Sony Pictures CEO Talks Cost-Extra Deals and Video IP Pickup at Variety CES Summit

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Mother Nature threw Ravi Ahuja a curve ball for his first interview since taking the reins as president and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), conducted at the Variety Summit at CES today at the Aria in Las Vegas. While his conversation with Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton covered a wide range of studio strategies — from deal structures to maximizing Sony IP — the most pressing topic was the devastating wildfires burning in Los Angeles.“Obviously, the situation…is very fluid,” Ahuja said. “You want everyone to be OK. Some of our employees have lost homes, many are displaced, but then there are other parts of the city that are OK. The decision is: Do we close our lot? Our lot has its own power and actually is in some ways a refuge for some people. So we strongly encourage people to work from home, but are keeping the lot open.”Ahuja took over on Jan. 2 for outgoing SPE president and CEO Tony Vinciquerra, who had run the Culver City, Calif.-based studio since 2017 and will remain onboard in an advisory role as non-executive chairman through the end of the year.Under Vinciquerra’s leadership, SPE made a number of key acquisitions — including anime-centric platform Crunchyroll and U.K.-based production outfits such as Bad Wolf and Eleventh Hour Films. It also stood apart from other Hollywood studios, which went all-in with bespoke in-house streaming platforms, instead choosing to be an agnostic producer of content for the global market.

“We’ve got to sell to other people, so we’ve got to have the highest standards in direct-to-consumer,” said Ahuja, who referred to the studio as “theatrical first” and an “arms dealer” when it comes to TV. “I thought it was a great decision [by Vinciquerra] not to do what everyone else was doing, a general entertainment streaming service, but instead to focus on a particular area where we could be different” with Crunchyroll, which is extremely popular with the Gen Z and Gen Alpha demos.Going forward, Ahuja says SPE’s strategy will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. One of the key areas he’s eager to evolve is the cost-plus deals currently favored by streaming services, and he’s willing to trade upfront cash for shorter windows on the streamers’ exclusive rights. “We have said to streamers [that] we will make it for less of a premium, but we want it back faster,” Ahuja said. ”So we’ll believe in the success of the show. I think the streamers, while there’s an intellectual openness to that, they haven’t quite gotten there.”“I think we’ve just been through this huge gold rush,” he added. “The peak TV thing and a lot of the business practices got skewed. And I think some of them will be completely new and different, but some will return to normal because they just don’t make sense.”Ahuja joined SPE in March 2021 as the chairman of its Global Television Studios and its corporate development operations, and was promoted to president and COO of SPE in March 2024. He was one of the key architects of the studio’s June 2024 acquisition of dine-in movie chain Alamo Drafthouse, managed under its newly established Sony Pictures Experiences division.A potential area for growth is further collaborations with sister subsidiary Sony Interactive Entertainment and its PlayStation Studios division to harvest video game IP for film and TV spinoffs. They’ve already scored a hit with their adaptation of Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic franchise “The Last of Us,” which will premiere its second season on Max in April.

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Ahuja said SPE provides “a little nudge” to inspire those cross-divisional collaborations, but is under pressure for projects to want to be “organic” with the game author involved. “You want to have someone who lives and feels intelligent,” he explained. “Otherwise, if each organization does what they want, it can be a bit complicated. We don’t have a committee that forces other people to do it. ” do things and says there will have to be 4 collaborations this year. It’s a collaboration without bureaucracy, so everyone feels smart about it and relies on it. Ahuja also touted the savvy fortunes of SET India, the world’s third most popular YouTube channel. world, and SPE’s multi-platform play with the “Karate Kid” franchise, which follows the smart and lucky six seasons of the Netflix series “Cobra Kai” with a new feature film “Karate Kid: Legends”, starring Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan, scheduled. set to premiere in May At Sony, Ahuja served as CFO of Fox Networks Group, then spent a year and a half as president of business operations and CFO of Walt Disney Television, where he was instrumental in the Disney/ABC merger Television. Fox Networks after the acquisition of the Walt Disney Company. of Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019. Ahuja left Disney in November 2020. When asked how a kid from Ohio became a Hollywood CEO, Ahuja highlighted his endless interest in the media business, his leadership and their winning trading strategies. “It’s just about developing skills along the way,” Ahuja said. “I guess before the Fox-Disney deal, I looked at it like I was going to stay at Fox forever. But then things happen and you just try to keep moving forward and learning. And then you locate the right thing, like where I am now, and do the best you can.

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