{"id":31861,"date":"2023-10-19T13:01:10","date_gmt":"2023-10-19T13:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innodebt.com\/business\/hollywood-turns-inward\/"},"modified":"2023-10-19T13:01:10","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T13:01:10","slug":"hollywood-turns-inward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/innodebt.com\/?p=31861","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood turns inward"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description\"><span>Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=3312bd87-0362-430f-be4e-502737bca34d\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p>Is Disney preparing to say goodbye to India? The US entertainment giant\u2019s chief Bob Iger is considering a significant change of strategy by selling all or part of its India business. <\/p>\n<p>Disney first entered India through a joint venture in the 1990s, when it was riding high from hits like<em> Aladdin<\/em> and <em>Beauty and the Beast<\/em>. More recently, India became a crucial part of Iger\u2019s big bet on streaming after he acquired Rupert Murdoch\u2019s Star television business in 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But Disney has recently reached out to Blackstone and other investors to gauge their interest in buying a stake in its Indian arm, according to reports confirmed by the Financial Times.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Disney\u2019s potential retreat from the world\u2019s most populous country has been somewhat lost in the long list of things Iger needs to figure out \u2014 such as finding his successor, an upcoming bill to buy out a minority stake in streaming service Hulu estimated to be at least $9bn, and the latest attack from billionaire activist investor Nelson Peltz.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But it speaks to a broader global retrenchment by Hollywood. Paramount, owner of the eponymous movie studio, might scrap plans to launch its streaming service in India, according to Bloomberg. Warner Bros Discovery has hinted at similar caution about launching its Max streaming service in countries such as India.<\/p>\n<p>WBD executive JB Perrette recently told a conference in Bali that the company would partner with local distributors in markets where subscriber revenue is \u201cjust too low\u201d or cluttered with \u201ca ton of other players, who are\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009losing a ton of money\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This is a reversal from the prevailing thinking among US media groups just a few years ago, when they were all trying to replicate the Netflix playbook.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The world outside the US was always a key part of Netflix\u2019s strategy. As the tech company stomped into Hollywood, rattling the companies that had long run the entertainment business, Netflix executives spoke often of the importance of countries like Brazil or South Korea, where it was investing heavily in local-language fare.<\/p>\n<p>The strategy was to go big: spend a lot of money on making TV shows, and then beam them into televisions in hundreds of countries throughout the world. This helped justify the money they were spending. If Netflix paid $20mn to make a show, the expense was at least divided up among more subscribers.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The incumbent US media groups initially tried to follow suit. But a series of challenges \u2014 such as rising interest rates, inflation, and a more impatient stock market \u2014 have led them to scale back these ambitions.<\/p>\n<p>As it turns out, producing television in different countries is time-consuming, expensive, and can be hard to get right. Netflix had a big advantage. It took on this task during an era when Wall Street was sympathetic to \u2014 even enthusiastic about \u2014 its heavy spending. In a sense, <em>Squid Game<\/em> and <em>Lupin<\/em> are creatures of the era of rock-bottom interest rates.<\/p>\n<p>The incumbents have not been afforded the same leniency. The current iteration of Hollywood is about delivering profit. It is not surprising then, that Disney is exploring options for India, where its streaming subscribers on average pay only 59 cents a month.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Disney has operated in India for decades but was flung deeper into the country through its blockbuster acquisition of Fox, which included Rupert Murdoch\u2019s Star India \u2014 the TV business he and his sons had spent decades building in the fast-growing media market.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This was a boon to Iger\u2019s initial streaming push. Star India contributed a multitude of early subscribers, inflating Disney\u2019s streaming numbers at a time when investors were obsessed with subscriber additions. But a few years later, with the market fixated on profit, these low-paying India subscribers appear less valuable. To make matters worse, Disney last year lost the rights to stream Indian Premier League cricket matches, leading millions of people to cancel their subscriptions.<\/p>\n<p>With Peltz pushing for \u201cmultiple\u201d board seats at Disney, Iger is under pressure to cut costs further. Against this backdrop, losing money in India for another five years is not appealing.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Netflix chief executive Ted Sarandos seems to have noticed that his competition is backing away.\u00a0\u201cWhen we first started doing this, I thought it was kind of unusual that about 80 per cent of television viewing around the world was US content and we\u2019re like 5 per cent of the population,\u201d Sarandos said at a conference last week.\u00a0But he added streaming is a \u201chard\u201d business and \u201cyou have to do it at scale\u201d. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard for the legacy businesses to navigate that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p><em>anna.nicolaou@ft.com<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Read the full article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/3312bd87-0362-430f-be4e-502737bca34d\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Is Disney preparing to say goodbye to India? The US entertainment giant\u2019s chief Bob Iger is considering a significant change of strategy by selling all or part of its India business. Disney first entered India [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-31861","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-business"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Hollywood turns inward | Innodebt<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Is Disney preparing to say\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/innodebt.com\/?p=31861\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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