Will Wicked 2 Help Hollywood Defy Gravity?

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Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Restors Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde.

Speaker 1 And me, Richard Osman. A good day to thee.

Speaker 1 Good day, listeners.

Speaker 2 Good day, Richard. Good day to you again.
How are you?

Speaker 1 I'm all right. Ingrid is away filming.

Speaker 1 Something rather exciting, observed me, is I've been watching an awful lot of the UK Snooker Championship qualifies, more than I would ordinarily, in a normal week.

Speaker 2 I know you'd withhold it otherwise. You'd deny yourself, but it's so great to just be able to give in to it all.

Speaker 1 Exactly that. How's your week been more importantly?

Speaker 2 It's been a busy one. It's somehow become Christmas

Speaker 2 and pre-Christmas and it's not.

Speaker 1 Not yet because it's not my birthday yet. Yeah, okay, I'm aware.

Speaker 2 It's not my birthday. Why won't anyone else respect this calendar?

Speaker 1 It's so weird, isn't it?

Speaker 2 It is very weird. We will actually end up during the course of the show talking about Christmas ads for you.

Speaker 1 Very much against my will.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because it's before your birthday. I'm so sorry, Richard, but they have all been out quite some time.

Speaker 1 We're going to to talk about Rosalia, who is this, the Spanish pop star who's just released this album, Lux, which everyone in the whole world seems to have gone absolutely crazy for.

Speaker 1 So if you've had 1,800 people tell you, you have to listen to the Rosalia album, we're going to tell you all about her. She's very, very interesting as a phenomenon.

Speaker 1 I think she might be the absolute archetypal 21st century cultural phenomenon.

Speaker 2 And we will also begin, though, by talking about Wicked for Good. The second part of the Wicked movies, which were originally filmed as one movie, and then they cannally divided them into two.

Speaker 2 That opened this weekend to $150 million. It's a huge smash.
It has lifted what feels like a curse on the box office that has been going on for quite some time now.

Speaker 2 And we were going to, we'll talk a lot about why it's been such a big hit, the nature of having a big hit like that these days, and what it actually means for Hollywood, you know, whether it's all totally fine now this movie has come out.

Speaker 1 It feels like it. Feels like there's

Speaker 1 at least five or six of these each year.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 During this this conversation, we will end up using quite a lot of the kind of US box office metrics. And I'll say why we do that.
It's because they are so good. They are amazing on the data.

Speaker 2 The way they break down audiences, the way they break down everything from like whether people are attending individually or in groups. We sadly don't do this.
There is a lot of read across to...

Speaker 2 global audiences, slightly less on this property, which is quite interesting because it's such a North American thing.

Speaker 2 But the reason we use those things as kind of ways of talking about it in terms of data points is because because they drill down into it so much and we simply don't do the same.

Speaker 2 Wicked for Good opened with $150 million at the box office. The first one was $112 million.

Speaker 2 Slight caveat in that they did a couple of previews of days on Wednesdays and Mondays last week. But it is the biggest ever second episode of a fantasy series.
So bigger than Harry Potter.

Speaker 2 Chamber of Secrets, bigger than

Speaker 2 Lord of the Rings, Two Task. That's amazing.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And to put it in a different context, Barbie was, which everyone knows was an amazing phenomenon, was $162 million. Lilo and Stitch earlier this year, 146 million.
So it's sort of between those. Yeah.

Speaker 2 One thing I do want to do before either, I can't remember whether it was at the very end of last year or the start of this year where I did like box office predictions of what was going to be a hit and what.

Speaker 1 Did you predict the Wicked 2 was going to be a hit?

Speaker 2 This was one of the easiest ones because

Speaker 2 we knew that it had already been, the first one had already been a hit. And also, if it's, they're only releasing a year apart because obviously they filmed them together.

Speaker 2 Anyone who didn't see that in theatres, a lot of people, by the way, paid paid for it over Christmas because it came out at the same time last year.

Speaker 2 This is their big sort of, this is a holiday movie essentially. It comes out just before Thanksgiving.

Speaker 2 A lot of people will have watched that in the pay window over Christmas where you can actually pay to watch it.

Speaker 2 And then if they haven't watched it, then they will have caught up in streaming over the year. So it's open bigger and that is not a surprise, I think.

Speaker 2 Other things that it has going for it, at the moment, IMAX really matters

Speaker 2 in terms of box office receipts and how it...

Speaker 1 When did that happen?

Speaker 2 Because I always, IMAX to me would always be like a very niche thing so niche every time you see any box office records now i max is a is a huge deal you know in london we would talk about the imacs and it was near waterloo you can have there are many more imac cinemas now those screens really matter they're much more people will pay more money and if you get a clear run at the imacs screens as this movie had Next week it will have to share some of that with Zootopia, which I'll end up talking about with Zootopia too.

Speaker 2 If you can get a clear run, there are lots of movies that haven't really had a clear run with it, and therefore it doesn't form such a big part of receipts but it's a big deal if it's only you

Speaker 2 and we'll talk about the absolute desert that has been this quarter the last quarter of the box office in a bit but a reminder it's like the most successful thing that universal have ever made and it comes from a stage show that was used off their original property so it's very very very solid IP The two stars, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Rivo, who promoted it remorselessly last year.

Speaker 2 Oh, they really did. I mean, but that became a cultural moment.
Yeah, it was a crossover thing. So that's something you need in the modern era.
It became a sort of crossover moment.

Speaker 2 They promoted it so much.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you this question because it's been absolutely ubiquitous and the two of them have a very charming relationship and they're on everything.

Speaker 1 Is that just a question of throwing an awful lot more money at this than other bits of IP? Because it's not like...

Speaker 1 5,000 different editors of different TV programs and podcasts and magazines are all saying at the same time, this is the thing I want.

