Sony Film CEO on Losing ‘Sinners’ and the Endless Big Tech Battle

Don't miss the movie critics are raiding his epic and exciting and gorgeous and heartbreaking, and stands as one of the greatest films ever made.

It's got incredible visuals, jaw-dropping action, and a cinematic achievement.

Avatar Fire and Ash now playing in theaters, and now nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and Best Costume Design. It is Monday, February 23rd, shaping up to be a nice rebound year for the Sony Pictures Movie Studio. After 2025, with only one movie that grows more than $100 million worldwide, this year

they've got a new Spider-Man, the Dumanji, a resident evil with Zack Kregger directing, and last weekend they successfully opened Go, an original animated movie.

“Sony's at the center of a bunch of industry trends we talk about a lot in this show, remember”

that the only major studio that does not own its own general interest streaming platform. That might seem like a big weakness in modern Hollywood, and some ways it is, but it's turned Sony into an attractive partner for the big streamers. They sell a lot of shows to the streamers, and Netflix just re-opped its pay one deal. That's the first pay TV window for Sony's movies.

That went for more than $7 billion worldwide, and of course Sony produced Kpop Demon Hunters,

which is now the biggest movie ever on Netflix. Starting the film's studio for more than a decade now, as Tom Roth has got a rich history as a top executive in Hollywood. He was at Fox for 20 years, founded the Fox search light specialty unit, and he ran the Big Fox studio.

And since 2015, he's been the chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures' Motion Picture Group, where he's made and released movies like The Spider-Man, and Spider-Verse franchise, once point in time in Hollywood, anyone but you, and it ends with us. Yes, he lived through that one.

“Sony doesn't have as much IP in its stable as rivals like Disney or Warner Brothers, so it”

has to be a little bit more creative. They're developing a LeBoubou movie, but they're also betting on more originality, Roth, and says. We wanted to get him on the show for a while.

He's always got strong opinions, and he's definitely willing to fight me, which I appreciate.

So I'm happy to say, joined us last week, at the AFI Conservatory for a live show in front of a crowd of students. The first of our little films full tour we're doing. Lucas Shaw was there as well. We talked the Windows issue, the Netflix Warner's ramifications, Kpop, the movie star

question a lot more. This is a two-parter, second-part will post tomorrow, but today it's Tom Rothman, and how he's making Sony pictures a lot more than just Spider-Man. I'm the Ruger and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is the town. Let's bring 'em out, Tom Rothman.

We're in a very cool Columbia Pictures bomber jacket, available for purchase in the Columbia Pictures store. I don't think so, unless you're haunting eBay or somewhere. Maybe I just came up with a side note of what vintage it is. At my age, I don't discuss such this.

You can tell by which of the Columbia Pictures women is in the eye. Well, that's a great thing. If ever one of the cool things is I'm sure you've seen, you both have seen when you come to the lot, the commissary on the building opposite the commissary is a series of the lady with the lamp from the beginning, each iteration, and it's really cool.

Last year we celebrated our 100th anniversary of Columbia Pictures, and that's a great thing. One of the great lucky things about the incredible fortune and good luck that I have with the job that I have, but it's the thing that the studio's, the historic studios, which are now seem to be called the legacy studios, have that all the Apple money in the world cannot buy.

And that's history. Yes.

“It costs them, what is it, $7 billion to rent your library Netflix for a few years?”

Well, something like that. Okay. It's value. Yes. So, I want to start.

I'll take the first question. I want to start by talking about this particular moment where we are, where we have one of the historic studios, I won't use the word legacy, is now being fought over by two companies, Netflix, and Paramount. I'm not going to ask you who you think is going to win everyone else, and then I don't

really know. But I do want to ask you about the implications of that sale, because things are going to change, right? Yeah. I think this is a major moment, not just because of that, but because what it's symptomatic

up, this, I would say, is the fifth, as Churchill would say, climate threat in the more than 100 years of the movie business in the honor and 20 plus, 130 plus years. If you think of it over the course of the history of the movie business, the first, obviously being the invention of sound, the second, the end of the studio system. And I also, I have the complete privilege and honor, I sit in Louis V. Mayor's office because

And I often say his death compared to the waters, I know I've actually never seen Jack

Warner's death, but I know how if you never knew Jack Warner's death. I mean, David, that was off. We'll show it to you for free. You can't have to say that. But I mean, if I go over there.

