Category: ves

https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/trump-tariff-foreign-film-national-security-1236386566

Jon Voight has presented his Hollywood rescue plan…

While President Trump dropped his 100% foreign film tariff bombshell over the weekend, Oscar-winner Jon Voight was already at Mar-a-Lago pitching his industry revival plan. The presidential “Hollywood ambassador” has been making the rounds with unions, studios, and officials to craft his proposal—and now we’ve got the details:

•For filmmakers, Voight proposes stackable federal tax credits (10-20%) on top of existing state incentives. His plan would expand Section 181 provisions, allowing producers to write off 100% of costs in the first year. Instead of blanket tariffs, he suggests targeted penalties of 120% on productions that could have filmed in America but chose foreign locations just for tax incentives.

•For infrastructure, the plan includes tax credits for building or renovating theaters, studios, and post-production facilities. It would create job training programs to ensure Americans have skills for high-paying industry positions, with special emphasis on developing production capabilities in heartland states.

•For streaming platforms, Voight wants to revive regulations that once prevented networks from owning the shows they aired. Streamers would need to pay producers premiums (25-40% of production costs) for exclusive licenses, return more ownership rights after license periods end, and share copyrights 50/50 with content creators.

•For international work, the plan proposes co-production treaties with countries like the UK to enable collaboration without triggering tariffs. It includes exemptions from penalties for legitimate international partnerships that truly require foreign locations.

https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/apple-tv-reportedly-loses-1-billion-streaming-1235110323

But it supposedly also has 45 million subscribers, and with $124.3 million in revenue.
Per the company’s most recent earnings, the three months ending in January saw Apple bring in $124.3 billion in revenue, $26.3 billion of which came from Services, a record for the division. That’s just for one quarter. For the year, Services brought in more than $96 billion. It can afford to absorb a billion dollars in losses.

https://spyglass.org/apple-tv-plus-strategy

It Wasn’t the Apple TV+ Spend, It Was the Apple TV+ Strategy

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonas-wolcher-6a970849_sad-news-no-more-great-movies-from-this-activity-7307855087974932481-VC7z

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/matrix-co-producer-village-roadshow-open-all-bids-after-bankruptcy-2025-03-18

Village Roadshow (prod company/financier: Wonka, the Matrix series, and Ocean’s 11) has filed for bankruptcy.
It’s a rough indicator of where we are in 2025 when one of the last independent production companies working with the studios goes under.

Here’s their balance sheet:
$400 M in library value of 100+ films (89 of which they co-own with Warner Bros.)
$500 M – $1bn total debt
$1.4 M in debt to WGA, whose members were told to stop working with Roadshow in December
$794 K owed to Bryan Cranston’s prod company
$250 K owed to Sony Pictures TV
$300 K/month overhead

The crowning expense that brought down this 36-year-old production company is the $18 M in (unpaid) legal fees from a lengthy and currently unresolved arbitration with their long-time partner Warner Bros, who they’ve had a co-financing arrangement since the late 90s.

Roadshow sued when WBD released their Matrix Resurrections (2021) film in theaters and on Max simultaneously, causing Roadshow to withhold their portion of the $190 M production costs.

Due to mounting financial pressures, Village Roadshow’s CEO, Steve Mosko, a veteran film and TV exec, left the company in January.
Now, this all falls on the shoulders of Jim Moore, CEO of Vine, an equity firm that owns Village Roadshow, as well as Luc Besson’s prod company EuropaCorp.

https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/post-and-vfx/jellyfish-pictures-suspends-operations/5202847.article

According to a report in Indian news outlet, Animation Xpress, Jellyfish is facing financial struggles and has temporarily suspended its global operations.

Beyond Technicolor’s specific challenges, the broader VFX industry continues to grapple with systemic issues, including cost-cutting pressures, exploitative working conditions, and an unsustainable business model. VFX houses often operate on razor-thin margins, competing in a race to the bottom due to studios’ demand for cheaper and faster work. This results in a cycle of overwork, burnout, and, in many cases, eventual bankruptcy, as seen with Rhythm & Hues in 2013 and now at Technicolor. The reliance on tax incentives and outsourcing further complicates matters, making VFX work highly unstable. With major vendors collapsing and industry workers facing continued uncertainty, many are calling for structural changes, including better contracts, collective bargaining, and a more sustainable production pipeline. Without meaningful reform, the industry risks seeing more historic names disappear and countless skilled artists move to other fields.

https://www.eurogamer.net/shadow-of-mordors-brilliant-nemesis-system-is-locked-away-by-a-warner-bros-patent-until-2036-despite-studio-shutdown

The Nemesis system, for those unfamiliar, is a clever in-game mechanic which tracks a player’s actions to create enemies that feel capable of remembering past encounters. In the studio’s Middle-earth games, this allowed foes to rise through the ranks and enact revenge.

The patent itself – which you can view here – was originally filed back in 2016, before it was granted in 2021. It is dubbed “Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games”. As it stands, the patent has an expiration date of 11th August, 2036.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/tiana-disney-series-shelved-1236153297

A spokesperson confirmed there will be some layoffs in its Vancouver studio as a result of this shift in business strategy. In addition to the Tiana series, the studio is also scrapping an unannounced feature-length project that was set to go straight to Disney+.

Insiders say that Walt Disney Animation remains committed to releasing one theatrical film per year in addition to other shorts and special projects

https://variety.com/2025/film/global/technicolor-vfx-mpc-shutter-severe-challenges-1236316354

Shaun Severi, Head of Creative Production at the Mill, claimed in a LinkedIn post that 4,500 had lost their jobs in 24 hours: “The problem wasn’t talent or execution — it was mismanagement at the highest levels…the incompetence at the top was nothing short of disastrous.”

According to Severi, successive company presidents “buried the company under massive debt by acquiring VFX Studios…the second president, after a disastrous merger of the post houses, took us public, artificially inflating the company’s value — only for it to come crashing down when the real numbers were revealed….and the third and final president, who came from a car rental company, had no vision of what she was building, selling or managing.”

https://deadline.com/2025/03/technicolor-ceo-company-back-lies-in-ruins-vfx-post-production-1236305304

In the Golden Age of Hollywood (1930-1959), a 10:1 shooting ratio was the norm—a 90-minute film meant about 15 hours of footage. Directors like Alfred Hitchcock famously kept it tight with a 3:1 ratio, giving studios little wiggle room in the edit.

Fast forward to today: the digital era has sent shooting ratios skyrocketing. Affordable cameras roll endlessly, capturing multiple takes, resets, and everything in between. Gone are the disciplined “Action to Cut” days of film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_ratio