Tom Rothman Fetes Columbia Pictures Centennial, Talks Quentin Tarantino, Streaming & How To Bring Young Audiences Back To Movie Theaters

EXCLUSIVE: Even though his traditionalist strategy made him an unlikely candidate, we included Sony Motion Pictures Group chairman Tom Rothman in our 2022 Cannes Disruptors magazine. At a time when every other major prioritized the building of streaming services above all else because of the Netflix juggernaut, Rothman was invited to defend his model. The one that sustained studios forever, where turning movies into tangible culturally relevant entities through aggressive marketing would lead to big ancillary sales through Sony’s output deal with Netflix, the place everyone else had cut off. His argument that Wall Street would soon realize that subscriber growth was a false metric and that profit is the telltale indicator would soon come to roost as the shine came off streaming ventures that have costs rivals billions to build.

Rothman is in Cannes today to toast the 100^th birthday of Columbia Pictures, and show a restored print of the 1946 Charles Vidor-directed Gilda, with Rita Hayworth in top form. He took a moment to update Deadline on what’s important for a movie business struggling to regain its mojo after the strikes. It is also a moment where Sony has thrown in with Apollo to swallow Paramount Global, leaving Hollywood with one fewer major studio, after Disney swallowed Fox. Rothman would not comment on that, but had plenty to say about the business.

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DEADLINE: How does it feel to preside over a centennial anniversary?

TOM ROTHMAN: It’s important to note that the studio is 100, not me.

DEADLINE: In your surprise appearance as a Deadline Disruptor two years ago, you made compelling arguments for the traditional revenue waterfall that still hold up. So, where’s the business going now?

ROTHMAN: Lemme just pause while I break out my crystal ball. I’ll try to answer that in the context of the hundred years thing, because it does give some useful perspective. I’ll just say this, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And for a hundred years through many, many different distribution models, through the advent and eventual extinguishing of the studio system, through the invention and mass adoption of television and then other forms of home entertainment, through the introduction of the VHS, and then HBO and then the 300 channel cable universe. Through it all, movies endure, and what’s true even in this streaming moment is that successful movies become more valuable.

All of those other outlets were seen as, uh oh, that’s going to be the death star for movies, have in fact added value because there’s some very fundamental connection between mass audiences and filmed entertainment, if an audience is moved in those seats in the dark. What was true a hundred years ago is true today. You have to make things that the audience responds to, passionately. If there’s a change, it’s been an evolution and I’ve seen it through the course of my career.

DEADLINE: What’s the evolution?

ROTHMAN: There was a time when good was good enough. How is it? It’s…good. Now, good Is death. Only great works. Good is not good enough. We have to make great things and we have to make things that are culturally imperative. But if we do, that for all the, to use your word chaos that is going on right now, I’m actually very excited about it. Those two movies that came out on the same day last summer, that’s a non-repeatable phenomenon. But I do not believe that the success of Oppenheimer and Barbie is non-repeatable. Both were made by super talented artists who took really bold steps and made something very original for the audience and the results followed. Great is hard, and the risks are very, very high. So are the rewards.

DEADLINE: You mention evolution. You’ve run studios a long time during which we saw the rise of the first dollar gross superstar, and then high concepts and superheroes driving tent pole franchises. All of that has hit a wall. What’s next?

ROTHMAN: I can’t pretend to know, but I can tell you our strategy, which does relate to the question you ask. I’m a student of Hollywood history, and you’re right, audiences affections have always gone in large trends. I mean, Columbia is 100 years old, but we’re on the old MGM lot. For 20 years, the MGM musical was a success simply because it was that. And then it came a point where it was not a success simply because it was an MGM musical. Those trends have always continued. The trends in audience affection we’ve had the last 15 or 20 years has been the great IP era, where everything is a movie of something else. A movie of a comic book, a movie of a video game, a movie of a toy. And yet most of the movies that really register and really move the culture are movies. They’re not really movies of something. My instinct about the audience is that last year, I’m talking about 2023 now, 24 of the 25 top movies were all IP based movies. I think three or four years from now, that is not going to be true. It will be maybe half. I think we’re exiting the era of the tyranny of IP, if I may coin a phrase. Having said that, our biggest movies this year will be IP and the biggest movies in the business will be IP. Still in all, I think that the audience is hungry. Hungry for new, hungry for originality, and you’re going to see more and more of fresh experiences that break through. At Sony, we’re certainly making that bet. Now, I believe that for those to succeed, they have to be great. And it’s only great filmmakers who make great movies. And so we have right now probably the largest number of really top directors making films for us than we’ve had at any one time in a studio maybe ever.

