Saturday dinner at the Morgan Stanley CEO retreat in Deer Valley: Jeffrey Katzenberg shared that he has traveled to China every month for 6 years and was 12 days away from consummating a sale of Dreamworks to a Chinese buyer who would have taken it private, but then Comcast scrambled to make a better bid, one that did not include Katzenberg in the integrated team.
So he is starting a new venture called WNDR (he is always full of Wonder) that is focusing on mobile content creation. Imagine programs like Game of Thrones segmented into 7-8 minute episodes by design.
Game of Thrones costs $300k per minute to produce.
“Film is not a growth business. That got me in a lot of trouble, but I stand by it. It is in a slow decline, but it is not disappearing. TV, on the other hand is exploding. There are 500 new TV series launching this year, double that of 5 years ago. There is so much I worry that I can’t watch it all!”
On the urge to go private: “Other than Jeff Bezos with Amazon, being in investment mode as a public company sucks”
Some other comments on the Little Mermaid’s outfit: Reducing the number of colors (from 11 to 7) used to paint her outfit saved $1m of production cost. It was all done by hand, released in 1989. And her top? “Trust me, a lot of design went into those shells!”
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