Speaker 1 Presumably, there is a campaign behind this which has an awful lot of money behind it. they they have

Speaker 2 to be strange media partners wow they're like the olympics or something genuinely i'm that's it's that's the sort of comparison i'm making it's like the world cup you know they got the headlines boss we were selling a bus stop the other day and my daughter said oh my god you can even get wicked electric toothbrushes you know there's a pink one and a green one i would say wicked toothbrush defying cavity oh my god it's so good that's so good why wasn't that the ad was it not no oh my god that'd be kicking the you would love to go into a studio and just record 400 partner lines i would yes yeah i know you would you genuinely, that would be an afternoon well spent.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, sadly, they didn't go with that one, but it is brilliant. Well done.
I love that. No, but they got stars who like promoted it relentlessly.

Speaker 2 They went on and on and on about it last time round. In a way, they didn't need to do it quite so much.
Probably like you in the Second Thursday Murder Club book. Once it's a thing, it's a thing.

Speaker 2 And they couldn't really repeat that kind of mad, emotional press tour where they cried in every interview last time.

Speaker 2 But it was pretty great when Cynthia Riva had to kind of throw herself across a red carpet to protect Ariana Grande from some kind of

Speaker 2 annoying TikTok or whatever.

Speaker 1 And they did like, you know, Dancing with a Stars special and they had a strictly special. So they can, they can, and those things are sort of unpaid things as well.

Speaker 1 So when something is that massive, you've got all your paid media, which last year there was a lot of.

Speaker 1 And this year, actually, because it was so huge, everyone is throwing media at you. Everyone is throwing...

Speaker 2 promo at you and you're not having to that stuff is all free they did something really old-fashioned in the us which is that they had something that's so like from

Speaker 2 different decades, like pre-millennial.

Speaker 2 They did like, it's called like a wicked and evening with the stars or something. They did like a TV special.
Oh, I love that. And it made that was huge.

Speaker 2 Dancing with the stars is absolutely massive there. And as you said previously, bizarrely, that is now a brilliant deliverer of the 18 to 34-year-old audience.
So it's done very well for that.

Speaker 2 And also, the other thing about it, which I think is kind of necessary, is that they were in the awards conversation last year.

Speaker 2 People thought, you know, best supporting and best actress, they sort of nominated for 10 Oscars, wasn't it? Yeah, nominated for a lot of Oscars. So it's basically the full spectrum property.

Speaker 2 It's got all of it. Right, let's talk about the context of the year because the biggest movie of the year is a Minecraft movie.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Rightly so. Then Wicked for Good, then the Lilo and Stitch remake.

Speaker 2 How this year has happened in Hollywood, remember, they have to get to 9 billion in box office or else it just they can't really survive in their current lifestyle as a town.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, their pumpkin remains a pumpkin. Yeah.
It does not turn into a golden coat.

Speaker 2 Quite right. You had a terrible first quarter, and then it was, that was, that sort of curse was lifted by a Minecraft movie.
And you had a kind of, you know, okay, good summer.

Speaker 2 And then an absolutely terrible third quarter. And the curse is lifted by this.
But that can't really...

Speaker 1 Well, this curse is being lifted by fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger movies. And that is unsustainable.
It's also not fun for our culture. It's not fun for moviegoers.
It's not fun for cinemas.

Speaker 1 You know, if you're relying to to get to that 9 billion, you're relying on four or five big movies to give you, you know, 50, 60% of that. Then that's not fun for filmmakers.

Speaker 1 That's not fun for film goers. I think you just, it's like...

Speaker 2 There's nothing to see.

Speaker 1 Listen, I find it extraordinary.

Speaker 2 I mean, I know we're all like, you know, Monday morning experts, but really...

Speaker 2 This is why I want to go back and look at that and audit myself as to what I said last year as what would be hits. And I will do.

Speaker 1 Audit yourself.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you have to.

Speaker 2 And I'll look forward to next year's and say whether, yes, because I definitely missed like like a Minecraft movie and that was stupid of me because I knew that that was big IP and that people would like it but there have been no blockbusters for absolutely months okay and it's extraordinary and if you look at the individual studios I want to say September the 23rd near the end of September but not the very end Warner's released one battle after another that is their last movie for the year Okay, what is wrong with you?

Speaker 2 Why have you not got some sort of children's related holiday play out? Why have you not got something there? You know, kids run movie theatres.

Speaker 2 You know that the family genre is the thing that most consistently has got people turning out. Why is there nothing, why do you not even have a movie?

Speaker 1 But is that not because they're saving because we now have such joggernauts like Wicked that everyone just tries to avoid it?

Speaker 1 And they think, you know what, we'll come out in January because there's no point going against Wicked.

Speaker 2 There's been nothing to watch if you have children since like July. That's ridiculous.
It's obviously ridiculous.

Speaker 2 Now you're going to have Wicked one weekend, then Zootopia 2, and you know, Avatar, whatever.

Speaker 2 There's a fine run in, whatever. But it's obviously ridiculous to say, what am I going to go and see Gabby's dolls' house? Okay, this is just like a Netflix show that is a nothing movie.

Speaker 2 And no, other than that, there has been nothing since the summer at all. That's obviously ridiculous.
You're sort of failing as a town if you're not putting out, you know, movies that people will see.

Speaker 2 There's nothing to go to. And the movies that have come out,

Speaker 2 you know, I really sort of despair of, yeah, but I do. Like, what a sort of, sorry, there's a movie where Sidney Sweeney is not hot.
I've already seen seen her be in not hot.