DEADLINE: Name some that are doing projects you’re excited about?

ROTHMAN: I have to preface by saying, I love all my children. Let’s be clear about that. But in line with what we’re speaking about, original movies by signature directors, we’ve got Taika Waititi making Klara and the Sun. We’ve got Jason Reitman, we made Juno with him back at Searchlight, and he’s doing one of the coolest films we’ve had here in a long time. It’s the Saturday Night Live movie, which is not about Saturday Night Live, but a real-time look at the two hours leading up to the first night of the first broadcast. Talk about mayhem and being on the edge and on the inside of a revolution, an atom-splitting moment. I was on the other end of that. I was there in college in that moment when the world changed, when you just felt youth climbing over the barricades. And this is the incredible behind-the-scenes look at those two hours, which until I read Jason’s fabulous script, I had no idea NBC wanted it to fail. That was the whole thing. They wanted Carson on Saturday night.

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That was the only reason they let the lunatics in the building. And it plays almost like a great sports drama, which is that right up until the end, you don’t know if the establishment is going to push the button and let ’em air, or go to Carson. And it’s a fantastic ensemble, all these young actors. It’s life imitating art, just the way the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players were, before they all broke through. You need that to be in the hands of a really talented filmmaker.

I think I’ve made eight movies with Danny Boyle and I hold him in the Pantheon and we have his new 28 Days trilogy. It’s 28 Years Later, but not in any way a literal sequel. Great cast, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jodie Comer…

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DEADLINE: Cillian Murphy who just won the Best Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer, was the indelible protagonist in the original. Will he be back?

ROTHMAN: Yes, but in a surprising way and in a way that grows, let me put it that way. This is Danny at his best, combined with a very commercial genre, like we had with Edgar Wright and Baby Driver. Sometimes when you put a real signature director into a commercial arena, it elevates it. So we have that Darren Aronofsky’s next film with Austin Butler, which is Darren’s most commercial entry ever. And he and Austin are very, very fired up about it. It’s called Caught Stealing, based on a cool book, an action thriller with a signature director to elevate it.

But once again, it’s original. It’s a movie. The industry needs stuff like this. It’s always risky. But I would say that the greatest risk, and then I’ll definitely talk about this one with a young coming up director, Kogonada. After Barbie, Margot Robbie had her pick of every script in the universe and she picked one called A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. It’s one of the most poetic exquisite scripts I’ve ever read. There are risks because the audience has not already bought into the IP, but I would argue to you that the far greater risk is that we bore the audience to death if we don’t try to expand and give the audience some new stuff. The audience won’t disappear, it’ll just narrow. But for us to do that, we want to be in the hands of super, super talented filmmakers. So, so that part of our slate is extremely filmmaker driven.

DEADLINE: The old wisdom was that a star gave you an opening weekend and put your film on a strong path. What’s the pecking order now?

ROTHMAN: I’m a believer in contrast, and I said this one year at CinemaCon; I think stars are more valuable than ever, but streaming doesn’t make stars. Only movies make stars. Stars are super valuable, in the right role. Dawn Steel taught me this 30 years ago and it’s as true then as now. A little less true during the studio system, but the minute that broke down, the operative rule became that talent follows material. So if you want a star, you’ve got to have great material. And the great material will get you a great filmmaker and that will get you a star. The stars that the audience want, they have their pick. So at a good studio, we’re not sellers at that point in the process, we’re buyers. We have to convince the best talent in the world to do it. The two co-equal things, is the quality of the material and the quality of the director. Believe me, the quality of the paycheck is way down the pecking order to the real talent in the world, who know how good is the material and how good is the filmmaker. So yeah, in that order, I would say probably first material because that’s what brings you the filmmaker. The idea and execution of it. The freshness and the originality of it, is going to get you an exciting filmmaker and then that filmmaker will attract the best, attract the best cast. But please don’t misunderstand me, big IP movies are going to stay big. The Legend of Zelda is going to be huge for us. Massive.

DEADLINE: Your director, Wes Ball, found a way to revive yet again the Planet of the Apes franchise. The last trilogy by Matt Reeves was hard to top. Going in, I thought, do we need more of this? Turns out the answer was, yes, because of the unusual entry point. Still, based what you’re saying about movies needing to be great, people have looked at giant video games as IP and often, it has not worked. How does Zelda adhere to what you’ve said about freshness?

