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      Writers, Seeking Pay Change for the Streaming Era, Prepare to Strike

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      In the 16 years since the entertainment industry’s last strike, sweeping technological change has upended the television and movie business.When the most recent Hollywood strike took place — 16 years ago — the internet had not yet transformed the television and movie businesses. Broadcast networks still commanded colossal audiences, and cable channels were still growing. The superhero boom had begun for movie studios, and DVDs generated $16 billion in annual sales.Since then, galloping technological change has upended Hollywood in ways that few could have imagined. Traditional television is on viewership life support. Movie studios, stung by poor ticket sales for dramas and comedies, have retreated almost entirely to franchise spectacles. The DVD business is over; Netflix will ship its last little silver discs on Sept. 29.It’s a streaming world now. The pandemic sped up the shift.What has not changed much? The formulas that studios use to pay television and movie creators, setting the stage for another strike. “Writer compensation needs to evolve for a streaming-first world,” said Rich Greenfield, a founder of the LightShed Partners research firm.Absent an unlikely last-minute resolution with studios, more than 11,000 unionized screenwriters could head to picket lines in Los Angeles and New York as soon as Tuesday, an action that, depending on its duration, would bring Hollywood’s creative assembly lines to a gradual halt. Writers Guild of America leaders have called this an “existential” moment, contending that compensation has stagnated despite the proliferation of content in the streaming era — to the degree that even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.“Writers at every level and in every genre, whether it’s features or TV, we’re all being devalued and financially taken advantage of by the studios,” said Danny Tolli, a writer whose credits include “Roswell, New Mexico” and the Shondaland show “The Catch.”“These studios are making billions in profits, and they are spending billions on content — content that we create with our blood, sweat and tears,” Mr. Tolli continued. “But there are times when I still have to worry about how I’m going to pay my mortgage. How I’m going to provide for my family. I have considered Uber to supplement my income.”Studio chiefs have largely maintained public silence, leaving communication to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on their behalf. In statements, the organization has said its goal was a “mutually beneficial deal,” which was “only possible if the guild is committed to turning its focus to serious bargaining” and “searching for reasonable compromises.”Privately, numerous studio and streaming service executives portrayed writers as histrionic and out of touch. You can’t make a living as a TV writer? By what standard? The business has changed; get used to it.By some measures, a major strike in Hollywood is long overdue. Since the 1940s, with a couple of exceptions, strikes have shaken the entertainment industry almost like clockwork — every seven or eight years — usually aligning with upheaval in the fast-changing business. The dawn of television. The rise of cable networks.“These things gotta happen every five years or so, 10 years,” Clemenza, the weathered Corleone capo explains in “The Godfather,” one of Hollywood’s most storied creations, as the film’s gangster families “go to the mattresses” against one another. “Helps to get rid of the bad blood.”Writers in Hollywood have long complained that studios treat them like second-class citizens.Dick Strobel/Associated PressFor generations, ever since the end of the silent film era, Hollywood writers have complained that studios treat them as second-class citizens — that their artistic contributions are underappreciated (and undercompensated), especially compared with those of actors and directors.Among Hollywood workers, screenwriters have walked out the most often (six times) and were responsible for the entertainment industry’s most recent strike in 2007. It was a precarious economic time — the Great Recession was underway — but “new media” was on the horizon. Apple had started to sell iPods that could play video. Disney was offering $2 downloads for episodes of “Lost.” Hulu was in the start-up stages.The existing contract between studios and the Writers Guild of America, which expires at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, sets minimum weekly pay for certain television writer-producers at $7,412. (Agents for experienced writers can negotiate that up.) One problem, according to the guild, involves the number of weeks writers work in the streaming era.Because of streaming, the network norms of 22, 24 or even 26 episodes per season have mostly disappeared. Most streaming series are eight to 12 episodes long. As a result, the median writer-producer works nearly 40 weeks on a network show, according to guild data, but only 24 weeks on a streaming show, making it difficult to earn a stable paycheck.Residuals have also been undercut by streaming. Before streaming, writers could receive residual payments whenever a show was resold — into syndication, for overseas airing, on DVD. But global streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have cut off those distribution arms.Instead, streaming services pay a fixed residual. Writers say there is no way to know whether those fees are fair because services hide viewership data. A new contract, guild leaders have said, must include a formula for paying residuals based on views.Guild leaders contend that it would cost studios a collective $600 million a year to give them everything they want. The companies, however, are under pressure from Wall Street to cut costs. And gains for one group of entertainment workers would almost certainly need to be extended to others: Contracts with the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, expire on June 30.Hollywood companies say they simply cannot afford widespread raises. Loaded with $45 billion in debt, Disney laid off thousands of employees in recent days, part of a campaign to eliminate 7,000 jobs by the end of June. Disney+ remains unprofitable, although the company has vowed to change that by next year. Disney is Hollywood’s largest supplier of union-covered TV dramas and comedies (890 episodes for the 2021-22 season).Warner Bros. Discovery, which has roughly $47 billion in debt, has already cut thousands of jobs as part of a $4 billion pullback. NBCUniversal is also tightening its belt as it contends with cable cord-cutting and a troublesome advertising market.These companies remain highly profitable. But they have not been delivering the kind of steady profit growth that Wall Street rewards.The last time the writers had a chance to negotiate a contract, the pandemic prompted a speedy agreement.Annie Tritt for The New York TimesScreenwriters come into these talks with notable swagger. In 2019, when film and TV writers fired their agents in a campaign over what they saw as conflicts of interest, many agency leaders figured that the guild would eventually fracture. That never happened: After a 22-month standoff, the big agencies effectively gave writers what they wanted.For screenwriters, there is also pent-up demand for raises, made worse by climbing inflation. When writers last had the opportunity to negotiate a contract, the pandemic was shutting down Hollywood, and so the two sides came to a speedy agreement — “essentially kicking the can down the road” in the words of Mr. Greenfield. In the negotiation cycle before that, writers focused more on shoring up their generous health plan.And writers have been incensed by mixed messaging from companies on their financial health.“NBCUniversal is performing extremely well operationally and financially,” Brian Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, wrote to employees last week, when the division’s top executive was ousted.Netflix’s co-chief executive, Ted Sarandos, received a pay package worth $50.3 million in 2022, up 32 percent from 2021, Netflix disclosed last week.“Lots of people are still getting very rich off of Hollywood product — just not the creators of that product,” said Matt Ember, a screenwriter whose credits include “Get Smart,” “The War With Grandpa” and the animated “Home.”The upshot: The situation might get worse before it gets better.“Every industry goes through course corrections,” said Laura Lewis, the founder of Rebelle Media, an entertainment production and financing company. “Maybe this is an opportunity to adjust the models for the next phase of the entertainment business.”“The question,” she continued, “is how much pain will we have to endure to get there.”John Koblin More

