{"id":94585,"date":"2025-03-11T03:00:13","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T07:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=94585"},"modified":"2025-03-10T15:49:12","modified_gmt":"2025-03-10T19:49:12","slug":"could-even-william-shakespeare-rescue-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/03\/11\/could-even-william-shakespeare-rescue-hollywood\/","title":{"rendered":"Could even William Shakespeare rescue Hollywood?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.honest-broker.com\/p\/if-william-shakespeare-came-to-hollywood\" target=\"_blank\">Ted Gioia<\/a> laments the apparent death of creativity in Hollywood over the last few decades:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner-480x160.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"160\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-84928\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner-480x160.png 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner-150x50.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner.png 728w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>They need somebody like Bill Shakespeare in Hollywood today.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not as crazy as it sounds. We know very little about the Bard of Avon, but these facts are indisputable:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>He worked successfully in the entertainment business for 30 years.<\/li>\n<li>He mastered the art of the deal \u2014 all six of his surviving signatures come from legal documents.<\/li>\n<li>He handled money wisely, as entrepreneur, grain merchant, property owner, money lender, etc.<\/li>\n<li>He still sells tickets today \u2014 more than 400 years after his death.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Not even Harvey Weinstein can match <em>that<\/em> track record. <\/p>\n<p>And \u2014 best of all\u2014Shakespeare didn&#8217;t let business get in the way of creativity. He knew how to make a buck without compromising his Bard status.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s another fact about Shakespeare: He never used the words &#8220;intellectual property&#8221; or &#8220;content&#8221; or &#8220;brand franchise&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I was reminded of that recently when I encountered this headline in <em>The Hollywood Reporter<\/em>.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_94586\" style=\"width: 863px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Hollywood-IP-or-nothing.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-94586\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Hollywood-IP-or-nothing-853x380.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"853\" height=\"380\" class=\"size-large wp-image-94586\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Hollywood-IP-or-nothing-853x380.jpg 853w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Hollywood-IP-or-nothing-480x214.jpg 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Hollywood-IP-or-nothing-150x67.jpg 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Hollywood-IP-or-nothing-768x342.jpg 768w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Hollywood-IP-or-nothing-1536x684.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Hollywood-IP-or-nothing.jpg 1666w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 853px) 100vw, 853px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-94586\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/business\/business-news\/media-deals-bain-cross-sector-ip-mergers-scope-scale-1236125940\/\" target=\"_blank\">Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;ve often accused the entertainment industry of abandoning creativity \u2014 and turning into boring IP [intellectual property] management companies run by lawyers, bankers, and accountants.<\/p>\n<p>But they don&#8217;t even hide it anymore.<\/p>\n<p>There was a day when they pretended to care about artistry \u2014 seeking out fresh talent and bold new ideas. But today it&#8217;s the exact opposite. They actually want <em>content<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>(This is where I concur with Barbara Broccoli, who had creative control over the James Bond films until last week. She forced Amazon execs to buy her out, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/news\/general-news\/jeff-bezos-bond-barbara-broccoli-amazon-idiots-1235101692\/\" target=\"_blank\">after she called them &#8220;fucking idiots&#8221;<\/a>. This outburst happened in response to the head of Amazon Studios describing the Bond films as <em>content<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p>So I read the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bain.com\/insights\/media-and-entertainment-m-and-a-report-2025\/\" target=\"_blank\">Bain report<\/a> and wept. So would Shakespeare \u2014 he would rage like King Lear on the heath if he saw a sentence like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>[Media] companies are essentially themselves converging to compete with the tech media platforms; they&#8217;re also acquiring to gain more evergreen IP that can be used across modalities. By owning these cross-sector assets and IP, they create fan communities and multimodal content &#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I thought <em>content<\/em> was bad enough. But we&#8217;re now dealing with <em>multimodal content<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>That sounds like one of the seven plagues of ancient Egypt \u2014 a step above locusts, but definitely worse than frogs and hail. Somebody at the consultancy deserves to be smote down at bonus time. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ted Gioia laments the apparent death of creativity in Hollywood over the last few decades: They need somebody like Bill Shakespeare in Hollywood today. That&#8217;s not as crazy as it sounds. We know very little about the Bard of Avon, but these facts are indisputable: He worked successfully in the entertainment business for 30 years. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,7,28,13],"tags":[833,241,251,122,532],"class_list":["post-94585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-history","category-media","category-usa","tag-amazon","tag-intellectualproperty","tag-jamesbond","tag-movies","tag-shakespeare"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-oBz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94585"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94588,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94585\/revisions\/94588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}