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audience Paramount has targeted in recent years with movies like Fences, Allied, and The
Big Short. Only this time, the studio doesn’t seem eager to be associated with the project.
Annihilation is being released in American theaters on February 23, but with much less
promotional fanfare than Arrival got. Outside of the U.S., Canada, and China, the movie isn’t
getting a theatrical rollout at all— its international release will be handled by Netflix, to whom
Paramount sold the rights in December. This arrangement is practically unheard of for a
major studio, since it openly acknowledges that Paramount doesn’t think the film will make
money. So what’s the rationale behind Paramount’s decision?
§ Paramount apparently sold the international rights to Annihilation after poor testscreening
results last summer indicated the film might be “too intellectual” for general
audiences. Garland’s last movie, Ex Machina, was a pint-sized hit, grossing $25 million and
garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. For the indie studio A24, that
was a solid result, and it was enough to get the director a deal at a major studio. But it
seems Paramount wanted something more mainstream from Garland. Annihilation will still
hit screens in the world’s two biggest markets—the U.S. and China—but the Netflix
partnership is an unusually public show of nervousness over the film’s profitability.
Paramount can use the money from the deal to help recoup the film’s reported $55 million
budget, but if Annihilation is a hit, the studio will miss out on any international grosses. The
deal also effectively signals Paramount’s lack of trust in the vision of the filmmaker it hired.
§ It’s a more extreme version of the clash between commerce and artistry that’s repeatedly
played out in Hollywood in recent years, though it’s rare for such drama to break out after
the film is completed. Annihilation isn’t a small-scale drama; it’s a visually inventive sci-fi
epic, the likes of which major studios have produced for decades. Paramount bowing out of
its international theatrical rollout is another example of the industry shifting away from films
that aren’t proven box-office quantities. Ironically, the same kind of Netflix deal is reportedly
being mulled for another Paramount movie, God Particle, part of the loosely connected
Cloverfield franchise. The other two Cloverfield films were hits for Paramount, but
apparently, the studio’s new CEO Jim Gianopulos has identified the $40 million–budgeted
space thriller as a risk. Paramount’s decision is partly motivated by internal politics, too.
Annihilation was ordered by the late Brad Grey, the studio’s prior CEO, who was ousted in
February 2017 after a string of flops. His replacement, Gianopulos, has less attachment to
the projects Grey shepherded and is seeking to shore things up after the studio’s disastrous
2017. But it’s rare for an upcoming film to lose theatrical distribution because of the failure of
unrelated past projects; Annihilation, after all, had very little to do with Baywatch not
connecting with audiences.
§ Annihilation and God Particle could be one-off casualties dumped onto Netflix as the
studio tries to get its books in order. Or this could be the sign of a more worrying Hollywood
trend, in which the very idea of a bigger-budgeted film that isn’t a guaranteed financial
success is simply anathema to a big studio, with Netflix used as a last-resort, cost-saving
measure. Another studio, New Line, has cut a deal with the service for an upcoming Shaft
movie starring Samuel L. Jackson and Jessie Usher, in which the studios split the
production costs and Netflix gets the international rights. It’s a model other studios could
soon follow. But there’s a difference between making such a deal up front and doing it well
after a movie has completed production. When Garland made Ex Machina in 2015 and
released it to strong reviews, healthy box office (it made more than twice its budget
worldwide), and Oscar success, he seemed primed as one of the most exciting new voices
in Hollywood. He was a perfect candidate to helm a bigger-budgeted studio
film. Paramount’s demonstration of its lack of faith in Annihilation is a particularly chilling
reminder of how risk-averse many big studios have become, and perhaps a sign to artists to
consider taking their work elsewhere.
7) Why I left Google to join Grab [Source: Medium.com] (https://goo.gl/iiTms1)
§ In this article, Steve Yegge, recounts his experience at Google. While he’s got several
good stories to share, he talks about a few observations to help paint a backdrop for why, of
all the great companies out there, he chose to join Grab. The main reason he left Google is
because they can no longer innovate. According to him, they’ve pretty much lost that ability.
He believes there are several contributing factors, of which he lists four here –
they’re conservative, they are mired in politics, they’re arrogant and Google has become
100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused.
§ According to him, Google’s nearly the entire portfolio of launches over the past decade,
copy a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon
Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant
(Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for
years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes
are fixed on their competitors, not their customers. To be fair, there are exceptions.
Google’s Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, TensorFlow, Waymo and a few others are generational
innovations and will take some time for the industry to catch up with. In short, Steve feels
Google just isn’t a very inspiring place to work anymore. And so, like many Googlers, he
had been thinking of moving on for a few years. But where would he go? It takes a lot to pry
someone away from the best place to work on earth, since if nothing else, Google still has a
pretty incredible work environment, especially for engineers. Also, he feels that almost all
big name-brand tech companies are much the same now. It seems like you can only really
get inspiration from startups these days.
§ About joining Grab, he feels it’s like going on a revolutionary war. He has never felt so
excited about something since maybe the early days of Grok, when he was working 12+
hour days on his mini-startup within Google to revolutionize the way developers interacted
with a billion-line code base. So what is Grab? Well, the simple and unsatisfying answer is: