Dear Gossips,
Six months ago, there was a report that Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount, two of the oldest and most storied Hollywood studios, were considering a merger. That deal did not materialize, though Paramount ended up coming within literally TWO MINUTES of merging with Media—owned by tech nepo son David Ellison—before the deal fell apart at the actual last minute.
Variety has a breakdown of what happened, but basically Paramount’s main shareholder is Shari Redstone, who owns Paramount’s parent/holding company National Amusements, Inc., and she was concerned about potential shareholder lawsuits since she was set to make out better in the deal than other, more regular-type shareholders. On the Skydance side, they think that a reduced pay package for Redstone soured her on the deal. Why not both?
We’re not actually going to talk about Paramount’s immense debt (over $14 billion) and poor sale prospects, though, at least in part because for now, Paramount seems to be going their own way with a three-prong “office of the CEO” that seems like an inevitable power struggle but is also providing a way forward for the studio that allows it to remain in business as itself unlike, say, the entities now known as Amazon MGM Studios and 20th Century Studios. What I really want to talk about is library loss.
Just one week after Variety’s report cited a plant that has “already identified $500 million in annual cost savings”, Paramount has obliterated the online archives of Comedy Central, MTV News, CMT, TV Land, and the Paramount Network. Go to any of those sites and you’re greeted with a prompt to either watch on TV (ad revenue) or subscribe to Paramount+ (subscription revenue).
But Sarah, these episodes and movies aren’t GONE, they’re basically just behind a paywall! …For now. And they just got less accessible, which isn’t great in and of itself.
My worry goes beyond Paramount, they’re just the ones pulling down anything they can’t maximize for profit because they’re in heaps of debt and their unique family-owned structure seems to make them a difficult merger target. What’s going on at Paramount right now is part and parcel of Disney making Fox titles harder to access, and Warner Bros. Discovery sh-tcanning movies for tax write downs, and it’s the early warning sign of what might be a massive period of library loss.
It's estimated that more than 75% of silent films are lost forever. There is no one sole reason for that, but two major contributing factors are: economic instability pushing studios to pinch pennies wherever they could (many silver nitrate prints were melted down to recover milligrams of silver that could then be sold), and a massive technological change rendering older formatted films “obsolete”. And guess what? We meet both of those conditions right now. Studios are making their own libraries harder to access, even outright stripping titles, in order to save a buck, and rather than technology making archiving easier, preserving digital-era cinema is a screaming nightmare of rapid obsolescence and decaying technology.
We’re reliving the Roaring 20s in all the worst ways, and for cinema, one of the worst is repeating the mistakes made during the talkie transition, when silent films were considered so obsolete as to be worthless, and thus, not worth preserving. Then there is also the mountainous debt brought on by an era of consolidation and chasing Netflix to make Wall Street happy. It will take a cooperative, concerted effort to maintain archival integrity through the ongoing digital disruption, but frankly, it doesn’t seem like anyone has the will for it, let alone the resources. Everyone’s trying to dig out from the debt brought on by building and supplying streaming platforms. There is no denying the convenience of streaming for audiences, but in every other regard, it has been an absolute disaster for the film industry.
Please note, we will be dark on Monday, July 1, for Canada Day.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
