City in January, but it has been positioning itself as a production-friendly city over the last several years, and it would be able to accommodate more people than Park City. Not to mention, Park City was never really asked if it wanted to host Sundance because it was such a small event at its conception. Now, tens of thousands of people descend upon Park City each year, engulfing and overwhelming the tiny town every January.

According to Moore and Marpe, what Sundance needs to be doing amidst all this change (and what they hope Sundance is doing) is to answer its purpose and ensure it continues to move in a direction that prioritizes the preservation of independent film and original storytelling. 

Netflix’s Updated Transparency Policy

Netflix has always touted itself as being transparent with its subscribers and growth (despite never being particularly transparent with either). Now the game’s up, and Netflix has announced it will no longer share subscriber numbers with investors. This shook investors, resulting in Netflix’s stocks plummeting the day of the announcement. 

Moore guesses Netflix’s decision may have been influenced by the relative newness of its four subscriber tiers. To avoid confusion when reporting subscriber numbers, Netflix decided to share only those that make it look successful, a policy that is not that different from how any other publicly traded company operates. 

Big Studio News: Mergers & Closures

Now for other big news: the legacy Hollywood studio Paramount is for sale, and there are some giant bids in for it already, Sony and David Ellison’s Skydance Media being the frontrunners in this bidding war. Since Skydance is owned and operated by a wealthy family who have historically shown interest in preserving film, theaters, and creating hits, our hosts are more inclined to support Skydance taking over Paramount than Sony.

However, as Moore explains, these mergers are problematic (think Amazon’s purchase of MGM Studios and Disney’s takeover of 20th Century Fox) because they mean fewer companies exist, resulting in less variety of content. “The reason it matters is it shrinks the amount of people who can put money and distribution behind stories,” Moore says. As this continues, there will be fewer and fewer people at the top deciding what stories get told. 

If you care about having access to unique and varied stories, this news matters greatly because even independent films are affected by changes at the studio level. Because of how streaming and home video work, an independently produced film will likely be owned and distributed by one of the major studios.

More disheartening news is that Jeff Skoll’s socially conscious production company, Participant, is closing its doors after twenty years of creating award-winning film and TV–the latest casualty of a time when independent film struggles to find adequate support. “They greenlit a lot of stuff that never would have been greenlit,” De Nobile says. 

Despite this sad news, Marpe gives us hope by reminding us of the cycle of Hollywood. “Historically, the way the cycle has gone is that independent film and original stories find a new way through,” she explains. All the indie film and TV going away leaves the door open for something else to come in. 

“Someone out there listening needs to find a new way to get through,” Marpe says. 

Listen to the entire episode here: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or iHeartRadio.