Speaker 2 Christie, which is a sort of boxing and domestic violence movie. Oh my God, yes, please.
Sorry, she's put on £30 and she's in a boxing and domestic violence movie. Great.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm sure that her agent thought, let's get her now in awards conversation so she has to get messed up and ugly looking and all of this sort of stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2 This is way too early in her career for that. Okay.
This, okay, maybe this happened with Charlize Saron or whatever in Monster, but this is, that's more than 20 years ago.

Speaker 2 I don't know the exact date different, but it's really the start of the 2000s. This is is not what, in any way, Sydney Sweeney should be doing.

Speaker 2 What a surprise that literally no one wants to see the Sydney Sweeney boxing and domestic violence movie, okay?

Speaker 2 Also, do you want to see The Rock in a 50 million? I'm sorry, I'm watching a 50 million dollar MMA movie. I don't want to see him in that.

Speaker 2 Sorry, I know he wants an award badly, and he's still hoping he's going to get that last maybe best actor spot.

Speaker 2 At the other end of the scale, you've got something like One Battle After Another, which, you know, I understand what that film is doing for Warners. It's a big prestige player.

Speaker 2 It's got the most prestige, maybe, actor. It's got Leonardo DiCaprio, Paul Thomas Anderson, of course.

Speaker 1 And they have actually had a good year, Warners as well. So they're not.

Speaker 1 They're allowed one as well.

Speaker 2 This makes up, you know, and I understand that that film does something different and it's going to be massively nominated.

Speaker 2 You know, it's one of those library things and it's a prestige thing and it will sit there for it and it will make eventually its money back.

Speaker 2 Sadly doesn't make its money back in the movie theatre, believe me. And

Speaker 2 it's sort of extraordinary that you've got all these prestige plays that even when you're thinking about The Rock for that movie, that should never have cost $50 million.

Speaker 2 People don't want to see these films.

Speaker 2 They may not even get them nominated for awards and they don't want to see them.

Speaker 1 Can I say something about Sidney Sweeney and The Rock and Glenn Powell in Running Man, which also did

Speaker 1 big numbers at the box office.

Speaker 1 And 10 years ago, that's a shoo-in, by the way. It's a remake of a cult piece of IP that was also a mainstream piece of IP, starring the hottest young actor.

Speaker 2 I disagree with both those things, but anyone

Speaker 1 will come to that. Wicked stars Ariana Grande Grande and Cynthia Arrivo.
Take me through their big box office successes before that movie. There are none.
And don't need to.

Speaker 1 They've both done brilliant things in their areas, but neither of them is a movie star. No one, by the way, is also next year kind of going, I want to see what Cynthia Rivo's next movie is.

Speaker 1 If she's in an amazing movie, everyone will go and see it. But no one is going to go and see a Cynthia Arrivo movie, an Ariana Grande movie, a Sidney Sweeney movie, a Glenn Powell movie.

Speaker 1 And that we've talked about a while, but that really has crept up on us a little bit. The IP is

Speaker 1 absolutely the king. And yet movies, you know, The Smashing Machine is costing 50 million, presumably because The Rock is taking quite a lot of money there.

Speaker 2 Quite a lot, yeah. They unfortunately filmed in masses of locations.
I mean, someone should have just said, no, no, no, you don't need to take this movie to all these different places.

Speaker 2 But yes, they made it much more expensive than they should have done.

Speaker 1 It feels like some sort of adjustment of the star system is completely necessary.

Speaker 2 And we've talked about this before. Something like The Running Man, which I have to say, you know, as I keep saying, you know, Glenn Powell is like a mid-level star.

Speaker 2 He works really, really hard and he does lots of things. Is he a movie star? He wants to be a movie star desperately.
I think he's coming at the end of something.

Speaker 1 Can you be a movie star?

Speaker 2 Can you be a movie star? Well, wait, I'm going to talk about that in just a second, but I will say about that property. Explain to me why The Running Man is a great piece of IP, okay?

Speaker 2 It's not The Terminator.

Speaker 2 It's like a real second tier, maybe even third tier Schwarzenegger movie. And

Speaker 2 it's not one of the big ones. And if it was The Terminator, then that would be a whole different thing.
And I don't think Glenn Power would be in it, by the way.

Speaker 2 But it's... Sorry, that's a reality.
And I don't.

Speaker 1 But who would be in it? If they remade Terminator now, who would be Terminator?

Speaker 2 Someone older, probably.

Speaker 1 Statham.

Speaker 2 They should put The Rock in it.

Speaker 1 The Rock is the Terminator.

Speaker 2 The Rock is a multiplex star. And The Rock will get people to go and watch it.

Speaker 2 If they did Terminator with The Rock, that's what you should be in. I couldn't care less about him being in a drama, about an MMA, his battle with prescription medication.
No.

Speaker 2 The thing you're saying about movie stars, something that I do think is the case is there's no particular reason why public service broadcasting needs to be delivered in one hour shows or 30 minute shows, as we were talking when we talked with Kate Phillips last week.

Speaker 2 That feeling of movie stardom that we love stars and we want to see them, is there any particular reason it has to be delivered via the means of a major motion picture?

Speaker 2 Because people might like to see them on an interview show. They see lots and lots of clips.
They have kind of direct parasocial relationships with them via their Instagrams.

Speaker 2 Do I need to see Two Hours of Sydney Sweeney?

Speaker 2 Maybe I'm just happy with clips. I understand for family things, and that's a completely different thing.

Speaker 2 And again, that genre and the family genre is very, very strong when it gets when they get it right.

Speaker 2 All of these movies that are going to be nominated for great performances for awards, I mean, the biggest one's going to be one battle after another. Otherwise, they're very, very small things.

Speaker 2 Hollywood likes to do this when it has, like, just in the same way that everyone's like, oh, everyone's back now. Don't worry because it's wicked.
It's fine. It's like, no, no, no, it's not fine.

