“The relationship between the buyer and the studio has shifted — quite a bit,” exclaimed Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura today at Comic-Con.
The former Warner Bros Motion Picture studio boss was part of Collider’s Producers on Producing panel alongside Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman and Roy Lee.
By buyer, di Bonaventura meant studio.
“The producer’s job was to protect the studio, but they’ve become less and less trusting partners, and more judgmental of what we do,” he added.
“A producer’s job is to make a star, a director and a studio feel good.”
However, those priorities in recent years have changed per di Bonaventura due to “the largely corporatization (with studios). There’s a breakdown in the utter trust that you’re a producer.”
“The producer has traditionally been the first person in and last person out on a production; the guardians of the pic’s DNA,” said di Bonaventura.
However, that dynamic according to the multi-billion grossing producer has changed, and it’s “one of the reasons why we’ve had quality issues over the last decade…you have a better chance of doing high quality if you can protect the DNA.”
Streaming, the great industry disrupter, has also rattled the ground on which these monolith producers have stood.
Goldsman spoke about how in the old days, “when you made a hit, you made a hit,” but in the streaming era, success is unknown.
“When you unhook the metric of viewership to success…when it became this abstract notion of subscribers and generating an increase in subscribers in terms of base numbers they have, when that started to happen, the idiosyncrasies of keeping people’s jobs became more important than the success of the movie,” said the I Am Legend scribe.
“There’s no metric to determine if it’s successful; only the people in place who take credit or lay blame; that creates the profile of a movie or TV series,” he added.
Summed di Bonaventura about streamers, “These guys are very smart and they do not share much of the information.”