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      in Movies

      Hollywood, Both Frantic and Calm, Braces for Writers’ Strike

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      Studios have moved up deadlines for TV writers, and late-night shows are preparing to go dark. But for other segments of the industry, it’s business as usual.Writers scrambling to finish scripts. Rival late-night-show hosts and producers convening group calls to discuss contingency plans. Union officials and screenwriters gathering in conference rooms to design picket signs with slogans like “The Future of Writing Is at Stake!”With a Hollywood strike looming, there has been a frantic sprint throughout the entertainment world before 11,500 TV and movie writers potentially walk out as soon as next week.The possibility of a television and movie writers’ strike — will they, won’t they, how could they? — has been the top conversation topic in the industry for weeks. And in recent days, there has been a notable shift: People have stopped asking one another whether a strike would take place and started to talk about duration. How long was the last one? (100 days in 2007-8.) How long was the longest one? (153 days in 1988.)“It’s the first topic that comes up in every meeting, every phone call, and everyone claims to have their own inside source about how long a strike will go on and whether the directors and actors will also go out, which would truly be a disaster,” said Laura Lewis, the founder of Rebelle Media, a production and financing company behind shows like “Tell Me Lies” on Hulu and independent movies like “Mr. Malcolm’s List.”Unions representing screenwriters have been negotiating with Hollywood’s biggest studios for a new contract to replace the one that expires on Monday. The contracts for directors and actors expire on June 30.“I support the writers,” Ms. Lewis said. “It’s challenging, though. Just as we are starting to recover from the pandemic, we could be going into a strike.”In recent weeks, television writers have been racing to meet deadlines that studios moved up. Worried about the possibility of having no income for months, some TV writers have been trying to push through new projects — to get “commenced,” Hollywood slang for a signed writing contract, which typically brings an upfront payment.One prominent talent agent, who like some others in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said there was a “mad rush” to complete deals before next week. Some writers began removing their personal possessions from studio offices in anticipation of a walkout.Likewise, studio executives began calling producers last week to tell them to act as if a strike were certain, and to make sure all last-minute tweaks were incorporated into scripts, so production on some series could continue even in the absence of writers on set. Executives have delayed production for other series until the fall in cases where they determined scripts were not entirely ready.The president of one production company said this week that she was “freaking out” over a TV project in danger of falling apart because the star was available only for a limited period and the script was not ready.The writers room for the hit ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary” is supposed to convene on Monday — the day the contract expires.“I’m making plans to go back to work when we’re supposed to go back to work,” said Brittani Nichols, a producer and writer on the show. “And if that doesn’t happen, I’ll be at work on the picket line.”The last Hollywood writers’ strike began in 2007 and lasted 100 days.Axel Koester for The New York TimesIf there is a strike, which could begin as early as Tuesday, late-night shows, including ones hosted by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, are likely to go dark. Late-night hosts and their top producers have convened conference calls to discuss a coordinated response in the event of a strike, much as they did during the pandemic.During the 2007 walkout, late-night shows went dark for two months before they began gradually returning in early 2008, even with writers still on picket lines. Jimmy Kimmel paid his staff out of his own pocket during the strike, and later explained that he had to return to the air because his savings were nearly wiped out.Mr. Kimmel and other hosts, like Conan O’Brien, gamely tried to put together shows without their writers or their standard monologues. Jay Leno, on the other hand, wrote his own “Tonight Show” monologues, infuriating the writers’ unions in the process.Though there’s plenty of uncertainty in TV circles, there are also segments of Hollywood where it has been business as usual.Executives at streaming services seemed to exhibit what one senior William Morris Endeavor agent called a “frightening, freakish sense of calm,” perhaps because they were betting that any strike would be short. Most streaming services have been under pressure to cut costs — even deep-pocketed Amazon Studios laid off 100 people on Thursday — and a strike is one quick way to do that: Spending would plummet as production slowed.“It could lead to notably better-than-expected streaming profitability,” Rich Greenfield, a founder of the LightShed Partners research firm, wrote to investors this month.At several movie studios, there is little sense of alarm, partly because a strike would have almost no impact on the release schedule until next spring. (The movie business works nearly a year in advance.) One movie agent said everyone in her orbit was preparing for the Cannes Film Festival, which begins on May 16 and will include premieres for films like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the latest from Martin Scorsese. Many movie executives were also preoccupied with CinemaCon this week, a convention for theater operators in Las Vegas.“The writers’ process is like 18 months to two years away from movies’ hitting our cinemas, generally, so you wouldn’t see an impact for quite a while,” said John Fithian, the departing chief executive of the National Association of Theater Owners. “There is a whole lot of writing already in the can — or the computer — for projects the studios are putting into production.”At the Walt Disney Company, the largest supplier of union-covered TV dramas and comedies (890 episodes for the 2021-22 season), more immediate worries have been the focus. Disney began to hand out thousands of pink slips on Monday as part of an unrelated plan to eliminate 7,000 jobs worldwide by the end of June. The company made news again on Wednesday when it sued Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.During previous union walkouts, television networks ordered more reality programming, which does not fall under the writers’ unions jurisdiction. The long-running “Cops” was ordered during the 1988 strike, while the 2007-8 strike helped supercharge shows like “The Celebrity Apprentice” and “The Biggest Loser.”Paul Neinstein, co-chief executive of the Project X production company, which made the most recent “Scream” movie and Netflix’s “The Night Agent,” said there had been a huge increase in reality TV pitches over the last month, even though his production company was not known for making unscripted television.“All of a sudden everybody’s got a reality show,” he said. “And that to me feels very strike-related.” More