Speaker 2 Nothing is fine here.

Speaker 1 I mean, Wicked is almost not cinema. It's a phenomenon.
It's a cultural thing that exists across lots and lots of mediums. It's not the fact that that's opened in movie theatres that's made it so big.

Speaker 1 It's a multi-platform assault on art.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and that press tour, like you said, was a sort of cultural moment.

Speaker 2 And maybe people saw last week Timothy Chalamet, who's got Marty Supreme, the Safdie Brother movie that you do want to see, not The Smashing Machine.

Speaker 2 And that's coming out on, I think, on Christmas Day or something.

Speaker 2 What movie is that? Marty Supreme. A battle what? A ping pong star.

Speaker 1 A ping pong star? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 Why do we want to see that? It doesn't feel like a bad thing. I think it's quite fun.

Speaker 2 People want to see Timothy Chalamet. I think people, it won't have cost a complete fortune and people want to see it.

Speaker 2 Now, he did a sort of thing where he was talking about doing his press tour and he did a video that, like a sort of jokey video, where he was coming up with really stupid ideas for how he could promote the movie, which AE24 then immediately sort of uploaded because they wanted to show that, you know, he's an ironist.

Speaker 2 He is good at a form of press tour that is not quite like everybody else's, but other people are saying, oh, well, do I actually really, you know, now I've seen all these press tours, now I've seen...

Speaker 1 Yeah, can I say something controversial? Yeah. Which is, I always, for years and years on panel shows, I always said, why are we paying comedians?

Speaker 1 Because literally they're just selling tour tickets off the back of this panel show. This comedian is getting more from being on this show than we're getting from the comedian being on it.

Speaker 1 It seems to me now that actors are getting more from being in movies than the movie companies are getting from the actors being in their film.

Speaker 1 So Glenn Powell gets more from being in Running Man than the movie company gets from Glenn Powell being in it, because he suddenly has three months' worth of you know publicity everywhere he wants to go being interviewed by everyone he wants to doing every single podcast and we all know that you can monetize your own personal brand far more than you used to be able to do it feels to me now that actors should pay to play it feels like whoever you are unless you know maybe you're shanome glenn powell's manager should say i'll give you a million dollars to put him in running man because it keeps him in the conversation it keeps him in the public eye for another three months four months in a way that something he just does himself wouldn't do it's saying this guy has a significance this guy has a role to play in our culture and then he just monetizes that money.

Speaker 2 You make your money from endorsements or whatever else it is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because Glenn Powell has not failed in Running Man.

Speaker 1 Glenn Powell has his face has been everywhere on huge billboards, on, you know, being incredibly charming, unbelievable, on everything he wants to do.

Speaker 1 And the person who's making money from that is Glenn Powell and Glenn Powell's manager and Glenn Powell's hot sauce. What do you think about that?

Speaker 2 I definitely think that stars are becoming...

Speaker 2 We've talked about how they're so diversified and they've got fragrance lines lines and for fashion campaigns and those are the things that in some ways make really big bucks and those personal brands are incredibly monetizable and actually fashion houses as i say and um

Speaker 2 fragrance houses can make money out of the market you've got to you've got to be in you've got to be in movies

Speaker 2 sort of loss leader to some extent certainly i think it will eventually become problematic that he just can't make that leap into the kind of megawatt territory and i think that eventually people will think well i could just put someone else in so so you'll you'll always have to remain competitively priced if you're him.

Speaker 2 This is definitely something that people are saying which is that the movies is just kind of a small thing and it's a form of job visibility but actually the big money comes from all of these subsidiary businesses that they have.

Speaker 2 I think that is obviously a really big problem for Hollywood. But if you don't make any movies and you don't give things a try, I think that it just all needs such a big rethink.

Speaker 2 I do think it's just genuinely extraordinary that like Warner's Has Nothing for the last quarter of the year.

Speaker 1 There has not been a family movie the one genre that you can actually bank on to keep the lights on they haven't bothered no one has bothered putting one out really since July but thought experiment if I'm a movie executive in Hollywood this that must be a hard job well not hard but you know what I mean depressing and I've got a big movie coming out I just I get actress managers to come in and pitch me some sums of money as to how much their talent would like to be in this film.

Speaker 1 I say, look, this is what we're spending on marketing. We've got a $100 million marketing budget.

Speaker 1 So, you know, we'll be on this thing, we'll be on that thing, we'll be teaming up with Coke, there'll be billboards everywhere. What is that worth to your actor? How much would you like to pay?

Speaker 1 And people will pitch in, you know, two million, three million, four million dollars. And suddenly, you know, you're being paid $10 million to get your cast because they're aware they're getting...

Speaker 1 six months worth of free publicity.

Speaker 2 And they're going to get a Gucci campaign now.

Speaker 1 And they're going to get a Gucci campaign out of it.

Speaker 2 I love this idea. This is brilliant.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think that is a good idea because it's very difficult to see how otherwise they can continue explaining to stars that they can't have theatrical release they can't have these huge salaries because it's them who's benefiting I mean listen you get paid to be on taskmaster but if you're a comedian it is the one thing that will move the dial in terms of

Speaker 1 absolutely knocking you up to the next level in terms of ticket sales and in terms of notoriety feels like if I was a big agent that'd be worth that'd be worth some money to me and Hollywood is like 10 times that.

Speaker 1 Imagine if you were someone else's agent who wasn't Cynthia Arrivo and you managed to get your talent in Wicked.

Speaker 1 If you think of the money that Cynthia Arrivo has made out of Wicked, and quite rightly, because she's brilliant in it, and you know,

Speaker 1 she's sort of an extraordinary star that we haven't seen before.

