Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Motion Picture Group chairman and CEO Tom Rothman likes to make strong statements to project his confidence in the company in defense of the theatrical business. “We are not fucking around here,” he said at a CinemaCon presentation in April, in the process of unveiling footage from upcoming Sony releases like Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” and “The Equalizer 3.”
However, in a recent conversation for our Screen Talk podcast, Rothman did his best to clam up on the most pertinent topic facing the industry today: the WGA strike. The studio head told us at the start of the conversation that due to an agreement with the AMPTP, the entity negotiating with the writers guild on behalf of the studios, he was not allowed to discuss the current situation. Nevertheless, when it came to one of the more contentious subjects related to the strike, Rothman did say, “I believe AI is scary as shit. For a period of a time in my life, I was working on a movie with Steven Spielberg called ‘Robopocalypse.’ Trust me, bad shit can happen. You seriously think a computer can’t figure out the nuclear codes?”
The WGA has been insisting that any AI materials assigned to a writer by a studio must give the writer original credit for the idea. While Rothman didn’t weigh in on that specific demand, he did imply that the studio wasn’t looking to supplant writers with AI. “A lot of the panic about this is overwrought,” he said. “I don’t believe that AI can replace creative genius.”
As for the studio’s recent output, while the raunchy new Jennifer Lawrence romp “No Hard Feelings” may not reignite the commerciality of the R-rated comedy, Rothman had a different recent success to embrace: Animated sequel “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” has already grossed more than a half billion dollars at the global box office, which makes it the third-highest grossing movie of the year so far and already ahead of the $384 million box office that 2018’s “Into the Spider-Verse” made during the same period pre-pandemic.
“It was a collection of a tremendous amount of talent, and money, and time,” Rothman said. “I believe movies in movie theaters are a vibrant, strong, viable, leisure choice for movie audiences, have been and will be. That’s an underpinning of the philosophy at this company.”
At the same time, Sony has been a beneficiary of the streaming economy. Unlike other studios, Sony has no in-house streaming entity, which means that it can sell its productions on the open market. “We are in business with everyone because we are content makers,” he said, adding that the studio plans to release “Napoleon” in partnership with Apple on Thanksgiving weekend. “That’s a movie Ridley [Scott] made at Apple for Apple and they have determined that it is in the collective interest of their ecosystem to have a theatrical release. I believe these ecosystems can co-exist. I’ve always felt that.”
When other companies rushed to change their models during the early months of the pandemic, he said, “People were making conclusions about long-term in a short-term crisis. When other entertainment companies were laying off thousands or in some cases tens of thousands of people, we did not. We invested in our people and we invested in our content.”
He’s proud of the global box office performance of live-action “Spider-Man: No Way Home” in 2021, well before “Top Gun: Maverick” became the box office savior of 2022. “Everyone says that Tom Cruise saved the box office,” Rothman said. I can tell you that ‘Spider-Man’ was before that and it showed that movies in movie theaters are enduring.”
Yet the Sony chief acknowledged one major area where the market had shifted significantly — the specialty business. Rothman, who founded Fox Searchlight in 1994 and oversees Sony Pictures Classics heads Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, said that the traditional platform release is no longer as viable as it once was. “I think in truth that the traditional long rollout, what I did for many many years at Searchlight, I actually think that is in peril,” he said, “not because those movies aren’t good, they are, not to say they don’t make cultural impact, they do to a certain segment of the audience, but actually the delivery mechanism for that is better at home.”
He added that “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” with its successful platform release in 2022, was the exception that proves the rule. “Obviously that happened, so it can happen, but it’s far less typical,” he said. “A bunch of more traditional older-skewing ‘Tars’ and ‘Banshees’ movies don’t break through to the box office levels that they used to. You have to learn to monetize them in other ways.”
Rothman also shared his perspective and admiration for movie stars like Jennifer Lawrence, his first producing credit from his indie days, and the rip-roaring story of how he convinced elusive A-list director Peter Weir to take the helm of “Master and Commander.”
Watch the full episode above or listen to it below.
Screen Talk is produced by Azwan Badruzaman and available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify, and hosted by Megaphone. Browse previous episodes here, subscribe here, and be sure to let us know if you’d like to hear the hosts address specific issues in upcoming editions of Screen Talk.
