Why Spielberg’s epic new project cost $2BILLION ... for mini-movies that only last 10 MINUTES
He’s one of the Hollywood A-list behind a new venture aimed at today’s mobile phone addicts. The future of storytelling – or short-changing cinema fans?
Almost 70 years after the expression ‘fast food’ was coined, the entertainment industry finally has its own version.
Its backers have already invested a fortune, almost $2 billion, in the idea that by catering to ever-shortening attention spans, they have secured their future on screen (even if it’s very little screens).
Called Quibi, a contraction of ‘Quick Bites’, the new subscription streaming service, unleashes a whole new way of telling stories — delivering dramas, documentaries, cookery or game shows, lasting ten minutes or less, to smartphones.
some of Hollywood’s most distinguished filmmakers — the very people you might expect to resist a new, bite-sized way of telling stories — have given it their blessing.
Foremost among them is steven spielberg, who has signed up with Quibi to make a horror series. As with all Quibi’s output, spielberg’s drama is intended to be downloaded via an app onto the diminutive screen of a smartphone by people who don’t have the time or the staying power to commit to anything longer.
spielberg’s series is titled After Dark. Ingeniously, it will download only after sunset, depending on the location of the phone.
there is plenty of ingenuity behind Quibi, which launched last month, not least in the way it is pouncing on significant shifts in the way we live our lives.
Fifty years ago, families went to the cinema together. Watching television, too, was a communal experience, binding not just individual households but the entire nation. In schools, factories and offices, at bus-stops, street corners and launderettes, we talked about what we’d all seen the night before.
THAt doesn’t happen any more. Now, we choose for ourselves when, where and how we spend our screen time. Even in our state of lockdown, families are fragmented in the way they make their entertainment choices, either gazing at phones or tablets or laptops in different rooms or, perhaps even more dispiritingly, in the same room.
this is the cultural convulsion which Quibi seeks to own, offering individualised entertainment on the ultimate handy contraption — a phone. moreover, with its bite-sized format it is tailor-made for a society which prefers not to dwell on anything too long, before moving on to the next.
We used to joke about people who couldn’t focus, saying they had the attention span of a goldfish. Now, the world’s goldfish could make the same crack about humanbeings. their average attention span is nine seconds. ours, believe it or not, is barely eight.
typically, we pick up our phones more than 1,500 times a week, more often than not to look at something we last looked at just moments before. All these changes are grist to Quibi’s mill.
the company’s founder is Jeffrey Katzenberg, the 69-year-old mogul who ran Walt Disney studios and then DreamWorks Animation.
like so many cinematic innovations, Quibi began with a ‘lightbulb moment’. In this instance, the light above his head flashed while he was reading Dan Brown’s bestselling novel the Da Vinci Code.
the book’s colossal global success, he reasoned, had a lot to do with its structure: more than 100 chapters, averaging just five pages each, far fewer than usual chapters of between 20 and 40 pages.
Perhaps, Katzenberg thought, he could apply the same idea to visual entertainment, exploiting a diminishing appetite for going to the cinema to see feature-length movies. Cinema-going is not what it used to be. Here in the UK, in the past decade, cinema admissions among 15 to 24-year-olds have fallen by more than 20 per cent.
Among other age groups the number has stayed fairly static, but there is a similar downward trajectory among young people in the states.
Why? Partly because ticket prices have become too expensive; not so long ago you could treat an entire family to a night at the cinema for what it now costs to buy a single ticket. But also because more and more people are getting all the entertainment they need from their phones.
Katzenberg wanted to get in on the act, and in march last year, with Quibi well into development, he was encouraged by another hard statistic: his target consumers of mostly younger people watched an average of 70 minutes per day of ‘short-form video’ — mainly through social media platforms and video applications such as Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, twitter, Vimeo and tiktok.
that growing figure shows no sign of slowing — and Katzenberg said he wanted his fledgling company to grab, with original programming, a minimum of 20 of those 70 minutes. Well, Quibi launched last month and the jury is still out. of course, there was no welcome party and limited razzmatazz in the media. Katzenberg hardly expected a pandemic-enforced lockdown as the backdrop to his launch, which at a stroke removes busy commuters from the equation.
they, millions of them, devouring Quibi’s content on buses and trains, were very much part of his light-bulb moment.
Yet even without them, Quibi reported 1.7 million downloads in its first week of business, taking
advantage of a 90-day free trial. After that, it will cost £7.99 per month.
In its first year, Quibi has guaranteed more than 175 original shows, with production costs of over $1 billion, and A-list talent such as Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Guillermo del Toro, Idris Elba, James Corden, Will Smith, Cara Delevingne, Jennifer Lopez and Laura Dern all committed to projects.
These won’t just be dramas. Quibi will also stream documentaries, reality shows, as well as news, comedy, lifestyle, sport and music programmes. Some will be daily, others weekly.
So is it any good? Is Quibi the entertainment of the future for busy people with limited attention spans but who like to binge?
As the Mail’s film critic, I decided to put it to the test...