Speaker 1 But if someone else had done it and was able to monetize that to, you know, 30, 40, 50 million over the next five years, then it's worth paying $5 million up front. I think you're right.

Speaker 2 I think the press tours in general are becoming just this huge saturation thing. And unless people think of different ways of doing them, then they're all kind of the same.

Speaker 2 And a lot of people, I've seen a lot of people write, given that it's been such a terrible quarter in Hollywood, a lot of people say the only people who have benefited from these is just like the stars for exposure.

Speaker 2 But certainly the movies haven't made any money.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but the stars have.

Speaker 2 The stars have, yeah. And they've made, laid down potential future income streams as well.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 And so, listen, just very basic economics tells you that something could change there. Not saying it will, because it definitely won't, but it could do.

Speaker 2 I love this take.

Speaker 2 But how can they be that bad that there isn't anything to see for families yeah it's like the bbc just going oh no we don't we don't we sorry we didn't do anything for christmas yeah it's just it's it's really it's six months of the year it's so late november when zootopia comes out that's so ridiculous that there were basically a dropped five months do you know what genuinely i'm so sorry you have to spend time with your kids

Speaker 1 Because we all know that the greatest thing about the cinema is it's two hours apiece. You can kind of shut your eyes.

Speaker 1 It's one of the few places that you can have just a little nap during the day. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, the amount of movies I saw with my kids when they were growing up, Pixar, and all sorts of things, where I saw the first 20 minutes and probably the last 20 minutes, and I must have had a snooze in the middle, but they were so happy.

Speaker 1 It's, yeah, I don't know what happens in most of the middles of the Pixar movies. Shall we do some adverts? Let's.

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Speaker 6 we're in good shape.

Speaker 5 Join me, Jacqueline Cole, as I meet the filmmakers, actors, and industry insiders influencing entertainment.

Speaker 5 Each episode, guests share their journeys and inspirations and answer trivia about the movies that shape them.

Speaker 5 My next guest is Emma Tommy, director of Five Nights at Freddy's and Five Nights at Freddy's 2. To listen, simply search Seen on the Screen wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back, everybody. Now, after those adverts, let us talk about Christmas adverts, which straight up.

Speaker 1 That's good. They are all out.
That's a good link.

Speaker 2 They're pretty much all out now.

Speaker 2 some of them have like refreshes in the last month but you either see them because they go viral and people they're made into a moment or if you watch live sport then you will have seen adverts in the course and apart from that you are not seeing you're not really because you're not necessarily watching tv in that way but it's such a huge spend last year people spent uk brands spent 10.5 billion and this year they think it will be 12 billion i was so fascinated by that number on christmas ads okay so i was so fascinated by the number.

Speaker 2 Do you know what else is 12 billion? The value of the defence industries to the UK economy.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 2 So that is how much they produce the UK economy. That's what they're worth, the GVA.
That same amount of money, not from the same sources, is put back into making us buy some stuff at Christmas.

Speaker 2 I just find that an interesting comparison of just how much...

Speaker 1 How much money is spent? Literally, but don't tell Ingrid, I bought a ground-to-air surface missile for Christmas.

Speaker 2 And those adverts, they're normally on, they used to be on traditional TV and those are the ones we're going to talk about because they're the ones that kind of get the most cultural purchase.

Speaker 2 We should say that most adverts now, it's like online search, display, social, all of that stuff. Those are the increasing focus.

Speaker 2 Nonetheless, these big set pieces still happen and they've kind of all dropped now.

Speaker 2 And they're not really just an ad, they're like some sort of seasonal entertainment event, which you want them to go viral so people talk about them more.

Speaker 2 Obviously, the biggest one normally is the John Lewis advert.

Speaker 1 It's always in the vanguard, isn't it? We spoke to to Rosie Hanley who runs the advertising side of John Lewis. So she's on the John Lewis side of it.

Speaker 1 Because as you say they spend a huge amount of money on these things. So I was trying to get to the idea of is there a return on investment from it and what is that return on investment?

Speaker 1 You know if if they're all spending a lot of money are they all making that much money back? You know, she's saying on the morning of of release of that advert they had 1.1 million video views.

Speaker 1 So by the way, no one's this is the rave dad.

Speaker 2 Rave dad, yeah. Rave dad meets adolescents.

Speaker 1 So, no one's looking at rave dad meets adolescents. So, no one's worrying about how many people have seen it on TV.

Speaker 1 So, true, oh, we got 1.1 million views on the first morning of the ad, which is up like 176% from the previous year. So, her take is look, the metrics are difficult.

Speaker 1 So, it's obviously it's a big deal for John Lewis to have that many people looking at something liking it and it gives you a warm feeling about John Lewis.

Speaker 1 She says, in about six months time we'll see how good, really how good our Christmas was and how well that's gone into the new year.

Speaker 1 But it's difficult to measure exactly how these things are making money for brands other than if you're John Lewis, you have to

Speaker 1 be a big brand

Speaker 1 forever and ever and ever. And this is one of the big times where you can absolutely re-engage with the public and remind people about John Lewis, remind it, you know.

Speaker 2 But feelings are very powerful in terms of creating loyalty to brands. It's really interesting.
So if you if it's giving you emotion.

Speaker 1 she said, you know, they do huge amounts of research, so you know, raved ad, you know, a thing about not being able to speak, not being able to say the thing that you mean.

Speaker 1 And she said, Well, we did lots of research with our customers, and that was one of the main things that came out of it: is people feel that they can't talk in the way they want to to people they love.

Speaker 1 So, you imagine the research they're doing, it's not just you know, do you like socks?

Speaker 1 And so, this is one of the things they sent out to Saatchi and Saatchi, like a year before these things are done, sort of a year in advance.

