There wasn't a ton of market research, iteration or testing, at least not up front. Executives would green-light a project and budget based on their personal experience and/or biases and opinions about what will work and what won't..
Not sure if that's still the case (this was ~10 year ago), but that rarely works in tech.
- Movies begin as risk assessments and cash flow analysis in the finance dept based on historical data.
- The revenue graph for a movie is a function of release month, the number of celebrity actors in the film, the box office receipts, followed by DVD sales, followed by TV release and a long tail of syndication (airlines, cable etc).
- Studios know, for example, that a romantic comedy in Feb staring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler will make a guaranteed $35 million at the box office regardless of what the movie is. A summer blockbuster with Will Smith will have a guaranteed $100 million in box office and DVD sales spread out over time. Sequels to popular movies will bring in a certain minimum income guaranteed. Movies that minimize dialog and maximize action do well in the global market. Include China or a Chinese celebrity actor in the plotline and you are guaranteed millions of additional revenue. This provides the bean counters information on how much to spend on movie production to minimize risk and ensure a steady revenue stream throughout the year.
- So the finance dept will green light a February rom-com with a production budget of $10 million, a summer blockbuster where there can splurge $75-100 million on production etc. They monitor other studio release dates to avoid going head-to-head with their releases. They keep a stable of celebrity actors on studio contract and force directors to include plot lines that maximize a global audience.
- It is only after the finance dept gives the green light and budget that they go and look at possible movies to make and pick a director. Story ? - that's just about the last thing to work out (Pixar is the exception).
While there‘s a limited subset of AI like GANs that I‘d actually call creative, the usual tabular models are none of these.
So what do you do to maximise chances for a box office success?
Do a sequel to (or remake of) a well known movie, hire a star, use the standard playbook (never skip the „all is lost“ moment for dramatic effect) and add a love scene.
If you ever wondered why 2020 Hollywood feels like the same boring stuff in 8k UHD over and over again.
I think Netflix did pretty well with just hiring some known creative people and telling them „whatever you do, just use your gut feeling and we‘ll buy it“.
That's been going on since the first wagons rolled into Hollywood.
I'm pretty sure even Shakespeare was doing a 16th Century, theatrical equivalent.
That's your toolkit. Build from there. And that' been true since we're telling stories, more or less.
Those Netflix decisions about who to hire are extremely data-driven - much moreso than Hollywood. House of Cards was their proof of concept in 2013:
> Sarandos says their wealth of data on user viewing habits proved there's a large audience for Fincher, Spacey and political thrillers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130126061225/http://www.huffin...
But I get your point, either extreme can potentially produce less than great results.
Really initial production is only half your production costs, and is a tricky process where what's greenlit often doesn't bear much relation to what comes out the other end. So the market research and metrics work better when you know a bit more about what the final product is.
This condition needs a name. I've done it myself too many times to count. The first time was back in 2004 with a Facebook rival at Yale University. We had all this great social photo and media sharing but it wasn't growing against the simplicity of Facebook. So, after a couple months of not being Facebook, we gave up and got jobs
<face palm>
You can't easily change the design of the space shuttle after you built it, so you better get it right.
Consumer hardware isn't quite so permanent, you can always recall the whole thing (samsung phones, early famicom), if you have the money.
But a website is easy to change -- there's no sense making it perfect before you know if people will use it.
But this sentiment is exactly this issue! "Before you know if people will use it" -- the point is that when people don't use it, is it because it was a bad idea to compete with Facebook or because the design wasn't right? When to give up and when to iterate?
- "I'm a rich/powerful/successful media person. I had success in my industry doing business a certain way, so why shouldn't I be able to translate that into running a tech startup too?"
- "I'm a good programmer and I don't see any reason why Zuckerberg would be smarter than me. What's so special about Facebook? We can beat them."
- "I'm in touch with what most people want, and this product idea totally makes sense to me. All I need to do is polish it up, and I'm sure I'll find users who are as excited about it as I am."