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      in Theater

      Livestreaming ‘Made All the Difference’ for Some Disabled Art Lovers

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      When shuttered venues embraced streaming during the pandemic, the arts became more accessible. With live performance back, and streams dwindling, many feel forgotten.For Mollie Gathro, live theater was a once-a-year indulgence if the stars aligned perfectly.Gathro has degenerative disc disease and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, resulting in joint pain, weakness and loss of mobility. Because of her disabilities, going to a show meant having to secure accessible seating after hourslong phone calls with her “nemesis,” Ticketmaster; finding a friend to drive her or arranging other transportation; and hoping her body would cooperate enough for her to actually go out.But when live performance was brought to a halt three years ago by the coronavirus pandemic, and presenters turned to streaming in an effort to keep reaching audiences, the playing field was suddenly leveled for arts lovers like Gathro.From her home in West Springfield, Mass., Gathro suddenly had access to the same offerings as everyone else, watching streams of Gore Vidal’s drama “The Best Man” and of a Guster concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. For a while, it seemed, everything was online: performances by the Berlin State Opera or the Philadelphia Orchestra; dances by choreographers like Alonzo King and a New York City Ballet Spring Gala directed by Sofia Coppola; blockbuster movies that were released to streaming services at the same time they hit multiplexes; even the latest installment of Richard Nelson’s acclaimed cycle of plays about the Apple family for the Public Theater was streamed live.“I was overjoyed, but there was also this tentative feeling like waiting for the other shoe to drop because they could take the accessibility away just as easily as they gave it,” Gathro, 35, said, “which feels like is exactly what is happening.”It is happening. With live performance now back, and some theaters and concert halls still struggling to bring back audiences, presenters have cut back on their streamed offerings — leaving many people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, who have been calling for better virtual access for decades, excluded again.While many presenters have cut back on streaming, there is still more available than there used to be. In September the San Francisco Opera streamed a performance of John Adams’ “Antony and Cleopatra” starring Amina Edris. Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaLivestreaming “opened up the door and showed us what is possible,” said Celia Hughes, the executive director of Art Spark Texas, a nonprofit that aims to make the arts more inclusive and accessible. The door, she said, has begun to close again.Aimi Hamraie,​​ an associate professor of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University who studies disability access, said that the decisions to cut back on streaming options “were not made with disabled people in mind.”“We’ve all been shown that we already have the tools to create more accessible exhibitions and performances, so people can no longer say it’s not possible,” Hamraie said. “We all know that that’s not true.”One in four adults in the United States has some form of disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But more than three decades after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act made it illegal to discriminate based on disability, advocates say that it remains difficult for many disabled people to navigate arts venues: gilded old theaters often have narrow aisles, cramped rows and stairs, while sleek modern spaces can be off-the-beaten-path or feature temporary seating on risers.To be sure, there are far more streaming options available now than there used to be. The San Francisco Opera has been livestreaming all of its productions this season, and last month the Paris Opera announced new streaming options. Second Stage Theater simulcast the last two weeks of its Broadway run of “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Circle Jerk,” a Zoom play that became a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for drama, returned for a hybrid run last summer for both live and streaming audiences. The Cleveland Orchestra has joined the growing number of classical ensembles streaming select performances. And this year’s Sundance Film Festival was held in person in Park City, Utah — but also online.Second Stage Theater simulcast the last two weeks of its Broadway run of “Between Riverside and Crazy.” From left to right: Stephen McKinley Henderson, Victor Almanzar, Common.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut venues and producers have cut back on streaming for a number of reasons: the costs associated with equipment and the work required to film performances; contracts that call for paying artists and rights holders more money for streams; and fears that streams could provide more incentive for people to stay home rather than attend in person.Arts lovers with disabilities are feeling the loss.“It made all the difference because I felt like during the pandemic, I was allowed to be part of the world again, and then I just lost it,” said Dom Evans, 42, a hard-of-hearing filmmaker with spinal muscular atrophy, among other disabilities, and a co-creator of FilmDis, a group that monitors disability representation in the media.The recent experiments with streaming have raised questions of what counts as “live.” Some events are heavily produced and edited before they are made available online.“It’s better than nothing, but it’s not the same,” Phoebe Boag, 43, a music fan with myalgic encephalomyelitis, who lives in Scotland, said in an email interview. “When you’re watching a live performance at the same time as everyone else, you have the same anticipation leading up to the event, and there’s a sense of community and inclusion, knowing that you’re watching the performance alongside however many other people.”More venues are providing programming specifically for people with disabilities and their families. Moments, at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, for example, is geared toward people with dementia and their caregivers. “Our main goal is that everyone has choice, everyone can get access to what they want in ways that work best for them,” Miranda Hoffner, the associate director of accessibility at Lincoln Center, said.Moments, at Lincoln Center, is geared toward people with dementia and their caregivers. Ayami Goto and Takumi Miyake, of American Ballet Theater’s Studio Company, danced.Lawrence SumulongThese types of programs have been welcomed. But others say that presenters must do more to make all of their programming accessible.“We need arts programs that are fully integrated,” Evans, the filmmaker, said.Even as presenters have cut back on streaming options, many have stopped requiring proof of vaccination and masks — placing new barriers to attendance for some of the estimated seven million American adults who have compromised immune systems that make them more likely to get severely ill from Covid-19.“It’s easy to feel just like you’re farther and farther behind and not only forgotten, but just completely disregarded,” said Han Olliver, a 26-year-old freelance artist and writer with multiple chronic illnesses who would like more access to the arts. “And that’s really lonely.”Still, new opportunities have led to more connections for and among disabled people.Theater Breaking Through Barriers, an Off Broadway company that promotes the inclusion of disabled actors onstage, has presented more than 75 short plays since 2020 that have been designed to be performed virtually. Last fall, it streamed a series of plays, including some that were created on Zoom and others that were performed in front of live audiences. Nicholas Viselli, the company’s artistic director, said the goal is to make streaming more regular.There is an idea that “‘doing virtual stuff is not really theater,’ and I don’t agree with that,” Viselli said.“It’s not the same as being in the room and feeling the energy from the audience and the actors,” he said, “but it is when you have artists creating something in front of your eyes.”Gathro continues to take advantage of streaming options when she can from her home in West Springfield. But she hopes that more presenters will stream their work in the future.“I wish I always had options for livestreaming, for really everything, because I would,” Gathro said. “For me, it’s worth paying as much as I would pay to see it in person. The accessibility is just that much more helpful.” More

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      in Movies

      Netflix’s Approach Shifts, Pushing Content That Can ‘Pop’