Speaker 1 Uh, and they said, This is one of the things that one of the territories that we found from our data. And Saatchi and Saatchi came up with this ad, which everyone loved, the rave dad thing.

Speaker 1 And it is a question of going into the data of who your customers are, what it is that they want, what they are feeling rather than what they want to buy. And so it's 100% that.

Speaker 1 It really absolutely comes from that. What are you feeling at the moment? What is it that's at the front of your mind? What is it in the world that sort of is making you, giving you pause for thought?

Speaker 1 But fascinating how no one is sitting there, the accountants are not going, the return on investment we want is this. What they're actually thinking is, this is what our customers are feeling.

Speaker 1 How do we show them that we are feeling it?

Speaker 2 It's sad middle-aged men, like one of the, like the Waitrose one with Joe Wilkinson.

Speaker 1 Yes, amazing.

Speaker 2 I mean, the message of the John Lewis is that having kids is better than being on a pill. Maybe the message of the Waitrose one way, but you can make it with Kiera Knightley.
You can.

Speaker 2 If you're Joe Wilkinson.

Speaker 2 By the way, can I just say, having spoken earlier before the break about what's supposed to be the most sophisticated storytelling in the world, that no one actually wants to go out and see films, I mean, the Waitress one's very long.

Speaker 2 It's like three and a half minutes or something. But I have sat through movies

Speaker 2 which have less clarity of story

Speaker 2 that are three and a half hours long.

Speaker 1 And less sexual chemistry. Yeah.
Ironically, Joe Wilkinson must think it's Christmas.

Speaker 1 I love Joe Wilkinson, so he's the nicest man. in the whole world.

Speaker 1 But what an amazing thing for him to be in that advert with Kieran Knightley and because of celebrity traitors for there to be an absolute equivalence between the two of them.

Speaker 2 You know what?

Speaker 2 Last year, I think I talked about this company called System One that has this very sort of sophisticated way of kind of a star system, multiple different stars for these ads and measures kind of audience satisfaction and audience happiness and all these sort of things.

Speaker 2 The one that has actually come out, which I think is quite interesting on top this year, is the Coca-Cola one. It's AI.

Speaker 2 First of all, don't forget they did an AI one that's almost identical to this last year. This time it's the same, but instead of humans, it's animals.
And it's almost the same.

Speaker 2 Obviously the AI is better. Instead of, there has been some sort of, some people have talked negatively about it.

Speaker 2 I think campaign magazine were trying to, the advertising Bible were trying to work out

Speaker 2 how much negative mention there'd been on it. But actually, what System One found was that it...
It's the highest possible score you can get, really.

Speaker 2 Spike rating when people see it, and brand fluency, and that's how quickly people recognize it.

Speaker 1 Brand fluency.

Speaker 2 Brand fluency. Brand fluency.
How quickly you recognize the brand.

Speaker 2 And bizarrely, the moment they're most satisfied, and this, listen, I don't think this is particularly, I think this is quite dystopian, is when they see the red trucks.

Speaker 2 Because the red trucks is like some sort of Pavlovian thing, the reminder of all the times I've seen red trucks in the previous Christmas adverts, and that's when the audience is most happy and they do not care that it is AI.

Speaker 1 We're a simple species, aren't we?

Speaker 2 They know what it is. It's creative consistency.
You know you're going to get the red trucks and they like that.

Speaker 2 They like to see that in the same way that some people say, oh, I watch strictly because it's a countdown to Christmas.

Speaker 2 You know, know you could use a calendar i don't think that's particularly optimistic in terms of where we're going if people don't mind that it's ai yeah well everything i read about the coca-cola campaigns of the last two years it seems to me they've had more people working on that than you know virtually any other advert.

Speaker 1 They've got a lot of people working on their AI stuff. Also, they're aware they've got a visual image which they're not going to change.

Speaker 1 So it's not like they were going to bring in a team of 100 people to revamp Coca-Cola's advertising. It's going to be the red trucks.

Speaker 1 They seem to be spending a lot of money and a lot of manpower, more to the point, to use AI to make these things, which is why I think there's been less pushback than there might ordinarily have been.

Speaker 1 It feels like they're doing, it's quite a cheeky use of.

Speaker 2 I don't think people know anything about that. No one normal watching that advert knows anything about that, and that's not why there's been no pushback.
They just don't care.

Speaker 1 That's not been why there's been no pushback.

Speaker 2 That's not why there's been no pushback. They just don't care.

Speaker 1 Yes, no, that's definitely true. But we're doing a podcast about entertainment, so do we care?

Speaker 2 Yes, I slightly do care, because it makes me think that people won't care. They don't really care when things are made by AI and they don't don't matter.

Speaker 2 And you can say all you like that, oh, like there have been humans doing that really fun prompt writing thing in the background. No, but that's...

Speaker 2 Which to me is not the same as sadly being an animator. And even though

Speaker 1 that's exactly my point, is I think that in the industry, people have given it a slightly free pass because they're aware that a lot of people have worked on it and they're taking a slightly kind of...

Speaker 1 detached view of what AI is.

Speaker 1 I think the lesson we learn, and this system, one thing is fascinating, is that an audience, you know, when people say, oh, it's ridiculous, you know, they changed the number of wheels on the truck at one point.

Speaker 1 Nobody notices. Nobody notices.
You know, sometimes you spend ages.

Speaker 2 They just feel happy when they see the red trucks at the end.

Speaker 1 But, you know, in an edit, sometimes people say, oh no, we've got to change that because the water is here and then it's there. No one notices any of those things.

Speaker 1 People feel television, they feel adverts, they feel movies. They just do.