ROTHMAN: Because the movie is being developed and made in the closest possible collaboration with [Nintendo video game designer] Shigeru Miyamoto. He’s a true genius in that world, and it’s really his strong vision that is motivating it. He created it and understands it thoroughly. You only to look at the results of Super Mario Brothers to see. The larger point I’m making is that I think a healthy slate going forward is not going to be one side of the divide or the other. It’s going to have a balance of big IP solid sequels. Let me tell you when the last of the Spider-Verse movies comes with Phil Lord and Chris Miller, it’s going to be a significant event, as will the next Tom Holland Spider-Man film. And when all the Karate Kid storylines come together with Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan and a new young karate kid. For those fans, that’s going to be a significant moment. We have those. The third and last Venom, is going to be huge.

But I just believe that the real win for us is to have a slate that balances those movies with some of the more adventurous stuff. There’s a significant segment of the audience out there, which is underserved for adventurousness. They’re underserved for newness, they’re underserved for cultural urgency.

DEADLINE: For awards season, you have Here, an adaptation of a celebrated graphic novel. It reunites the Forrest Gump team of Bob Zemeckis, Eric Roth, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. I wrote a lot about it when Bill Block at Miramax jumped in and found risk-averse studios reluctant because of its unusual vantage point.

ROTHMAN: We are distributing it in the U.S., this Forrest Gump. I can tell you it is emotional and daring and, in its form, unlike almost any other film ever made. In every movie I have ever seen, the characters go to various places. In this film, the place remains a constant and various characters pass through it, over eons and generations. It is deeply profound — a depiction of the immutable impermanence of the human condition. Its also a super cool use of AI, which shows its value, when used properly, as a tool in creativity. There are moment here that are emotionally shattering.

DEADLINE: Eric Roth told me the de-aging of Hanks and Wright, using their past work, is awe-inspiring. You mention Jason Reitman capturing young people coming over the wall. I think of something like Quibi, which from its inception felt like something an older person would think kids wanted, and they rejected it outright. It is hard for people who are older to anticipate what young audiences want, as you found out in a good way with the surprise success of the Sydney Sweeney-Glen Powell rom-com Anyone But You. What in your mind is the biggest threat to keeping these young people from redeveloping or better prizing the theatrical experience? And what are you doing to combat that?

ROTHMAN: It comes back to the same thing, which is that we have to make things that are culturally urgent to them. So we have to be in business with young voices and we have to make stories that are relatable to young audiences and bring cultural urgency to them. This is different when we were in our twenties. Movies were successful by default. We went to the movies. That was an activity. If you wanted to date a girl, that’s what you did. You went to the movies.

The audience in general, but particularly a younger audience, no longer goes to the movies. They go to a movie. It is now a programmatically driven decision, not an overall behavioral decision. It’s programmatic. What is it about a particular movie that is significant and compelling and urgently relatable enough for me that I’m going to go to see it? In which case, they will absolutely go to the movies, absolutely, but they will not do it as a matter of course. I sort of smile about it because I think a hundred years ago, that’s pretty much the same, that people went every week, with their nickels. But even then, you had to make stuff that people really wanted to see.

That’s more significant now. And the bar is higher. That’s the difference. The bar is higher to get young people to be excited to go out, to care. We had a wonderful success with Anyone But You, a movie that spoke very loudly to people in their 20s. That’s what it was. If you were in your twenties, your late teens or your 20s or your early 30s, that movie was really very, very relatable to you. Why? I think because you can’t bottle these things, obviously. I think part of it is going to what we were talking about before, part of it is they hadn’t seen a really great romcom in the theaters in a while. And yes, we had the elements. The direction by Will Gluck was excellent, and chemistry between the two leads was great. The ending was fantastic, and people went out into the parking lot with a big smile on their faces. Collectively, they just hadn’t had that fun in a while, and they wanted to share it. So there is a communal aspect to movie going, if you can access that, then you get the uptick from that communal experience. All your friends go with you and you experience it once.

DEADLINE: This seemed like one that benefited from Sweeney’s Euphoria following, and TikTok as a vehicle to reach that audience.

ROTHMAN: There was a phenomenon around it, and that movie was very well marketed in the world where a young audience lives. Television advertising, completely irrelevant to that movie. Irrelevant, irrelevant. TikTok was everything on that film, and that’s where we sold it and that’s how we promoted it. And the social promotion was terrific. It wasn’t an accident because we know that’s where the audience for that movie lives.

DEADLINE: How much of the future of P&A does that represent for movies? It has to be cheaper than the traditional TV spend, even though that has helped give theatrical movies cultural relevance and a zeitgeist feel that straight-to-streaming titles just don’t have.

ROTHMAN: The answer to your question is yes, marketing will become much more efficient. Linear television, especially live sports, is still relevant. You’ll see a lot of ads for Bad Boys on live sports. Holistically, the answer to your question is yes, digital is by far and away infinitely more important than any linear advertising. And it’s much more targetable across the board, across the board.

DEADLINE: If I spent $60 million on TV, how much is digital going to cost?

ROTHMAN: It depends on whether you have the right elements for it. Here we had two rising stars, one of whom, Sydney, had a very strong social following to begin with Euphoria, and they were very game. You need to have talent that’s game and willing and smart about it. And then you can do a lot for a lot less. Like 30% less. But you have to be willing to take the leap and leave some of the old crutches behind.

The pivot to digital has allowed us to be far more efficient with our spending and far more targeted, so that you’re not having to carpet bomb the world just to get the people that you want. Kids are not watching television, they’re on their phones and you can reach them there. You have to see the fundamental behavioral shift from our generation, where we’d say, let’s go to the movies this weekend. And then, okay, what do you want to see? How about this? How about that? It’s not the way it works now. Maybe it does for the boomers, but not  younger audiences. They are, what do you want to do this weekend, with our limited resources. Dinner with friends? Tickets to a concert? A new series dropping on a streamer? Or, maybe there a particular movie I am dying to see because I heard it’s great. Or I’ve seen it on my feed and it looks really fun. That’s the nature of choice.

And that’s why what we make has to be great and urgent, because what I just described is a ruthless equation. What it means is to us is that the bar is high. The movie business has gone from number one to number five, in terms of what a young person might do on a weekend. But you can still succeed tremendously. Now, while I have Deadline here, I’m going to use this bully pulpit to raise a good issue, and I hope someone in exhibition somewhere is reading this. We need for ticket prices to come down.

DEADLINE: Explain.

ROTHMAN: I think it’s not healthy. I understand why it happened, and that exhibition went through a terrible near-death experience with Covid. I get the instinct to raise prices. But I think overall, if you look for example at how every Tuesday in America, every single Tuesday is the biggest day of the week. Why? Because of the half-price tickets. It’s fundamental consumer economics: just lower the prices and you’ll sell more. You’ll make it up in volume, and concessions. I do think that is relevant for young consumers. They all have their streaming services, which because you pay by the month, it feels like it’s free. And movies, particularly in big urban markets, they’re expensive. So that means it better be super special. I wish exhibition could see its way towards doing more pricing experiments, not taking them up, but taking them down.

Well, what’s a fair price to see a movie on a Friday night? That I don’t know. And I guess it depends. Listen, if the movie’s good enough and it changed your life as movies did for me, then I guess it’s however many bills you’ve got in your wallet. You’ve got that series The Film That Lit My Fuse. Movies change lives. There’s a value proposition in pricing for two constituencies that are important to us. Kids are trying to make rent, they don’t have a lot of disposable income. And the second very significant pricing-sensitive segment is the family audience. It’s too dang expensive to take your whole family to the movies right now, even if the kids get in half price or whatever. I sound like I’m arguing against my own business, but I’m not. I’m lobbying that I think we would endear ourselves much more, particularly to that family audience, if the price is moderated some. Exhibition will argue, fair enough, moviegoing is still great value. It’s still a fraction of the cost of a Broadway show or a football game. But for a lot of people bringing a family of four or six to the movies, that can be an expensive undertaking.

I should also say in fairness, the production side of the business needs to get its own cost house in order, too. Streamers, who don’t have an individual film-profit-based model, inflated the cost of making films and all the studios, who do have such a model, succumbed to varying degrees. Mega-negatives became Giga-negatives, and budgets are up across the board. This is not just bad for us studios, it’s bad for the audience. High negative costs decrease creative risk taking, which decreases the ability to push for the kind of originality I spoke of before. Instead, it leads to repeating the tried and true, and the tyranny of IP. The trick, as I have said before to you Mike, is to be creatively reckless, but fiscally prudent at the same time. Fiscal discipline is often misunderstood — employed appropriately, it’s a creative tool, as much as a financial one.

And while we are dreaming, movies should be shorter. Casablanca was 1 hour 42 minutes, with credits, and you know, that was pretty good.

DEADLINE: Best Cannes memories?

ROTHMAN: I’ll give you two. Back in the days when indies were indies and I was running the Samuel Goldwyn Company, we brought David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. It was thought that movie was too outrageous, scandalous. And we took the risk and put the movie in Cannes with everyone saying it was going to be the death of us, right? And the opposite happened. I remember being in the theater at the end, through the standing ovations. This was long before they timed them. That movie went on to win the Palme d’Or, an incredible feat, an incredible reversal, and a great moment for David Lynch and our little company. Suddenly…

DEADLINE: It was hotter than Georgia asphalt.

ROTHMAN: That’s the line. Very good. Very impressive. My first Cannes experience I’ll always remember. That was a Jim Jarmusch film I co-produced called Down by Law. David Picker, who was a great mentor of mine, gave me advice I still follow to this day. When you walk up the steps to the Palais, you get to the top of the steps and they will try to push you into the theater. Don’t do it. Stop, turn around and look. What you’ll see is the red carpet and a beautiful Mediterranean sunset and hundreds of film lovers all around. The movie won’t have screened yet, the reviews won’t be in yet, but you will have worked really, really hard to get to that moment, and that place. And you need to stop for a minute and look. It’s what would be referred to today as practicing gratitude and appreciating the privilege and the thrill of a life in the movie business. And I did that that night, and I’ve done it every night since when I’ve been there.

DEADLINE: The studio hits 100 years old. What does that matter to these young audiences you covet and how to you convey the history that has brought the craft to where it is now?

ROTHMAN: The truth is, they don’t give a sh*t, right? I give a sh*t, but they don’t. Whether something they want to see comes from Columbia or Warner Brothers or Universal, they don’t give a flying f*ck. But because we are a hundred years old, we have two things. We have one of the great film libraries that not only has ever existed, but that can ever exist no matter what tech company comes in. They don’t have Lawrence of Arabia to sell. And we do. And the value that that library creates gives us the opportunity to make new things. That’s the first thing our history gives us in value for today. So the consumer may not give a hoot about our past hundred years, but if we do our job right, they’re going to care very much about what we bring them this year and the next year and the next year. That library enables it. The second thing is to take great filmed entertainment comes from a willingness to take risks. A stable institution is better able to take creative risks. So the strength of our history and the stability of who we are today, look, you say there’s been a lot of chaos and a lot of change, but not here. The administration that’s in place has been here 10 years. We’re solid, we’re profitable, and we’re stable. And that enables us to be bold. Could we have taken the risk on Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood if we were laden with debt and we didn’t have a library? While the consumer might not care this is where Frank Capra made all his great movies, one thing enables the other.

DEADLINE: Two more. Still not troubled to be the major without a streaming service? Some would say in the long term it makes you vulnerable because bigger is better.

ROTHMAN: I would say that the polite response is, they’re not paying attention. The impolite way of saying they should get their heads out of their asses. And you can quote me, obviously the opposite is true. We did not lose billions and billions and billions of dollars on a general entertainment network. Instead, we became a strategic content supplier, for lack of a better word, an arms dealer. And we have, without a doubt, the most favorable and lucrative ancillary deals in the world because of it. So our product is extremely, our content that we make is extremely, extremely valuable. Now, are there days when it would be easier for me and my job if I could say, you know what, I like this movie. It’s not really over the bar enough for theatrical. It’s not going to satisfy what I talked about earlier, that programmatic demand, but I kind of like it and I’ll just slide it through a streaming service. It would make my job easier. We don’t have that. We’re in the burn the boats business. If we’re in it, we got to win it. But holistically, events have proven that it’s the right model.

DEADLINE: Last one: Deadline recently broke news that Quentin Tarantino scrapped The Movie Critic as his final film. It was going to star Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth from Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and you were going to have that film on your slate. What does that feel like, thinking you have that film, and getting the call from him that you suddenly do not?

ROTHMAN: I would just say this. I have unbounded respect for Quentin, and he is a true artist, and his art is more important to him than anything else. I respect that. And I think he’s very, very determined that his 10th movie will be his last feature film. I’m sure he will go on to do many, many vibrant, creative things because he’s an absolute fountain of creativity, but he wants his last movie to be meaningful to him. And what are you going to say really to that? Except, right on baby. So yeah, I think it’ll go down as … and Kubrick and a lot of great directors had them … as maybe one of the greatest movies the world will never see. I am greatly consoled by the absolute certainty that whatever movie he does decide to make as his last movie will in fact be even better.

DEADLINE: And it will be with you?

ROTHMAN: Well, let’s just say Mike, that I’m very optimistic about that.

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