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      The streaming service long thought spending on ads didn’t result in more viewers. That has subtly changed under the marketing chief Marian Lee.Netflix made sure viewers had ample opportunity to hear about “Wednesday,” its macabre hit starring Jenna Ortega.They could come across it in an airport security line when plopping their belongings into a tray that asked “What would Wednesday do?” Or see the title character in the Uber app when they ordered a ride. Or they could encounter it on TikTok, where seemingly everyone from Ukrainian soldiers to hip grannies were performing the title character’s arm-jolting, addictive dance set to the Lady Gaga song “Bloody Mary.”Either way, the marketing resources Netflix dedicated to the show helped to make it a global sensation. The push included Netflix shifting its social media resources from sites like Twitter and Instagram to TikTok after the amateur dance videos went viral. There was also a campaign in which local markets around the world adapted the slogan “What would Wednesday do?” to their country’s taste and culture. (Billboards in Los Angeles cheekily stated: “I read your screenplay. It’s time to rethink your writing career.”)The streaming service said the show’s eight episodes were viewed 1.24 billion hours in the first 28 days they were available, making it the second most-watched English-language series on the service, just behind the fourth season of “Stranger Things.”For the movie “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” there was a widely publicized (including TV commercials) one-week theatrical release on Thanksgiving that generated a reported $15 million in ticket sales. After that, a Los Angeles-based escape room and a handful of murder mystery dinners across the country — and more commercials — helped to keep the word of mouth alive until the expensive star-studded sequel debuted on the service at Christmas time. It racked up 279.7 million hours watched in the first 28 days, which Netflix said made it the fourth most-watched English-language film on the service.“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” received a one-week theatrical release at Thanksgiving and became available on Netflix at Christmas time.John Wilson/NetflixNetflix’s marketing tactics are indicative of an evolving strategy for a company that is facing a much more competitive streaming marketplace — and trying to serve an increasingly fickle audience. The new tactics also come as Netflix has introduced an advertising tier and is cracking down on password sharing as it contends with a maturing U.S. market. It has also essentially replaced its original creative team, opting for executives with broader tastes to serve a global marketplace. To sell this evolution of the world’s largest streaming service, the company is relying on Marian Lee, its third chief marketing officer in three years.“I’m trying to enable creativity, because I want to bring all of this content to more people around the world,” Ms. Lee said in an interview at Netflix’s headquarters in Los Angeles. “I also want the rest of Netflix to understand what the marketing strategy is: We support the content organization.”She spent the previous night staying up late to finish the reality show “Full Swing,” saying she cried in her bathroom when it was over.“I’m watching everything, and I’m going to tell you where I think this is really going to pop,” she said.For all of Netflix’s success over the years, the company has never quite found its footing in marketing. That is primarily because of the company’s core tenet is that the streaming service itself is its greatest marketer, and spending on expensive commercials or advertisements does not always improve viewer engagement. In 2019, the marketing operation moved under Ted Sarandos, who was then the head of content and is now the company’s co-chief executive. He hired Jackie Lee-Joe from BBC Studios to be chief marketing officer. She departed after just 10 months, when Mr. Sarandos surprised many inside Netflix by appointing Bozoma Saint John as the new C.M.O. Ms. Saint John used her formidable social media presence — she has 424,000 followers on Instagram — to host her own lifestyle events under the moniker @badassboz while running the Netflix marketing team, but her impact on Netflix’s shows and movies proved less fruitful.Ms. Lee was the global co-head of music at Spotify when she was hired by Ms. Saint John in July 2021. She was promoted to chief marketing officer in March 2022 after Ms. Saint John left. In contrast with her predecessor, Ms. Lee’s Instagram account is private, and when she was offered Ms. Saint John’s office, she declined, opting to remain in the one she occupied that was closer to her staff.“Wednesday,” starring Jenna Ortega, was marketed heavily through TikTok.Vlad Cioplea/NetflixNetflix’s marketing budget has remained fairly consistent, increasing to $2.5 billion in 2022 from $2.2 billion in 2020. But Ms. Lee’s 400-plus global team has enacted a subtle change in strategy, in which many of those dollars have been shifted to focus on individual titles as opposed to the branding of the streaming service itself.Still, the amount of money set aside for marketing remains relatively small, considering Netflix spends $17 billion a year on its programming. And when filmmakers and showrunners grouse about working with Netflix, the complaints are often aimed at the marketing department, which they feel can be limited by its budget. It is an issue traditional studios have tried to capitalize on, arguing that they may pay less upfront for a project but that they will spend more in marketing to let people know when it’s coming out.“The legacy studios spend more on marketing,” said Tripp Vinson, a producer of the Netflix “Murder Mystery” films starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. The first movie came out in 2019 and the second became available to Netflix subscribers on Friday. “But as a producer, what do I care about? You’re implying that the more you spend, the greater chance you have of getting your audience in that legacy, traditional marketing way. Well, I know from ‘Murder Mystery’ 1, whatever Netflix did to market this movie, the amount of viewers that I got, that’s what I care about. And they were astounding numbers.”For “Murder Mystery 2,” the streaming service added a second premiere at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, international billboards and commercials during the National Football League’s divisional playoffs. It also partnered with the social media star Mr. Beast to offer an unwitting couple a surprise trip to the Paris premiere. The first movie landed back on Netflix’s Top 10 list a week ahead of the release, and expectations inside the company for the sequel are high.Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, pushes against the notion that the company had not aggressively marketed specific shows and movies in the past.“I think the tension may be with people feeling like there is only the traditional way to do it, and they don’t realize we market in so many different ways,” she said, noting the service’s social media channels reach 800 million people globally.Netflix held a premiere event for “Murder Mystery 2” at the Eiffel Tower in Paris.Scott Yamano/NetflixFilmmakers, though, have noticed a difference with Ms. Lee.“Right when she arrived, she came down to see what we were doing and visited the set often,” said Debbie Snyder, a producer of the $80 million sci-fi spectacle “Rebel Moon,” which is directed by her husband, Zack Snyder.The plan is for the film, scheduled to debut on Dec. 22, to be the first in a trilogy.Did Ms. Snyder receive the same personalized attention when the film “Army of the Dead” debuted in 2021? “No,” she said. “Not really at all.”Netflix’s film chairman, Scott Stuber, said the marketing department under Ms. Lee was more in tune with the content side of the company. He noted that he was particularly impressed by her nimble approach, like her ability to maintain buzz for “Glass Onion” after its theatrical release.“I like someone who actually knows the old playbook, but also is very interested in how to rewrite the rules for the new playbook,” he said.“I’m trying to enable creativity, because I want to bring all of this content to more people around the world,” Ms. Lee said.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIn February, members of Ms. Lee’s brand marketing team crammed themselves into a conference room to discuss, among other topics, “The Marquee,” a handful of high-tech billboards with pithy messages that rotate weekly and appear in strategic locations around the world like Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, Times Square in New York and Les Halles in Paris. She listened intently to the presentation: The board at the Trevi Fountain will be moved to a different location in Rome, one that is less of a tourist spot and more of a place where local Netflix subscribers could connect with it; Times Square is going to get an innovative new billboard that is easier to program yet looks like the physical one on Sunset Boulevard. A marquee is coming soon to Warsaw.“The point of the board is to have fun, be edgy and push all the way to the edge,” she said.“I know it’s a lot of pressure because they have to come up with a new message every week,” she added, “but if they’re just using it for something lame, I’d rather not do it.” More

