Donna Langley Talks AI, the NBA and the “Great Paradox” of Original vs. Franchise IP
NBCUniversal chief content officer Donna Langley weighed in on a wide range of topics of interest to Hollywood, including the state of theatrical films, how artificial intelligence will be used in the entertainment industry, and the give and take between developing original storytelling and the desire for franchise intellectual property.
Speaking at a Bank of America conference Thursday, Langley was asked whether Hollywood studios should invest more in original projects, rather than lean on franchises that are familiar to consumers.
“This is a great paradox, because the short answer is ‘Yes.’ I think what we’re seeing with the audience is that the pandemic taught them to stay home and watch streaming, and we have to habituate them back into going to the movies,” Langley said, noting that people used to go the movies on a Friday night, then pick what they wanted to see when they got there. “That’s no longer the case, it’s really destination viewing. We’re going to think ahead of time. Oppenheimer is opening, Barbie is opening. We’re going to that movie.”
“As it pertains to that question, we do look at originality, but then if it’s too original and it doesn’t seem familiar, then it’s harder to market and it’s harder to get people to sample it, right? So we talk a little bit about this sort of familiar surprise, you know? So you take something that is familiar and you put a little topspin on it,” Langley added. “An example of that is a competitor’s movie this year, Disney-Fox with Deadpool & Wolverine, putting those two characters together gives everybody a little of what they want. They understand what it is. It’s there’s a value proposition there, but putting them together, you haven’t seen that before, so we’re constantly challenging ourselves to think outside of the box.”
She also addressed how she thinks about Universal’s film slate, and the role IP plays in it.
“I wish there was a formula, right? I wish it was like all IP makes a hit movie, or all talent is going to open a movie, and it just doesn’t really work like that,” she said. “So the way that we look at our slates and how we build them is really like almost like an investment portfolio. It’s very varied across multiple genres, budget ranges, appealing to all different types of audiences. There’s sort of pillars in there, whether it’s animation or all-audience kind of blockbuster type movies like Fast & Furious or Jurassic. And then we kind of pepper around it, but we’ve got our specialty division Focus Features, and then you’ve got the main studio slate, you know, again, doing everything from Jason Blum’s horror films to catering to maybe a female audience. But we sort of look at it really across the breadth of the whole thing.”
That being said, Langley also had a touch of pessimism when it comes to the future of theatrical entertainment, given the dramatic changes that the entertainment industry has faced in recent years.
“The challenges in the headwinds are clear and obvious and again, just refer back to what I was speaking of earlier that the habituation that we all had as as movie goers has dissipated. I do believe that volume in the marketplace gets that back. But to what extent is really the big question?” she said. “I can say that because we want to be very eyes wide open about our challenges and not pollyanna-ish about it at all, we’re sort of mapping our business to the assumption that we are not coming back to 2019 levels, that we will sort of stay in the range that we’ve been in ’22-’23 I do think ’24 is an anomalous year in that the impact of the strikes cannot be overstated. It was devastating because we just didn’t have the the volume that is required for the audience to feel like there’s something worth showing up to see, you know, so they just get out of the habit.”
And Bank of America analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich also pressed Langley on generative artificial intelligence, and what role it could play in the company’s content going forward.
Langley noted that the tech has been around for a long time, even if it has seen exponential growth in recent years.
“It’s really important to us, though, that content creation has got to be human centered. Storytelling, the creation of a story, the making of anything, it’s got to be all driven by human beings,” she said. “And so if there are products developed out there that can enable efficiency, great we will be all about that. But it’s really important for us to protect our filmmakers, it’s really important for us to protect our IP.”
As for what Universal will use AI for: “At the moment, it’s mostly efficiencies, and we’re we’re looking at different ways that it could enable post-production processes as a, for instance, dubbing, some visual effects work that we do in post-production and things like that,” Langley added. “So it should be much like when computer generated imagery came along, CGI… in the world of animation, instead of doing hand-painted drawings that would take five years, you could do it much faster. We’re looking for all of those types of innovations to enable efficiencies, but we want the quality to stay of course.”
And she touched upon NBC’s $2.5 billion per year NBA deal, and what it could mean for NBC’s content slate going forward.
“I’m actually very excited about it, primarily because it appears that the audience for the NBA is different to the NFL,” Langley said. “It’s going to open up a whole new opportunities, or a set of opportunities, to invite new audience members in, and figuring out how to cater to them, to keep them there after the games and use that to our benefit is really kind of thrilling, actually.”