I didn't get, but if you come see me, I can show you Louis office, Louis office, one of the

“two most famous offices, and in those days, I think, you know, what they say about the”

brilliant Irving Fallberg, Louis office is in the fallberg building, right? Irving Fallberg was so brilliant, that by my age, he'd already been dead for 40 years. Just that. Everybody worked for him. How hard was it?

Everybody worked for him. And if you didn't want to do what Uncle Lou wanted you to do, you had to come into the office that I now occupy, and because they all, the stars, there was no freedom to move between students. Correct.

So, when that ended very abruptly, when Jimmy Stewart came home from the war, and had been shot out by the Nazis, he didn't give an F, what Uncle Lou wanted him to do. He wanted to do what he wanted to do. So, the breakdown of the studio system, then I would say the third, climactor, convention of television.

And all of the home entertainment that followed, which we'll talk about, I assume today. And that was a similar crisis moment for the movie business, and I ran Fox for a number of years, and the myth was that it was Cleopatra that almost bankrupted Fox. It wasn't. Actually, the Petra was a hit, isn't it?

It was television. The fourth, obviously, the transition from analog to digital, and now we're in the fifth. Right now, as we sit here today, and now I would say that, is the entry of truly hyper-scale technology companies into our business at a level of capitalization beyond anything that could ever been conceived, these are trillion dollar companies that have decided, or whatever

reasons, to come in to our business, and could comment it with that is what I would refer to as the crisis in Windows. And those two things are related, because the trillion dollar technology companies, the issues of profitability in the movie business secondary to them.

“I think for the first time, because they're scaled, they don't have to play by Hollywood's”

rule. Correct. And they actually don't have to make profit, it's such a small portion of what their balance sheets are, and that is very different. Believe it or not, I remain optimistic that if Hollywood writ large, so the entire ecosystem

recognizes both the thread and the opportunity. There's a vibrant future, if, and I use this not in the royal sense, I use it in the literal sense, if we respond in the right way. And you say opportunity, what opportunity are you talking about? Look, I'm a movie guy, right?

So I can speak separately about movies themselves, which I continue to believe in if we do the right things, but I think we are at a very decisive moment. But with respect to all these bright young, we're going to also bright young and optimistic out here. I'm not going to disillusion all these young folks, go out and get them, whatever the

traditional economics that I grew up under, people will always want to be entertained.

“But to believe there's opportunity for a company like yours, you have to believe there”

are things that you so many pictures can do that a hyper-scaled company cannot do, and I believe that thoroughly. And what is that besides owning beloved IP, what is it that you can do that Apple Amazon and Netflix and YouTube cannot do? I can answer that in the immortal words of Beyoncé.

When somebody asked her, how do you get to be Beyoncé? You know what she said? Make dope shit. So that's as simple as it is. Well, yeah, it's just ain't easy to do.

But you're going to say that I had imagined that on a percentage basis your hit rate is better than those other companies. Those other companies have made dope shit. Occasionally.

Look, since the history of art, since Devinci fell off his ladder, two things are have always

been inconsistent, quantity and quality. You kind of got a pick, right? More and more for the theatrical business, the theatrical bar has gotten higher and higher and higher, right? You've got to be over the theatrical bar, because I would like to talk about why that

bar's gotten higher, because I think it's part of the larger challenge as we face. Talk about why is that bar higher? But is that bar really a quality bar? I mean, if you go and look at the 10 highest grossing movies each year, you're telling me that those movies are there because there are some of the best movies released for the

audience, they are. So don't be a snob. We're in the audience business. But they're the best movies that are pre-branded for the audience. There's no pre-branded on sinners, it's just great, and there was no pre-brand.

It was just really good and really satisfying and the audience loved it, and they told

their friends.

“But the reason the bar has gotten higher is because of the mistake that, again, collectively”

the business and we bear our own share of the responsibility for this. I don't sure it has made with respect to windows. windows are very ill-understood aspect of our business right now. What happened was collectively movies went through a near-death experience in code. We're in out of home entertainment business and nobody could leave their homes.

So that put tremendous amount of pressure on the people like us who make movies and on exhibition who exhibit movies, when they were literally closed, it was literally, if you go, you're going to die, the movie's got to be really good for that. Let's face, you know, I really want to see it. Enough to die?

Well, maybe I want you to know, so then we came back out of that and there were in my judgment in correct assumptions made about what the larger ecosystem needed and what was best for the larger ecosystem. I mean, the length of the windows. Yes, the length, but understanding the windows when people talk about their multiple

windows, the length of the window to what is also the thing to transactional. Where you buy it. And the way you buy it. Where you're paying money to watch it, your TV, your own it, but you're renting it to subscription to free to act all of it.

Correct. Throughout all of the history of the movie business from that moment I mentioned in television,

entertainment in the home first is seen as a terrible threat to the movie business.

And then becomes a great boon to the movie business. It has happened every time and I live personally for many of those transitions. That's what happened with television and syndication. That's what happened when the video cassettes at home, oh, my gosh, you can put it in your thing.

Who's going to go to the movie theater, everybody? And then they buy it again at home with its good HBO home box office was a boon to us. And guess what? Same thing. 500 channels.

Streaming is a great boon to us. It's like a fantastic partner for us. We make a great great deal of money on our pay one window.

“The key to all of this is to protect the exclusivity, protect an exclusivity period for movies”

and movie theaters. It's simple gang. Who's seeing cassette blanca here in this audience good because if you have and you're all expelled. So he says at the end says Rick, maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon.

We've made the audience think that they don't have to go to the movie for a story-based reason. We made them think that they can see it at home, maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon. They don't know. They don't distinguish between people putting it out on 17 days.

But if enough movies come out in 17 days, they know. Maybe not today or tomorrow. But soon. And they're not idiots. Say, my Nikola, do you feel the mood of this story-based hero with a change in the

window? No. No, not. As a story-based hero, you don't have to do anything with it. Wow.

That's all right. Yes, exactly. As a story-based hero, you don't have to do anything with it. As a story-based hero, you don't have to do anything with it. You can't do anything with it.

No, I don't feel like a story-based hero. A story-based hero? Yes. Is this a story-based? Yes, but that's only half the equation.

Because as much money as you guys make from Netflix, they're also competing with you and conditioning the audience with their own originals and going back to the scale comment for the first time in the history of the movie business. The distributor is able to spend just like you do and compete just like you do for the top-level projects.

No. That's the difference.

The video, when HBO at the height, HBO is not making $100 million movies.

Netflix is. My turn? Yes. Okay. No.

Because algorithms don't market, we do.

“That's why our product is so valuable to Netflix because you know about it.”

If we made it good enough, you're going to care about it. That's number one. And number two, how many here are in the directing program or the writing program? Okay. How many of you in the directing program and the writing program?

dreamed of your whole life to go out on streaming.

How many of you, the movie you care about that you've been thinking about making since you were ever a kid? I want to put that movie out in movie theaters with that lady in front of it. I feel bad that we beat the hell out of every day. Okay.

Two questions off of that. What was your most watched movie release last year? Well, this is a trick question. He knows the answer. Yeah.

But we all know the answer. Our most watched movie was a K-pop demon hun. Which was released on Netflix. Yeah. With the lack of marketing that you described.

Yep. And it took about a month for that movie catch on.

“And that's why that movie was placed in the very right place for it.”

The most you picture business that I'm in, you guys all hear this phrase as you go out in the world.

And you have some of your first studio meetings.

It's the parachute business, meaning you open or you die. So that's the way it works, unfortunately, but it's worked that way for a long time really in the post jaws era. The advantage with Netflix and we are extremely happy with K-pop. We're very proud of it.

Goes to what you were saying before the quality of animation. But do you think it would have opened? You think K-pop would have opened? No. I don't.