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      in Television

      Why There Is Talk of a Writers’ Strike in Hollywood

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      TV and movie writers want more money, but Hollywood companies say the demands ignore economic realities. The deadline to sort out those differences is approaching.Television and movie writers want raises, saying that Hollywood companies have taken unfair advantage of the shift to streaming to devalue their work and create worsening working conditions.The companies bristle at the accusation and say that, while they are willing to negotiate a new “mutually beneficial” deal with writers, the demands for an entirely new compensation structure ignore economic realities.Whether the sides can settle their differences will determine if the entertainment industry can avoid its first writers’ strike in 15 years.Unions representing more than 11,000 television and movie writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood’s nine largest studios, including Amazon and Apple, began talks on March 20 for a new three-year contract. The current agreement expires on May 1.The Writers Guild of America, West, and the Writers Guild of America, East, have the strength to bring Hollywood to a halt if they do not get a deal to their liking. Chris Keyser, a co-chair of the W.G.A. negotiating committee, said in an interview that this moment for writers was “existential.”“The industry is almost always unfair to labor,” Mr. Keyser said. “This time it’s broken — it’s actually broken.”Here is what you need to know:Will there be a strike?No outcome is certain, but little in the posturing so far suggests an easy resolution. Producers have begun to stockpile scripts by asking writers to complete as many ahead of the May 1 deadline as possible.The negotiations will likely be acrimonious given the seismic changes in the industry. The rapid transition to streaming entertainment has upended nearly every corner of Hollywood, and writers believe they have been left behind.Unlike directors and actors, writers have historically been willing to strike. The most recent strike stretched from 2007 into 2008, lasting 100 days. One in 1988 dragged on for five months. A walkout must first be authorized by union members; the W.G.A. has signaled that it could conduct a vote as early as the first week in April.Authorization gives the union leverage, but it does not mean a strike is inevitable. In 2017, writers overwhelmingly gave the go-ahead for a strike (with 96 percent of the vote). The sides ultimately reached an agreement a few hours before the first pickets hit studio sidewalks.The entrance to NBC Studios in Manhattan.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHow would a strike affect audiences?There will be a gradual halt in the production of many television shows, except for reality and news programs, which would be mostly unaffected.Viewers will notice the fallout first among entertainment talk shows, including “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” If a strike lasts several weeks, “Saturday Night Live” would not be able complete its season. Soap operas, already on viewership life support, would run out of new episodes after about a month.Plenty of high-profile TV series have coming seasons that are already finished. But premieres for fall series like “Abbott Elementary” would be delayed by a monthslong strike, and viewers would begin to notice fewer scripted TV series by the end of the year. Reality and international shows will start to run in heavy rotation.Moviegoers would not experience immediate effects; movie studios work about a year ahead, meaning that almost everything planned for 2023 has already been shot. The risk involves 2024, especially if studios rush to beat a strike by putting films into production with scripts that aren’t quite ready.The offices of the Writers Guild of America West in Los Angeles.Andrew Cullen for The New York TimesWhat are the writers’ complaints?Every three years, the writers’ union negotiates a contract with the major studios that establishes pay minimums and addresses matters such as health care and residuals (a type of royalty), which are paid out based on a maze of formulas.And though there has been a boom in television production in recent years (known within the industry as “Peak TV”), the W.G.A. said that the median weekly pay for a writer-producer had declined 4 percent over the last decade.Because of streaming, the former network norms of 22, 24 or even 26 episodes per season have mostly disappeared. Many series are now eight to 12 episodes long. At the same time, episodes are taking longer to produce, so series writers who are paid per episode often make less while working more. Some showrunners are likewise making less despite working longer hours.“The streaming model has created an environment where there’s been enormous downward pressure on writer income across the board,” David Goodman, a co-chair of the guild negotiating committee, said in an interview.Screenwriters have been hurt by a decline in theatrical releases and the collapse of the DVD market, union leaders said.Between 2012 and 2021, the number of films rated annually by the Motion Picture Association fell by 31 percent. Streaming services picked up some slack, but companies like Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO Max, have been cutting back on film production to reduce costs amid slowing subscriber growth.Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesAre the companies in a position to pay more?They would argue this isn’t the best time for it.Disney said in February that it would cut $5.5 billion in costs and eliminate 7,000 jobs to address streaming losses, an atrophying cable television business and steep corporate debt. Warner Bros. Discovery has already cut thousands of jobs as part of a $4 billion retrenchment. NBCUniversal is also tightening its belt as it contends with cable cord-cutting and a troublesome advertising market.The writers are unmoved by this. Mr. Keyser noted that Netflix is already profitable (to the tune of $4.5 billion last year), and that rival companies have said their streaming services will be profitable in the next year or two. “We don’t get to negotiate again until 2026,” Mr. Keyser said. “We’re not waiting around until they’re profitable.”Who’s doing the negotiating?In a rarity for Hollywood, the chief negotiators are both women. Carol Lombardini, 68, leads the studio effort; she has worked at the producers’ alliance for 41 years. Ellen Stutzman, 40, leads the W.G.A. effort. She was appointed only about a month ago, after David Young, who has served as the ferocious negotiator for writers since 2007, stepped aside, citing an unspecified medical problem.Ms. Stutzman, who has been with the W.G.A. for 17 years, said in an interview that Mr. Young would play no part in these negotiations. She called him “a wonderful mentor.”Are the studios aligned?Absolutely, according to the producers’ alliance. “The A.M.P.T.P. companies approach this negotiation and the ones to follow with the long-term health and stability of the industry as our priority,” the alliance said in a statement, referring to impending contract renewal talks with directors and actors. “We are all partners in charting the future of our business together and fully committed to reaching a mutually beneficial deal.”But differences start to appear when you talk to senior executives on a company-by-company basis. In private conversations, they point out that the group is much less monolithic than in the past. It now includes tech companies like Amazon and Apple, for example, whose primary business is not entertainment.Striking members of the Writers Guild of America passed out leaflets in Rockefeller Center in 2007.Librado Romero/The New York TimesIs the W.G.A. united?For generations, ever since the end of the silent film era, Hollywood writers have complained that studios treat them as second-class citizens — that their artistic contributions are underappreciated (and undercompensated), especially compared with those of actors and directors. This sentiment runs deep among writers and has historically resulted in extraordinary unity.In 2019, when film and TV writers fired their agents in a campaign over what they saw as conflicts of interest, many agency leaders figured that the W.G.A. would eventually fracture. That never happened: After a 22-month standoff, the big agencies effectively gave writers what they wanted.What about collateral damage?Tens of thousands of entertainment workers were idled during the 2007 strike, and the action cost the Los Angeles economy more than $2 billion, according to the Milken Institute. This time around, many of the small businesses that service Hollywood (florists, caterers, chauffeurs, stylists, lumber yard workers) have only started to regain their footing after pandemic shutdowns, increasing the stakes of a strike and potentially leading to community fissures. More

