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 have to sell to other people, so we have to have the highest standards in direct-to-consumer sales,” said Ahuja, who called the studio a “film-first” and “arms-seller” when it was created. to television “I thought it was a wonderful decision [via Vinciquerra] not to do what everyone else was doing, a general entertainment streaming service, but to focus on a specific domain where we can simply be others” with Crunchyroll , incredibly popular. Gen Z and Generation Alpha demos. Going forward, Ahuja says SPE’s strategy will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. One of the key spaces it needs to enter is premium pricing offerings. favored lately across streaming services, and is willing to offer upfront money for shorter windows on streamers’ exclusive rights “We told streamers [that] we’d do it for less, but we need it to come back faster. “, said Ahuja. “This is how we will do it in the past fortune of the show. I think that streamers, even if there is an intellectual openness on this issue, have not yet reached that point. “I think we just went through this huge rush of passengers,” he added. “Television peaks and many business practices have been distorted. And I think some of them will be absolutely new and some, although others will be general again because they just don’t make sense. » Ahuja joined SPE in March 2021 as president of its global television studios and corporate progression operations, and was promoted to president and lead COO of SPE in March 2024. He has been one of the main architects of the studio’s acquisition of SPE in June 2024. the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater chain, controlled through its new corporate company Sony Pictures Experiences. department. One potential growth domain lies in ongoing collaborations with sister subsidiary Sony Interactive Entertainment and its PlayStation Studios department to collect video game intellectual assets for film and television spin-offs. They’ve already made a huge fortune with their adaptation of Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic franchise “The Last of Us,” the second season of which will premiere on Max in April.

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Ahuja said SPE gives “a little bit of a push” to encourage these inter-divisional collabs, but he stressed that the projects must be “organic” with involvement from the game’s creator.“You have to have somebody who really lives it and feels it,” he explained. “Otherwise, if each group is kind of doing their own thing, it can be a bit of a mess. We don’t have a committee that forces people to do things and says there must be four collaborations this year. It’s collaboration without bureaucracy, so everybody feels good about it and leans into it.”Ahuja also touted the success of SET India, the third most popular YouTube channel in the world, and SPE’s multiplatform play with the “Karate Kid” franchise, which will follow its successful six-season run of the Netflix series “Cobra Kai” with a new theatrical feature “Karate Kid: Legends,” starring Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan, set for release in May.Prior to coming to Sony, Ahuja was CFO of the 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 merging Disney/ABC Television with Fox Networks following the Walt Disney Company’s acquisition of Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019. Ahuja departed Disney in November 2020.Asked how a boy from Ohio came to be a CEO in Hollywood, Ahuja credited his endless curiosity about the media business, leadership and winning business strategies.“It’s really just building skills along the way there,” Ahuja said. “I suppose before the Fox-Disney deal, I viewed it as I was going to stay at Fox forever. But then things happen, and you just try to keep growing and you try to keep learning. And then you find the right thing — like the place that I’m in now — and you do your best.”

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