I think the evidence is pretty clear that it's a classic, classic. The other thing that you get, it didn't open on Netflix. They're okay. But nobody would jump it up and down for weeks and weeks. What the great advantage there is, and why it's in the right place, especially for that particular

thing that was a word of mouth, the repeat viewing is free.

“Repeat viewing in movie theaters is not free.”

And the word of mouth phenomenon that that became over a number of weeks when you look at the Netflix chart, it goes gradually like this. And then up and up. I think that was a perfect match. You do that deal again.

I mean, obviously there was a lot of other things. You did a slate deal during COVID to get a lot of Sony movies like to Netflix, one of them was K-pop. I trust me. In my job, I, hindsight is 2020 and I regret a lot of decisions, not that one.

That's been great. It's been great for the brand. There are also tremendous number of intangible benefits that have come to that, which are really rich. We are now.

I'm very proud to say this is a credit to Michelle Grady at ImageWorks and Christine Bellson and Damien at Spa, we're the hottest animation shop in town. And if you're a young, cool animator who wants to break ground and do new stuff and don't want to do the same old, same old stuff, you're beaten down spa, so many pictures animations doors.

So that's great. And we're attached forever to it. So we're very happy. And we're happy. Here's the other thing.

I'll just say about that. That was done as part of the direct platform part of our deal. Our job is to deliver them hits. That's what we're supposed to do.

“And I think they're very happy because they've renewed a very nice deal for us.”

Speaking of decisions, you may regret what about sinners. You were in on sinners would not do the unique deal that gives Ryan Kubler the copyright after 25 years. Do you regret that one? I don't regret it.

I'm sad. That we couldn't have it. We actually offered more money for it than it went for. I thought it was fabulous. And I think Ryan is an exceptionally fabulous director.

In fact, I have a story about him, which is that I was on the jury at Sundance when fruit fell station was its Sundance. And I went in the jury room and we closed the door in the jury room and I said, "Okay, gang, we can do this in five minutes or we can stay here all night. I'm not leaving till we say fruit fell station."

What is the dissenter? I can't even remember. There was a lot of dissent. The truth, the matter was, if you know your stuff, you knew it when you saw it. So I had the honor to hand Ryan his jury prize at Sundance.

He came up with the same humble somewhat shy gentleman that he is now. And I handed him the prize a second graduation. This is the first. It is not going to be the last and this year that prophecy will come true. And I thought sinners, I thought the script was great.

However, when you do my job and this is one of the hard things in the job, you can never

ruin your business for one movie. And I respected his desire to, you know, have a return on the copyright. I respected, you know, the decision that other companies would make to be willing to fully finance and just rent a movie and not own it for the long term in their library.

day, on my walk to the commissary, I walked by a large poster of Lawrence of Arabia, the movie, by the way, that led me to be in the movie business because I'm just a Jewish kid from Baltimore. Well, I get here, partly because of that.

“And I stopped, I think, about that, I thought about it hard in this thing that what would”

Columbia be without Lawrence of Arabia now and all the other valuable titles in our library. Movie studios don't really, the profitability that underla- it goes to what we talked about before, the history, what makes us different, the profitability that underlines a movie studio is its library, that's the enduring value. And I felt in that circumstance that that was one bridge too far that we couldn't compromise,

but do I wish we had it? Absolutely. Even though you did it for Tarantino, no, that was great in public. So there, that wasn't our decision that came from the fact that Django versus Zoro, which was a split with Miramax, that already existed.

And in fact, that's kind of even what made it hard because given that, if we had done it for that, we would have institutionalized it as a part of this business. What could I say to Steven Spielberg or any of the people I'm dealing with now, Sam Mendes, you know, we do have others asked for it since not for me, because I think they know the answer.

Correct me if I wrong. I don't think you've done a movie with Ryan. No. Where is he on the list of filmmakers you haven't worked with that you'd most want to work with, like, what's your top three?

Well, I guess I'm going to, you know, betray my, my advanced years. I pretty much worked with almost everybody, which has been a great privilege. But I would say the whales I'm still chasing would probably be the same as everybody else.

I've not had the privilege to work with Chris Nolan, and I would always hope to.