Or, the flip side of the same coin is really about ego. One of the hardest lessons of the lean/agile/tech-y start-up culture (in its idealized form), is to not let ego interfere with learning, but also to be able to let go of ego-centrism without giving up confidence or competence (i.e. you don't have all the answers and you should be fundamentally humble and curious, BUT you should not forget or overlook your existing skills or competencies either).
I doubt it's practical for individual episodes yet. You would likely need a month between episodes to do this, and people would just forget about your show in that time.
Some folks on Patreon are experimenting with it. One of my favorite series Astartes[0] puts out episodes every rare once and awhile, but we all clamor for them nonetheless.
You couldn't run a normal show this way, for sure. But it is interesting to see the results of it in the small.
It's simply infeasible to adjust a show to fan feedback on a weekly basis I think. You'd need either a really small show, or one where most of the elements (sets, lighting, wardrobe, etc.) stay pretty consistent between episodes, then the work would just be a matter of tweaking the story, rather than figuring out how to get the whole crew out to all the locations required to make a traditional tv show.
So you cant really change that much week to week.
Consider also the way standups hone material over many performances building up their set.
So there are incremental feedback models in entertainment - but they’re rare.
I guess remakes and reboots are a crude model of iteration as well, although it’s not like each new iteration of Spider-Man is a refinement of the last based on audience feedback - it’s still speculative ‘here’s that same thing repackaged in a way new audiences will love!’ thinking, rather than creeping towards product-market-fit
This situation is emblematic of the fundamental conflict it would face. On the one side the desire to produce rapid cheap bite-size content to iterate on for a metrics-based tech company, on the other blowing all the cash for said content on the Hollywood tactic of putting star power on the red carpet
most ventures fail, whether it's in tech or entertainment. tech has billion dollar flameouts too--webvan, theranos, etc. entertainment has startups that hit big too--parasite for example. founders who exit successfully can more easily raise the next time around, just like directors and producers who have a hit.
each industry thinks it's unique and different, but that's due mainly to ego, not to (many) true differences. even cultures largely overlap. people with gobs of money can (and if warranted, should) fail too.
for instance, the movie (and tv) business more readily lends itself to a repetitive process constrained on storytelling, which is more focused, on a macro scale, than tech. it would be akin to tech companies settling on only building web businesses over and over again, albeit with different twists. the video game sector has possibly hit that kind of stride.
i don't know that this affects their ability to succeed though, well-funded or not.
Streaming video for example has more or less stopped producing viable venture startups on the B2C side. Successful new ventures in streaming, the ones who will actually make money, are folks like Disney and Warner with IP. Their business advantage is horizontal integration, rent seeking for content with killer margins over company-controlled pipes. Disney Plus, HBO Max apps have zero notable tech innovations. The only criteria to the consumer is that the content is exclusive and the app stays in the background and doesn't fail. OTT video, as a vertical for consumer innovation, is over.
Same goes for SaaS, ecommerce, social networks, gaming, music, news etc. Maybe we'll get some standout disruptions from time to time as hardware evolves. But the tech is all about plumbing from here on out..
If the investors are known for hockey stick growth tech startups, your company is a tech company even if you are just long real estate.
A very large portion of well funded, early stage startups that crash and burn in LA are typically because media people have a hard time conceptualizing lean startup, and rapid iteration etc. Over the years I've accepted it's not so much hubris as it is entertainment is just a different industry with a different way of doing business and people who found success in entertainment think that method they achieved translates to tech startups, when it unfortunately doesn't.
In Hollywood you put all this time and money into one big event like a film, or an album or a pilot and people scoop it up due to marketing. They consume it, then they are done. If they like it they ask for more. So if you have the money you spend all of the money at once to make the best thing possible, put as much marketing and PR against it as possible and people will consume it anyway. Usually you make some of your money back. If consumers ask for more, that's a bonus. Then you go out and raise more for the sequel or the next album or whatever.
Of course tech is different - you can't put all that money into the first iteration and expect it to pay off. You need to stretch it out over many experiments and control burn over years. It's just a totally different financial model and business plan. There are so so many Quibis out there that never got past private alpha / beta. The execs spend YEARS crafting that perfect alpha, open it up privately to friends and family, it flops and then they throw in the towel just like that. I've seen it more times than I can count now