Episode 7: Mid-Year Update on 2024 Entertainment Industry Predictions with Tisha Morris

Welcome to the Entertainment Business Podcast. I'm your host, Tisha Morris. Join me as we go inside the entertainment industry of film, TV, books, music, and all content creation, where we'll weave together the creative and business of entertainment with practical tips, inspirational interviews, and insider information of all the latest trends. And with that, let's get on with the show. Hello and welcome to The Entertainment Business Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm Tisha Morris, your host, and today I'm doing something a little bit different. This is a, what we call a solo cast in the podcast world where it's just me today. And I wanted to kind of, number one, reintroduce myself to anyone who is new. Um, I am entertainment attorney based in the LA area. Area. And the reason I started this podcast is, quite frankly, I love the entertainment industry. I love all sides of it. I'm obviously on the business side of it, but I'm a huge, huge fan of all film and TV, books, music. I love all of it. And I'm on the, obviously, business side of it where I can help people get their projects out into the world. Growing up, I was fortunate enough to have parents who loved going to the movie theaters, and it was our family tradition to go every Friday night. So I feel I have at least through the '80s for sure, early '90s. I saw every mainstream film that was at the theaters. And, you know, the theater industry is going through a little bumps now, but good to see that it's getting some, which I want to talk about in this podcast today. It's, it's hanging on and it's so fun still to go to the theater. But I wanted to I wanted to do this solo cast and talk about some of the things going on in the entertainment industry currently. At the beginning of the year, I did a TikTok. By the way, I'm on TikTok, Tisha Morris. I think it's just Tisha Morris. And of my predictions for the year in the entertainment industry. And so we're at the halfway, halfway mark of the year. And this is sort of a check-in to see where we, where we are, where we've been so far this year and what I think is going to— what we're going to continue to see. I first want to talk about the summer hits. The summer hit. This is just a little more of on the creative side of the industry and Inside Out 2. Wow. This is another hit. The summer— this has been the biggest summer hit that we saw, that we've seen. It has already made $1.3 going on $1.4 billion. That's billion. It had a $200 million budget. And I loved it. I love, love, loved it. Okay. And also what I loved is that it was a female character. And so the common thread between last summer and this summer is female-driven movies do really well. They're breaking the billion-dollar mark. So I'm so happy to see that, and I think it's going to encourage more female leads and female topics. And I think it's just a real win-win for everyone. So that's my little take on the summer, the summer blockbuster. And I think it's again really helping the theaters giving some lifeblood that they very much need coming out of the pandemic and seeing where, you know, the theater industry goes. This was actually one of my predictions, and not initially for 2024, but in the upcoming future, and that is the kind of the renovation or resurrection or renaissance. I'm not sure which, which of the R-E words for the theater industry. I think I think the new theater in the future is going to be an entertainment destination with a lot of different, not just movies, but gaming and more interactive experiential, maybe some virtual reality components and making it more of an entertainment destination. Sony recently bought a theater chain, and I'm curious to see what energy they're going to infuse into that, or if they're just going to hold on to it and keep it as is for another day. But I'm curious to see what they're, what they're planning on doing with that. And which that leads me to, I don't know that this was in my prediction or not, but seeing live experiences, was it the Netflix House pop-up? I think it's more of a permanent pop-up. Of course, you know, this is obviously Disney figured this out years ago, having a theme park. But we're seeing more and more of these more studios having these live experiences. And this live component is really what I think the younger generations are really wanting and loving. What comes to mind is the Meow Wolf art installation. I don't know if anyone's been to that. It started in Santa Fe and is now in other cities. So I think— combining the live experience with the theater experience is where we're headed as far as the theater goes. All right. So one of my other predictions was more licensing. This was kind of somewhat Captain Obvious with the hit Suits on Netflix. It gave it another resurgence of an audience. And I think that really helped Netflix get on board with licensing something they were not in favor of in their earlier iterations. And now they're seeing the benefit of kind of reigniting old shows, particularly those with 9 seasons, something we don't really see anymore. And I think they're seeing that we really love the more seasons. Now in the thick of Madam Secretary, which has, I think, 6 seasons. The first 3 seasons has 23 episodes or 22, 23 episodes, which is kind of the old way of linear TV. And, you know, we love getting into these characters and these characters' lives and seeing where it all goes in these longer format series. So maybe whether it's through licensing or however that works down the road. I think that's a big, big sign of what, what viewers are wanting. Um, what they're also wanting is more live sports, okay? And we're seeing more of that in streaming, bringing more live sports. And we're seeing Netflix starting to jump on board with having live sports. They just bought out the WWE. Um, wrestling, not necessarily my cup of tea, but if you like Live wrestling, Netflix now has that. Peacock is making a big, big push in live sports, offering more on their streamer. Prime Video has had the Thursday Night Football for a year or so, but we're going to see more and more football and basketball, NBA, I think those, those, that licensing right is, is up on the auction block right now and we'll see where that falls. So yeah, more streaming live sports. And again, this goes back to that experience, experiential. I think the more we go down this AI path in general in the world, not just in the entertainment industry, but in every way, live sports and live experiences is where emotions reside. That's why personally I love watching sports. I love just watch Wimbledon and seeing the high-pressure moments and how these people handle it. And, and, uh, you