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      in Television

      The Trouble With Reboot TV

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      The reboot that changes nothing will be uncanny and lifeless; the one that thinks itself more clever than its predecessor will turn out cynical and sour. In life, you rarely get a second chance to do something right — so goes the shopworn cliché. Contemporary Hollywood is a different matter. If a property was even glancingly popular in the 1980s or ’90s, it seems, it’s either in the process of being resuscitated or has been already. “Reboot” is one of those coinages that burrows into the lexicon without ever being fully explained (at least to me), but it has clearly supplanted “remake,” migrating over from the language of computing such that you now imagine the entertainment industry pulling every last item from its junk drawer and plugging it in to see if it still works. So startlingly large is the number of rebooted series that the phenomenon has even inspired an original show: Hulu’s very funny “Reboot,” about a fictional garbage ’80s sitcom being brought back to life.Hollywood’s dependence on old intellectual property has been a source of hand-wringing for at least the past two decades, but a majority of those complaints have centered on the film world and its parade of blockbusters. It’s on television and streaming services, though, that all this grasping at the familiar has really reached an apotheosis, with three recent shows yielding some of the strangest gambits yet. One of them is distinguished by the threadbare rationale for its existence. Gen Xers like me sacrificed untold I.Q. points on the shoals of ’80s television, but even I look at the new incarnation of “Night Court” — among the less-remembered of NBC’s classic Thursday sitcoms, about a Manhattan judge who was also an accomplished magician — and marvel at its pointlessness. The original, which ran between 1984 and 1992, felt like a supersize sketch show and depicted weirdos and reprobates dragged before the court after hours, a parade of old-timey jokes about winos, flashers and sex workers. Later I would have occasion to learn firsthand that there is no such magical judge to slap you on the wrist and send you on your way when you get arrested at night.The labored premise of NBC’s hit new version puts us right back where we started: The now-deceased Judge Harry Stone (played by the great Harry Anderson in the original) has been replaced on the bench by his daughter. The show strikes a sort of nonaggression pact with the audience: It won’t be funny, but neither will it challenge or rearrange any of the psychological furniture of the original. Its selling point is stasis. When Dan Fielding — John Larroquette, returning from the original — finds himself “surprised” by fake snakes exploding from a box, an old Harry Stone gag, even he seems vaguely disappointed. Whom exactly is this show for? What is the point of making it about Stone’s daughter, rather than any judge in any night court? How do you generate nostalgia for something that wasn’t especially missed? This is the reboot at its most indecipherable, a miasma of reflexive nostalgia and boardroom guesswork. HBO Max’s new “Velma” operates on the opposite logic: It interrogates and deconstructs its source material so aggressively that it often turns abrasive. The program is an animated spinoff from the “Scooby-Doo” franchise — first produced for television in 1969 and then in various forms since, with a talking Great Dane and a group of young detectives traveling around in a van solving mysteries (Arthur Conan Doyle meets “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”) and unmasking ornery criminals who curse about how they “would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids” (a Watergate-era mantra). This isn’t an especially offensive premise, which makes it difficult to understand the level of contempt “Velma” seems to have for it.One simple explanation may be that “Velma” sits in a lineage of dorm-room pop-culture deconstruction that became popular, during the 1990s, among a generation seized by the misapprehension that it was the first to discover irony. (This was my generation; in my early 20s, I briefly thought I was a genius for recognizing subtext in the cartoon “He-Man” that was actually just text.) The core of this aesthetic position is condescension — a belief that you, the astute modern viewer, are equipped with a sophisticated grasp of the medium, and the world, that eluded the credulous rubes who came before you. Programs that pander to this fantasy often skew mean, and “Velma” is meaner than most. There are some funny jokes, and Mindy Kaling voices the lead role with dyspeptic panache, but the series on the whole oozes molten hostility: It is viciously satirical, festooned with disturbing imagery, full of slapdash violence and kneejerk nihilism. Within its first two episodes, the original characters Fred and Daphne appear as a possibly psychopathic man-child and a glamorous drug dealer. Scooby-Doo makes no appearance at all. There are needling remarks about television’s checkered history of minority representation, and the showrunners seem to treat their reconception of Velma — making the character South Asian and moving her to the center of the story — as an act of bold subversion, but it’s not clear “Scooby-Doo” is a cultural monument of such gravity as to make those choices particularly brave. “Velma” mostly just wants to bite the hand that feeds it.Netflix’s reboot of “That ’70s Show” makes some rational sense, at least. The original sitcom chronicled the escapades of a group of cheerfully stoned and horny Wisconsin teenagers across the Carter administration. Its reincarnation, “That ’90s Show,” follows a parallel cabal of stoned and horny Clinton-era teenagers, who through some tortured story machinations end up pursuing their indolence in the very same Wisconsin basement, under the watch of the very same authority figures. All this is tactically coherent: It revives a cozy period piece while also capitalizing on the current youth vogue for all things ’90s.Unfortunately, the subtle warping of the space-time continuum is by orders of magnitude the most interesting thing about the show. Like so many family reunions, the overarching vibe is one of obligation. The pilot features a large swath of the original cast, but no one radiates much happiness at being back. Saddest of all is the return of Kurtwood Smith and Debra Jo Rupp as the roost-​ruling adults. Unlike the younger actors reprising their roles, these two never get to leave; their characters are now tasked with spending their golden years still wisecracking at a bunch of teenagers.The logic of the television industry suggests that so many reboots exist for the simple reason that they stand a high chance of being popular, using a familiar idea to cut through a glut of programming. Distant number-crunching concludes that some substantial segment of NBC’s prime-time viewers, a demographic whose median age is around 60, may sooner revisit “Night Court” than sample something more novel; excellent Nielsen ratings bear that out. Judging by Netflix’s rush to reboot everything from “Full House” to “Lost in Space,” streaming services’ internal data must say similar things.These shows face a clear creative bind. The reboot that changes nothing will be uncanny and lifeless; the one that thinks itself more clever than its predecessor will turn out cynical and sour. Either way, the market will keep serving them to us. So often, on TV as in apps, research and algorithms seem to manifest our lowest impulses as an audience, even the ones we would rather not have — say, a weakness for stupefying predictability, a smug feeling of superiority or a comforting retreat into fuzzy-blanket familiarity. They know what makes us click, even when the answer isn’t pretty.Source photographs: Patrick Wymore/Netflix; Robert Sebree/20th Century Fox Film Corp., via Everett Collection. More

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      in Movies

      Do You Have a Civic Duty to Watch the Video of Memphis Police Beating Tyre Nichols?