Did you bid aggressively on that? I did. I did. I bid very aggressively on that. And Ryan, and I'm sure there are some others that I'm not thinking of right now.

But I've, one of the things that I pride myself on that I pride myself to be a filmmaker's executive, and that we support filmmakers, and I have had the privilege to work with many of the people that I grew up admiring, and when I'm mostly proud of those folks, I've made multiple movies with them. I'm on my eighth movie right now with Danny Boyle, I'm on my third movie with Sam Mendes.

I'm just thinking to people who are working with right now.

“And I think the mark of a good executive and a strong company is, do you do repeat business?”

We are back with the call sheet Craig. Did you wake up at five in the morning to watch the men's Olympic hockey match against Canada yesterday? No, and I regret it. I showed them pictures of people lining up outside of bars in Santa Monica at 5 a.m.

I was like, oh, I wonder if Craig's there perhaps. You know, those are the moments that you remember and I didn't do it. I did it early. I'll go to a bar to watch March Madness. I don't know why I didn't sort of, I mean, five a.m. is a little early.

That is. You can't even sell beer in California until 6 a.m., but the boys were open at five. I watched about an hour of it. I watched the last hour, hour and a half.

I did not wake up at five, but I did wake up at about 6.30 to watch up pretty amazing.

The ratings for this Olympics in Milano, Cortina have been pretty darn good for NBC. They said they were as of a couple of days ago. They were averaging 23.9 million viewers. That's through Wednesday of last week. And that is the highest number since Sochi in 2014.

Pretty incredible. Why do you think that is a few reasons, first of all, the time difference between the East Coast of the US and Italy is only six hours, which is much better than it was in Beijing for the most recent Olympics.

“And I believe the one before that as well.”

And then the USA is just doing well. The fact that Americans are winning, and they, you know, the Elissa Lú, one, I guess the men didn't do as well in, in figure skating. But in the big things, there's a lot of American winners, which usually helps. And then our old friend, the Nielsen big data is helping as well, where every sporting

event seems to have higher ratings than last year. I guess the Super Bowl didn't. But the big data, new Nielsen tracker is adding some viewers. I'm sure. Yeah.

That's probably right. And then honestly, the hockey.

I mean, winning our first golden hockey and having this kind of rivalry now, because

us in Canada, definitely helped a lot. I know. Amazing shots. And I, with the no-teeth at Jack Hughes guy, got his stocked out and scored the winning goal, like, hero.

And don't forget, Cash Patel.

beers. Yeah. I forgot.

There's nothing going on right now.

Might as well party.

“No, nothing for the FBI had to do these days.”

Maybe he was looking for the Jeffrey Epstein files, the missing files were in the locker room of the US men's team. So my prediction is that this is going to be the trend for the weekend. It's going to get better.

And that the final Olympics number will be above 25 million, which would be a huge win for NBC.

Don't forget, they pool together all the different networks. So it's NBC, it's CNBC, which is now in by version. It's USA, it's peacock. All those numbers are pool together. And they do a weird thing where they like roll in some of the afternoon viewing too.

So it's not like 25 million people are glued to NBC on a given night.

“But when you put it all together, it will, I think, get above 25.”

In the last two to four years, NBC has really figured out how to stream the Olympics and how to communicate. It's much better.

And the production's amazing.

Mike Tereko is great. The drone cameras are amazing, like Bob's letting be a drone camera, can't beat it. The gold zone thing is really awesome. You bounce around and you can see all the important moments. You do a really good job.

“The only issue now is that you basically have to stay at social media because you find out”

who wins. Yeah. And because of the time difference, every time I hop on like Twitter or something, I find out who won something that's not going to air until hours later. Yeah.

Well, it does air. It's just you're not watching it live. You're watching it in prime time. Yeah. But honestly, I don't care.

The production during prime time is really fun. They tell you a lot about the athletes, soup dog pops up, so I don't care. All right. That's the show for today. I want to take my guest Tom Rosspin, who's Greg Vorbeck, Artider is Jesse Lopez and John

Jones. And I want to thank you. Part two is tomorrow of Tom Rosspin.