CAA’s Roeg Sutherland remains bullish on the theatrical market, thinks the recent spate of mergers and consolidations represent an “opportunity” for film financiers and says it’s too soon to predict what the fallout will be from the wave of firings at Netflix.
“To be honest, I really don’t know,” Sutherland said at Rome’s MIA Market of the streaming giant’s turbulent week. “Obviously, something’s going to change, but I don’t know. Ask me that question in three weeks from now, and I’ll have a much better sense.”
Running from Oct. 19 – 23, MIA marks the first industry confab to take place since the Red Wedding-style bloodbath at Netflix, which saw the Los Gatos-based streamer ax 1,000 employees — around 6% of its workforce — including chief content officer Bela Bajaria and head of film Dan Lin, whose firing was announced on Monday just hours before MIA attendees gathered for an opening reception in Rome’s lavish Palazzo Barberini.
Sutherland, who is co-head of CAA’s media finance department and its international film group, is among the headline speakers at the MIA Market’s newly launched European Investment Hub, which aims to help European industry professionals navigate the wide range of financial tools — in both the soft money and equity financing spheres — that are currently at their disposal.
Appearing on Tuesday to share his perspective on the evolving landscape of film financing, talent packaging and international distribution, Sutherland was asked about how a wave of recent mergers — including Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery to form Skydance Corp. — could shake out for the industry.
“In my world, mergers represent opportunity. Contraction represents opportunity. Financiers see that as a moment where people will be opportunistic,” Sutherland said.
“No one really knows what the [Paramount-Warner Bros.] merger is going to lead to. We know that David Ellison has guaranteed a certain amount of movies getting made a year,” he continued. “How that’s going to change the international landscape for those studios, I think that’s going to have a significant impact. We don’t know exactly to what extent it will. I think we’ll have a much better sense in January or February. But in the U.S. market itself, it’s going to present a big opportunity for new distributors to come out, new financiers to come out.”
While laying out his company’s approach to finding and cultivating talent, Sutherland trumpeted CAA’s ongoing commitment to “discovering new voices” while stressing that “in recent years…those voices have come from outside of the United States.”
“Maybe it’s because the way that the systems are built out in Europe, which allows filmmakers to go and tell stories that would be very difficult to tell in the United States,” he said. “Not because of political reasons, but for financial reasons. We have no aid from our government in any significant way.”
Crediting Netflix and other streaming services for familiarizing U.S. audiences with global content, Sutherland pointed to the spectacular success of the streamer’s Spanish-language awards hopeful “La Bola Negra” as evidence of shifting audience habits — and proof that the company “will probably have an interesting question to ask themselves about what the power of theatrical is.” “Even for a Netflix movie, people are going out to theaters to see it,” he said.
Following a record-breaking summer box office that was the highest-grossing of all time, Sutherland said there’s abundant proof that American audiences still have a desire to watch movies on the big screen.
“What you’ve seen in the United States this summer, where audiences are actually going back in theaters and really embracing original content — for me, that’s what is really interesting,” he said. Whatever the fallout of the latest round of corporate mergers and retrenchments, he added, “the audience is just growing.”
“We still have a responsibility to make movies for an audience that is craving it,” he said. “That audience, I think more than I have ever experienced in my career, is holding us accountable for making good movies…. And they’re there to embrace them. As long as we make the right movies, they’re there to embrace them.”
The 12th edition of Rome’s MIA Market runs Oct. 19 – 23.