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      The video of Memphis police beating Tyre Nichols challenges public complacency — and complicity. What are our duties as citizens and as human beings?Do you have a civic duty to watch, or a moral obligation not to?Some version of that question has confronted us since the body- and pole-camera footage of Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols was released on Friday evening. The argument isn’t necessarily about whether the Police Department should have posted the roughly hourlong, four-part, lightly redacted video online for everyone to see.The legal and political reasons for doing so, at the urging of Mr. Nichols’s family, seem obvious and cogent. Too often, the worst abuses of power are allowed to fester in secrecy, shrouded in lies, bureaucratic language and partial information. Raw video offers clarity, transparency and perhaps accountability — a chance for citizens to understand the unvarnished truth about what happened on the night of Jan. 7.That is the hope, in any case: that concerned Americans will become witnesses after the fact, our senses shocked and our consciences awakened by the sight of uniformed officers repeatedly kicking and punching Mr. Nichols, who would die from his injuries three days later. “I expect you to feel what the Nichols family feels,” Cerelyn Davis, the Memphis police chief, said in anticipation of the video’s impact. Her appeal to common humanity expressed faith in the power of even the most horrific images to foster empathy and community — and faith in the human capacity to experience outrage and compassion when shown such images.That faith provides a strong argument for the importance of looking. To turn away in circumstances like this would not merely be to succumb to a loss of nerve, but to risk a loss of heart. In insisting that the world see what had been done to her son, RowVaughn Wells, Mr. Nichols’s mother, recalled Mamie Till-Mobley, who in 1955 placed the disfigured body of her murdered son, Emmett, in an open coffin so that the viciousness of the racists who killed him could not be denied.A delicate ethical line separates witness — an active, morally engaged state of attention — from the more passive, less demanding condition of spectatorship. The spectacle of violence has a way of turning even sensitive souls into gawkers and voyeurs. Violence, very much including the actions of the police, is a fixture of popular culture, and has been since long before the invention of video. For much of human history, public executions have been a form of entertainment. The history of lynching in the United States is in part a history of public spectacle, in which the mutilation and murder of Black men brought out white crowds to stare, cheer and take photographs.I’m not saying that looking at the video of Mr. Nichols’s beating is equivalent to joining in one of those crowds, but rather that Black suffering in America has often been either relegated to invisibility or subjected to exploitation and commodification. That is the dilemma that Ms. Wells and others in her position have faced, even as she challenges the public to acknowledge her son’s full humanity.We don’t automatically recoil from violence. We can just as easily respond with indifference, morbid fascination — or worse. Images are powerful, but not powerful enough to compensate for a society’s failures of decency or judgment, or to overcome its commitment to denying truths that should be self-evident. Mr. Nichols’s case can’t help but recall the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, captured on video by a neighbor. The officers in that case were acquitted, and unrest swept the city.On Friday, not long before the Memphis videos were posted, a police body-cam clip was released showing part of the Oct. 28 assault on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, at his home in San Francisco. That attack, carried out by an apparent right-wing extremist, had been the subject of grotesque jokes and lurid, baseless speculations from some of his wife’s political enemies. While the video seems to refute all such claims, it is unlikely to stem the tide of conspiracism and fantasy in some right-wing precincts. The assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, also involved extremists hunting for Ms. Pelosi, and in spite of abundant documentation has been treated by partisans as a tangle of mystery, indeterminacy and through-the-looking-glass distortion.A clip from the attack on Paul Pelosi at his home in San Francisco.San Francisco Police Department, via Associated PressVideo may not lie, but people do. The fact that even the plainest images are open to interpretation, manipulation and mischaracterization places an ethical burden on the viewer. The cost of looking is thinking about what we see. Video is a tool, not a shortcut or a solution. Three decades after the Rodney King beating, Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd, and a bystander’s video of his killing galvanized a global protest movement. What we do with the images is what matters.What do we do with these images that come from official sources, and that exist partly because of the impulse to keep a closer eye on law enforcement? In the Memphis videos what is perhaps most heartbreaking, and most chilling, is the casual indifference of the officers to Mr. Nichols’s anguish — and to the cameras that recorded it.In the pole-camera video, which is the longest of the four segments and has no sound, you see him crumpled against the side of a patrol car and collapsing onto the ground as his assailants and an ever-increasing number of their colleagues mill around, mostly ignoring him. Someone lights a cigarette. Someone fiddles with a clipboard. Because of the silence of the soundtrack and the immobility of the camera, time seems to slow down, and action mutates into abstraction. A human catastrophe is playing out under a ruthlessly impersonal eye looking down from above.The body-cam footage puts viewers in the position of the police officers.Memphis Police Department, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe body-cam adds sound and movement. You feel the frenzy of the chase and the impact of bodies as Mr. Nichols is taken down. Then you hear his anguished, pleading, desperate cries. You also hear the officers complaining that he made them run after him and made them pepper-spray one another, insisting that he must be “on something” and embroidering a story — which they may well believe — about how he took a swing at one and grabbed for another’s gun.After a while, the drama of the traffic stop, the chase and the beating fades into the routine tedium of the job. The semi-intelligible voices on the radio, the blend of jargon and profanity in the officers’ conversation, their mixture of weariness and bravado — all of this is familiar. We’ve seen this before, not only in real life but also, perhaps most of all, in movies and on television. And of course in first-person games, which the body-cam footage uncannily and unnervingly replicates. We see the violence from the point of view of a perpetrator. We aren’t bearing witness so much as experiencing our own complicity, and taking account of that is perhaps where the work of watching these videos should begin. More

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      in Music

      Movie Trailers Keep Tweaking Well-Known Songs. The Tactic Is Working.