know, that's why we love, love sports. There's a live— obviously a live-action component to it that's a little unpredictable, um, because there's real humans involved. So I think live sports, um, is, is, is going to be— continue to be bigger, as is sports betting, um, whether that's good or not. But, but sports betting— and that leads me to One of my biggest predictions, and that's gaming being bigger and bigger and bigger. And the idea of games to screen. So books to screen has been, been really hit a high a few years ago. I think we're going to start seeing games to screen more and more. That recent movie, was it Fall Guy? I didn't, I didn't see it, but that's based on a game and So that's something I'm actually seeing in my practice of negotiating games to screen. And you see also Netflix has a gaming component, or not gaming, but yeah, games that you can play. It shows up on my iPad, I don't know. So they're already seeing the writing on the wall with games as well. Another prediction I had was more mergers. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Gaming companies. Of course, the big merger of the year was or is Skydance and Paramount. I think that's going to be the big, the big merger news of 2024. You know, Paramount was, is one of the last really traditional studios. And now Skydance, that is the biggest news of the merger year. I don't foresee any other big mergers for this year. I think what we're seeing instead is a lot of bundling with, with companies coming together to bundle their streaming services. And so instead of buyouts and mergers and acquisitions, we're seeing a lot of kind of joint ventures with regarding— with regards to their bundling service. And so I think we're going to see more and more of that, maybe them testing the waters of what it's like to, to, to, to play nice with each other and see if it can be a win-win. Because I think we can all agree there's just, there's too many streaming services to keep up with. And, you know, we're obviously coming kind of coming back around full circle to, to where we were with the, with the 4 big networks. I don't think we'll ever go back to that with 4 big streamers. But you can already see that I mean, it's kind of already how it's playing out. So another one of my predictions was smaller budget content, um, that being more in vogue, which is good news for small filmmakers, indie filmmakers. And I'm going to reel that back a little bit. Um, there's kind of two sides of that. Yes, smaller budget content, mainly because there's so many new ways of getting content out, whether it's on YouTube, TikTok, private platforms online. That's nothing new. And so definitely the smaller budgets can find a home. But I will say that I'm going to kind of reel back my prediction because what I'm seeing is the studios in their their budget cutting, uh, definitely 2024, uh, has been a budget cut year for I think all the entertainment companies. They are relying on their tried and trues, and so those with a legacy, um, content with a legacy, uh, also tried and true actors who definitely can draw a crowd. Basically, they're going with very safe choices and options that they know that they can make their money on. Not a lot of experimenting, not a lot of gambling. And I think we're going to see that definitely through the rest of the year. I think into 2025, I think things start to lighten up. And the budget or the, the experimentation starts to get a little freer toward the last two quarters of 2025. But yeah, there's just a real tightening. You know, there's obviously the strikes were a thing. AI has been a thing. But honestly, it's really about the bottom line for these entertainment companies. That's really it's the shareholder price, balancing the books, getting their economics to a normal place following peak TV during the pandemic and during the streamer wars. So I think this, this pullback is really more about the economics than it has been about AI or the strikes. It is— it just kind of all happened at the same time. I think we're looking at summer 2025 when the entertainment companies start, start loosening up and spending a little bit more money. And until then, we're going to have some licensing, we're going to have some good sports. And then the smaller formats, that's where the experimental and the films, more the indie films, will find a home. So That's kind of where I'm seeing the industry right now. It is a, it is a very interesting time. I know there's a lot of people out of work in the LA area. There was an article that just released yesterday about reality TV being way down as far as in Los Angeles. I think that article was a little bit short-sighted in just talking about Los Angeles. I think reality TV, I don't know I don't have the numbers, but I don't know that it's extremely down in general. It's just down in Los Angeles. I think that makes a lot of sense. A lot of these reality TVs are now taking place all over, you know, in different cities. There was one recently I watched that took place in San Diego, another in Atlanta, another in Austin, of course, in some of the islands. Yes, I'm a reality TV fan, if you can't tell. And rarely do reality shows take place in LA. 'Cause, you know, why? It's expensive to, and there's not, the tax credits are different for reality TV than they are scripted. So that kind of, that article kind of made sense to me. I don't think it's any big news that the industry doesn't already know. But yeah, things are tight. Things are tight. And, you know, I think it's gonna be, I think everyone's kind of holding their breath for when the budgets do pick up as to, you know, which jobs will be replaced by AI. I think that's the big wait and see. So I'd love your— I would love your thoughts on any of this. Follow me on Instagram. I always post the links to the episodes. Feel free to comment on those posts. And if you don't already follow and subscribe to the show, please do. And please provide a review, assuming that it's good, and any requests of guests If you want to be a guest on my show, then just go to the website. There's a form to fill out. My website is MorrisEntertainmentLaw.com or TishaMorris.com and go to the podcast page. And I love to have— I have authors, musicians, actors, filmmakers, anything entertainment related. So again, thank you so much for listening, being a listener of the podcast, and I will see you soon. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you like the podcast, please like, subscribe, maybe even share to your friends. And for more information about my services, visit my website at tishamorris.com. That's T-I-S-H-A Morris. Well, that concludes today's episode, and I wish you all the best. Until next time, keep creating and please take care.