Speaker 1 And this idea that the downfall of AI is going to be that it is not going to be technically proficient enough for people, that is definitely not the case because no one no one most people don't care about technical proficiency it feels like this coca-coder thing I just think you have to keep a watching brief on it because I think it definitely opened the door to the fact that people do not mind a lack of technical mastery in what it is they are watching but as you say I would rather there were animators working on that than you know, people putting in prompts.

Speaker 1 But what one does about that, I don't know, other than maybe not wave it through. Whereas the John Lewis ad,

Speaker 1 no AI at all. They shot it in the fridge in Brixton.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 The one thing about that advert, I've been reading about the kid in it who didn't tell his mum he was in it until

Speaker 1 she saw it live. The dad in that advert, who does a great job, I think, conveys an awful lot.
I cannot find out who he is.

Speaker 1 There seems to be no record. Anyways, I'm always fascinated with who's in things and what they've been in before.
And

Speaker 1 there is no record as to who he is. So if anyone listening to this can tell us who that John Lewis is not AI actor is.
Well, one assumes not.

Speaker 2 He's a clean skin. They had to just find a generic dad.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 Maybe.

Speaker 1 Maybe they did. But it was fascinating talking to Rose Hanley about the John Lewis advert and what a big deal it is to John Lewis.
And it just is that thing.

Speaker 1 As human beings, every year, there is a reset and there is a, we take stock of who we are as people. And brands do want to.
own that.

Speaker 1 That's a very, very big deal to own something like that, to have that kind of relationship with customers that when they think about the world and think about who we are as a country, they think about our brand.

Speaker 1 So the return on investment question, which I put to Rosie, is fascinating because it is utterly intangible and it is just about weaving John Lewis

Speaker 1 into the fabric of British life. The other thing I asked her is I said, how often do people pitch you songs?

Speaker 1 And she said, my entire year. is people pitching me songs and saying, oh, you should think about that.
She said, by the way, I've never used one that someone's pitched me.

Speaker 1 But my entire year is people saying, oh, I'll tell you what, I just listened to this. This would be amazing.
But Where Love Lives, Alison Limerick, I think, is

Speaker 1 a cracking choice.

Speaker 2 Has it troubled the charts?

Speaker 2 Because sometimes the music...

Speaker 1 No, not particularly. I was going to do a thing, and there's just no point about Christmas number one.
Christmas number one is dead now. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So Alison Limerick is, you know, like fourth favorite for Christmas number one, but it's not. going to happen because we know what Christmas number one is going to be now.

Speaker 1 We knew for a few years it was going to be X Factor.

Speaker 1 Then we knew it was going to be Lad Baby. And now we know it's Wham.
Every year it's going to be Wham. You know, you can still get kind of evens on it being Wham this year,

Speaker 1 which is sort of free money.

Speaker 1 But that lovely race for Christmas number one we used to have is, you know, it's 13 years ago, killing in the name was probably the last funny race for Christmas number one we had.

Speaker 1 And now it just isn't anything.

Speaker 2 Well, we now have the adverts race, which we didn't, which is itself a relatively new bolt-on, and we have to just take things where we can.

Speaker 1 We've just got time, I think.

Speaker 1 I just wanted to talk, you know, like when an album comes out that everyone gets into at the same time, and at the moment it's the Rosalia album, Lux, that everyone's gone crazy for.

Speaker 1 And rightly so, if you listen to it, it's very, very, very unusual. It's unlike anything else probably you've quite listened to.
It's got touches of flamenco. It's got,

Speaker 1 you know, Latin urban music in there. It has classical music, Raw Philharmonica on it.
Bjork is on it. It's really, really...
a very, very beautiful and extraordinary album.

Speaker 1 It's sort of basically based around stories of female Christian saints.

Speaker 1 She's got an incredible voice and everyone has just discovered her. She'd been around for a long time.
Firstly, listen to the album. If people have not listened to it, I think you'd love it.

Speaker 1 But secondly, she is an amazing character because she has come up with this, what is essentially a very avant-garde album, but that people adore.

Speaker 1 But, you know, she also happens to be a brand ambassador for Skims. And she's got a makeup line.
And she's made a transformation-flavoured Coke for Coca-Cola.

Speaker 1 So she's absolutely in the heart of the world of Kardashians and this, that, the other. And she's made one one of the great avant-garde pop albums of the 21st century.

Speaker 2 That is religious. Yeah.
Sorry. I mean, that to me is one of the things I found most interesting was that just at the, I think at the weekend, the Vatican came out,

Speaker 2 a cardinal from the sort of basically the Vatican culture department

Speaker 2 came out and praised her. For me, that's quite interesting because I grew up in an era where, first of all, where Spain was not quite a theocracy, but it was very, very religious.

Speaker 2 Spain, where she's from, she's Catalan, has become much more secular. But also where the Vatican condemned things.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the Vatic, you know, everyone, obviously in the old days, Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon, but then Madonna, anyone involved in the Last Temptation of Christ, the Vatican condemning people used to get headlines.

Speaker 2 Now the Vatican praising people because everything has become much more secular in lots of different ways. And I find the religion of this album really sort of fascinating.

Speaker 2 It's like sort of brat, brat religion.

Speaker 1 I mean, it plays with religion.

Speaker 2 It's a very 20s, 20s.

Speaker 1 In the same way that Madonna used to play with religion, I guess, but for a while.

Speaker 2 Well, Madonna's really praised it because she obviously sees a sort of bloodline between it all. But it's very weird because, I mean, on the last album on Moto Mammy, the biggest

Speaker 2 ruminations on God were on a song called Hente.

Speaker 2 So I find it sort of...

Speaker 2 Anyway, this cardinal said that when she talks about spirituality, it means she captures a profound need in contemporary culture to approach spirituality, to cultivate an inner life.