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      Composers are increasingly in demand for trailerization — reworking existing tracks by artists including Kate Bush, Nirvana and Kendrick Lamar to maximize their impact in film and TV previews.David James Rosen’s work has been streamed on YouTube hundreds of millions of times. He’s played a crucial role in some of pop culture’s biggest recent moments. But few people outside of the space where the entertainment and marketing industries overlap know his name.As a composer, Rosen is at the forefront of the trailerization movement: He’s in demand for his ability to rework existing songs to maximize their impact in trailers for films and TV shows.He married vocals and motifs from Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” to a thunderous version of the “Stranger Things” theme in the lead-up to the second volume of the show’s fourth season. He intertwined the Nigerian singer Tems’s cover of “No Woman No Cry” with Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” in the teaser for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” symbolizing the meeting of the franchise’s future and its legacy. He put a sinister singe on Taylor Swift’s “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” for the diabolical doll thriller “M3GAN.” He added cosmic drama to Elton John’s classic rock staple “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” for the upcoming “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”As potential viewers are inundated with an ever-growing number of options, studios have limited chances to build anticipation for their projects. At the same time, technological advances have made it easier than ever for products to stand out. “People want their film to have its own identity,” Rosen said in an interview at a Los Angeles coffee shop. “The genie’s out of the bottle as far as the limitless ability to customize something for your film. Clients, studios, agencies, whatever, they all know that and like to take advantage of it.”Rosen spent his 20s playing guitar in the New Jersey band the Parlor Mob. After moving to L.A. in 2014, he got a job as the in-house composer at a trailer house — the specialized production companies behind these promos. Three years later, he co-founded Totem, a music library that creates custom tracks for trailers. Much of Rosen’s output is original compositions, but the ones that get the most attention are his overhauls.“Almost never does a song just drop into a trailer and work,” he said. “Maybe it needs to feel more epic or more emotional, or maybe it needs to feel subtler with things pulled away.”“I view it as a new life for a lot of these artists’ songs,” Rosen said of his custom work for trailers.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesTrailerization is a relatively new term and the distinctions within it are malleable. There are reimaginations, which are usually instrumental covers by composers. There are overlays, where elements are added to a song in varying degrees. Then there are remixes, where the source material is distinctly altered, often to shift the context.Some distinguish between remixes and overlays by what the composer has to play with. If there’s a full set of stems — the separated digital parts that comprise a song — it’s a remix. If stems aren’t available, it’s an overlay.Occasionally composers will be asked to create “invisible overlays,” where they make adjustments that are imperceptible to most listeners but nudge a song toward a more wide-screen sound.The trailerization process is now so common that even when a trailer uses the film’s original score, it too will be adjusted. “Trailers are a mini version of the movie,” said Cato, the one-named composer whose credits include performing a system update on Vangelis for the “Blade Runner 2049” trailer and giving Guns N’ Roses an anguished-turned-pulverizing remix for Jason Momoa’s Netflix revenge film “Sweet Girl.”“You have to suck people into the theater and tell a story in two-and-a-half minutes,” Cato added. “That is so intense and builds so quickly that most music written for the actual movie will be way too long and drawn out.”IN THE PAST, trailers often relied on the scores of previously released films, but that practice has basically become verboten. Starting in the late 1970s, the composer John Beal pioneered original scores for trailers, but that required a recording studio full of musicians, making it a costly, resource-heavy endeavor. Today, with developments in software, it’s easier than ever to simulate those sounds.“I could sit at my computer at home and you wouldn’t know that there wasn’t a 100-piece orchestra there,” Rosen said. “You couldn’t do that 10 years ago.”Many point to the trailer for “The Social Network,” from 2010 — which featured a Belgian women’s choir singing Radiohead’s “Creep” — as the origin of what became the trailerization trend. Its success incited a deluge of trailers using slow and sad covers of well-known songs, usually featuring female vocalists. Recent examples include Liza Anne’s version of “Dreams” by the Cranberries for “Aftersun” and Bellsaint’s interpretation of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” for the second season of the “Chucky” TV series.Sanaz Lavaedian, the senior vice president of music for the trailer house Mocean, said that when she entered the industry in 2011, there was still a lot of resistance from artists who didn’t want their music used for commercial purposes. Covers provided a workaround. Now, as more musicians are struggling to make a living, they’re often more open to trailers not just using their music but modifying it.“There were so many bands that didn’t think licensing was cool, so they never let us do it,” Lavaedian said. “Now they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re going to make half a million dollars on this? Nevermind.’”Many high profile trailerizations are applied to songs that are decades old: Remixes and overlays allow the trailers to tap into the nostalgia evoked by the original. “If we were able to remix an Elton John song or a Beatles song, these are iconic artists,” Lavaedian said. “The second you hear their voice, you know who it is, and there’s a lot of weight in that. More weight than if it were a cover.”The composer Bryce Miller’s big breakthrough came in 2019 with the “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” trailer, which featured his custom orchestral rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” atop images of kaiju carnage. His subsequent credits include a modernization of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” for “House of Gucci,” an orchestral blend of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” and the “Addams Family Theme” for “Wednesday” and a haunting overlay for Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” in “The Batman” trailer.“As soon as I can get rid of dated-sounding guitars and drums, I can build a more contemporary production that is pulling from more pop music sounds,” Miller said. “Older recordings sonically are a little thin and lack the heft that so many contemporary songs have.”Unique remixes began appearing in trailers going back to the mid-2010s, but it wasn’t until the one for Jordan Peele’s 2019 film “Us” that studios and audiences began to really take notice. In the fresh interpretation, with its piercing strings and moody atmospherics, a celebratory weed rap by the Oakland duo Luniz became deeply unsettling.“Every once in a while we get one of those game-changer trailers,” Lavaedian said. The “Us” trailer “is taking a song and deconstructing it down to its bones and then constructing it again to do what that film needed it to do. It was kind of groundbreaking.”MARK WOOLLEN, THE founder of the trailer house Mark Woollen & Associates, specializes in award-season films and was responsible for that transformative “Social Network” trailer. New York magazine once called him “the uncontested auteur of the trailer era.”In a phone interview, Woollen noted that in contemporary trailers, omniscient narration has largely disappeared (that means no more hackneyed “In a world …” setups) and there’s less dialogue from the film. Trailers “can be more impressionistic and elliptical in their storytelling,” he said. “It’s more about creating a feeling in a lot of the work.”As a result, the trailer’s soundtrack has become increasingly crucial. “Music is sometimes 80 to 90 percent of the process to us,” Woollen said. “It’s trying to cast that right piece of music that’s going to inspire and dictate rhythm and set tone and inform character and story, and hopefully make an impression.”For Amazon’s recent love triangle “My Policeman,” Woollen used Cat Power’s “Sea of Love,” which has become a romantic favorite among aging millennials. Though Cat Power’s original interpretation was stripped down to just the singer Chan Marshall’s voice and strums on an autoharp, Woollen had a composer overlay swelling strings as the drama became more fraught.Rosen with two of his semi-modular analog synths. “Almost never does a song just drop into a trailer and work,” he said.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesBeyond providing the vibes, a song is often selected for a trailer because the lyrics convey the film’s narrative themes. Woollen didn’t just select “Sea of Love” because it is mysterious and seductive. He was equally guided by the refrain “I want to tell you how much I love you” and the ambiguousness of who that “you” might be.In Marvel’s “The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” trailer, as the heroes realize the size of the predicament they’ve gotten themselves into, the sound design emphasizes Elton John singing, “I should have stayed on the farm/I should have listened to my old man.”Deciding which song a trailer uses and how it’s employed can involve studio marketing executives, the filmmakers, the team at the trailer house and the composer. A trailer’s creation can take years and is often covered by restrictive nondisclosure agreements, preventing the people behind it from discussing the details of making it, even after it has been released.Because the material is so protected, the musicians rarely see the images that will be included in the trailer. Instead they have to rely on a music supervisor or creative director at a trailer house to guide them through inception and multiple rounds of revisions. “We’re literally dealing with billions of dollars in unreleased assets,” Lavaedian said of the footage from the films. “There’s no way we can send that to a composer.”UNLESS YOU KNOW where to look on the internet, the pieces made by trailer composers are largely uncredited, and sometimes contractually so. Trailerizations are created “to live exclusively in the trailer,” Rosen said. “They serve as a piece of marketing.”But that may be changing.When the agency Trailer Park approached Miller about doing a trailerization for the first volume of the fourth season of “Stranger Things,” he was told the general plot and tone of the episodes. He’d long wanted to do something with Journey’s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” and it turned out the song was on the agency’s shortlist as well.After spending months on his ominous remix, it made it to the final stages of the approval process where the original musicians had to sign off. Steve Perry, the song’s singer, loved it and came to Miller’s studio to help construct an extended remix. Then he got Netflix to release both versions on the official soundtrack, with Miller’s name attached.Miller called Perry inspiring and a joy to work with. “He’s also like a runaway train. As soon as we finished ‘Stranger Things,’ he’s like, ‘What are we doing next?’” The pair collaborated again on a trailerization of Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” for the Hulu series “Welcome to Chippendales.”Where will trailerization at large head next? Recently, there’s been an interest in 1990s alternative rock hits, with remixes of Spacehog and the Toadies appearing in trailers for “Guardian of the Galaxy Volume 3” and “The Midnight Club.” In the promo for “Babylon,” the team of composers known as Superhuman created a Jazz Age-influenced interpretation of David Bowie’s “Fame” that’s almost as nutty as the film itself.With decades of material to work with, Rosen hopes the trend continues. “There’s more opportunity for creativity from me and other people,” he said. “I view it as a new life for a lot of these artists’ songs.” More