In Hollywood, there’s a new xerife — or xerifes — in town, according to Barry Diller. The IAC chief said big tech companies like Apple will replace legacy studios like Disney and Paramount as the leaders of the entertainment world.
“What is the definition of Hollywood leadership? The definition is what migration is to tech companies. Netflix, Amazon and Apple are really the controllers of what we call the global film and television companies,” Diller said at the Sixth Annual Show. “This is, to say the least, a mile away from what our image of Hollywood was.”
The comments were made at the FT Business of Entertainment Summit in West Hollywood, California.
One of the main reasons for the power shift in entertainment, Diller noted, is that tech companies simply have more money to spend. Apple, for example, is worth $3.5 trillion, Amazon has a market cap of $2 trillion, and Disney, for comparison, is worth $169 billion.
“The difference in resources between these companies is astronomical,” Diller said.
Disney is still spending a lot of money on content, but tech companies are accelerating their spending, while Disney and others are trying to control their spending.
Last year, Disney paid $27 billion for shows and movies, up about $3 billion from the year before. Netflix spent $13 billion last year and will spend $17 billion in 2024, while Amazon increases expenses by 14% Year over year to $18.9 billion in 2023.
What he doesn’t know is that Diller has a long and decorated history in Hollywood. He was executive chef at Paramount from 1974 to 1984, before becoming chef de cuisine at 20th Century Fox, where he launched Fox as the country’s fourth-largest network in 1986. In 1995, Diller founded IAC, the digital media group behind vehicles like People Magazine and Pista Diaria.
Hollywood's dominance of the entertainment world, which has existed since the birth of the film industry in the early 20th century, is over. “It's no more,” he repeated. “Hollywood no longer has that dominance.”