Speaker 2 I do think there is something in that. You know, I definitely do.
People are still religious in lots of

Speaker 2 spiritual, but not institutionally so.

Speaker 1 The church is thinking, we should get in on this spirituality thing.

Speaker 1 That seems big.

Speaker 2 Rather than just say you haven't done it by the book, which is what they used to say, they're now like, hey, anyone's talking about it at all? That's good.

Speaker 2 To me, it's fascinating that you can make something... I mean, really so idiosyncratic.
And I mean, a lot of pop right now.

Speaker 2 And also, it is, I saw her say in an interview, you know, I'm quite bored of celebrities like celebrity beef in pop songs

Speaker 2 and instead she's gone with saints so yeah it's clever isn't it it's quite yeah

Speaker 2 but it can be really commercial and one of the reasons it can be really commercial that I am definitely very interested in is the idea of being global now.

Speaker 2 It's really hard to break into the, you know, UK charts are all US dominated.

Speaker 2 The idea of this global chart, if you look at the Spotify global chart, there was a point she's, since Lux has come out, she's had lots and lots of songs in the Spotify Global top 50.

Speaker 2 She may not have troubled the charts in your individual country, but she's so global.

Speaker 2 Because of the way that people consume and discover music, you can be someone making a lot of money and being very, very successful and not really troubling top 10s, even top 20s locally at all.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm not saying in Spain, but

Speaker 1 yeah, she's at 13 number ones in Spain.

Speaker 1 But yeah, she's definitively crossed over in the UK now in the way I think she crossed over in the States, which has always been slightly more amenable to Spanish language music.

Speaker 1 But she is now clearly going to be an absolutely enormous star in the UK as well. We will hear an awful lot about her.

Speaker 1 Like her, you know, one of her previous albums, El Marquerre, was about, that was about a 13th century Occitan novel, Flamenca.

Speaker 1 You know, she's and yet met with universal acclaim and full of RB bangers. And she's an extraordinary.

Speaker 2 But it was also, was it not also her degree thesis?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Her first two albums were her degree, like Better than Sebastian for indie kids out there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, she was, she, because she studied

Speaker 1 Flamenco, she's, you know, she music theory and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 But what I'm going to do my thesis in the form of an amazing album.

Speaker 1 But someone

Speaker 1 who will wax lyrical about Almodavar and Tarkovsky and also be a Skims brand ambassador, that feels like what the 21st century was really, really looking for.

Speaker 2 Someone who's happy to do it all, to take it all and to understand where we are as a century and to liberation theology, to say, I'm still a feminist, but this is, I can still, I believe in in this higher power.

Speaker 1 None of which, by the way, works if you don't make a great album.

Speaker 1 So that is Rosalia. I just wanted to mention it because lots of people have started talking about her, and I just think she's an incredibly interesting person.

Speaker 1 So if you've heard some of the music but didn't know so much about her, I just think she's a very interesting figure, and I think she's going to continue to be incredibly interesting as the years go by.

Speaker 1 So I just think she's someone just to absolutely say she should be on your cultural radar. If you don't like the album, that's okay.
But if you listen to it,

Speaker 1 it might be one of your new favourites. Any recommendations, Marina?

Speaker 2 Yes, I would like to recommend Anatomy of a Cancellation, which is a BBC series, a BBC sounds series,

Speaker 2 which explores, I mean, from every angle, the sort of cancellation of the author Kate Clanchy, who wrote a book, who was accused of racism in a book she wrote about teaching children.

Speaker 2 And it's it's absolutely for Katie, it's done by Katie Razzle, who I just absolutely love. I think she's brilliant brilliant at the BBC.

Speaker 2 And she's talked to so many different people in every different angle of this story. And it's really gripping about our age.
And it's very well done.

Speaker 2 I mean, I found it incredibly depressing in lots of other ways. But it's so interesting.

Speaker 2 And I mean, it is just a full, it's the 360-degree look at this, which I think is just, you can do that over. the course of seven episodes and I think it's wonderful.
Excellent.

Speaker 1 I want to recommend a book.

Speaker 1 On our bonus episode this week, we're going to do Christmas gift guys, but i think this would be a good christmas gift for people i just finished the ian mccewan book which is called what what we can know which is the worst title of any book ever because it's impossible i've been reading it and i love it and i can see the front cover but i cannot i literally i'm having to drag what we can know out of somewhere because it's almost impossible to remember it's such a brilliant book it's written 100 years in the future uh a literature professor is looking back on a on a poem that disappeared that he's trying to find and he looks into the life of it this poet and his wife and the people around them But it's amazing because you're 100 years in the future.

Speaker 1 So you sort of see what that is like. He's looking back as an historian to our era now.

Speaker 1 But because it's Ian McEwen, it's also beautifully written and there's some very, very funny bits and great characters. So it's what we can know.
I mean, good luck with that.

Speaker 1 Ian McEwen will be easy for you to remember, but what we can know. And I thought it was an absolute banger, if you can call an Ian McEwen novel a banger.

Speaker 2 I think you can.

Speaker 1 I think you can. So you have a Christmas gift guide for our members on Friday, but we have a

Speaker 1 but on Thursday, we have a special episode, uh, which is, I'm really looking forward to because I've got some really, really good ones for you. The greatest comebacks of all time in showbiz history.

Speaker 1 So, across all the different genres, not disses, but career comebacks, career

Speaker 2 than just repartee.

Speaker 1 Yes, not a not a comedian having to go at someone in the front row. Um, yeah, the greatest, the greatest career comebacks in showbiz.
We're doing that on Thursday.

Speaker 1 I'm looking forward to it very, very much indeed. But otherwise, we'll see you on Thursday.

Speaker 2 See you on Thursday.

Speaker 2 This episode was brought to you by our good friends at Sky.

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