Based On

Happy Thursday. I'm writing you from seat 7C, somewhere between Sarasota and LAX. Last week: Costa Careyes on the Mexican Pacific with friends, a detour to Florida to see my family, and now back to Los Angeles to meet with investors. Too much seafood, too few vegetables, too much time in transit.

Between the tequila and the turbulence, I've been thinking about storytelling.

It started, as most good observations do, with a totally unnecessary movie bracket.

Night three in Mexico, a movie suggestion devolved into a single-elimination tournament that nobody planned and everyone immediately treated like it mattered enormously. Pirates of the Caribbean, Death of Stalin, Marty Supreme, Tenet, Jurassic Park, and a few others I'll protect to preserve certain friendships.

The bracket revealed something. The films eliminated early weren't the legacy hits, they were the expensive new ones that felt assembled by committee. Competent, coherent, and belonging to no one.

Audiences can feel authorship, they just can't always name it.

A few days later, at my parents' place in Sarasota, we were talking about what's worth watching, what's worth making, what feels real versus manufactured. My brother remarked that standup is one of the last pure art forms left. Just a person and a microphone on a stage.

No IP. No franchise safety net. No $200 million budget to wallpaper over a weak idea. Either your specific perspective on the world lands, or it doesn't.

And stand up is thriving. Chappelle, Gillis, Handler, Mulaney are all selling out arenas. People are showing up in person and streaming from their couches because someone specific is on that stage with something only they could say.

The conventional anxiety about Hollywood is that originality is dying. That every film is a sequel, a remake, or adapted from something that already proved itself elsewhere.

That's true. It's also always been true.

Shakespeare lifted almost every plot he ever wrote. Hamlet is borrowed. Romeo and Juliet is borrowed. King Lear is borrowed. Brontë was reworking Gothic tropes that predated her by a century. Spielberg was doing Joseph Campbell in a theme park. The hero's journey your high school English teacher mapped onto everything is 1,000 years old and applies to Jurassic Park and Parasite with equal accuracy.

Plot has always been borrowed material. The interesting question is what gets built on top of it.

Watch Pulp Fiction and you feel, unmistakably, like a specific weird human made it. The crime thriller genre was a century old when Tarantino got to it. Watch it and you feel his particular obsession with dialogue, violence as choreography, and pop culture as religion in every scene. Inception uses every heist premise you've seen before, and is completely, unmistakably Nolan. Get Out is a horror film in a tradition stretching back decades, and you feel Peele's specific racial anxiety and dark wit in every frame.

That quality, the felt presence of a real specific person on the other side of the screen, is what the bracket was voting for. It's what standup lives or dies on every single night.

You can't acquire it. You can't model it against demographic panels. You can't option it from a content library.

Which leads me to Paramount Skydance and their recent acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The prize: Batman, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones. A century of characters that already live inside audiences, already carrying recognition and loyalty nobody had to build from scratch.

The studios call this “investing in storytelling”. The more precise description: the industrialization of recognition.

Authorship is the felt presence of a specific person behind the work. Recognition is what audiences feel before the work even starts, the muscle memory they carry for characters they've known for decades. You don't have to earn that attention; it arrives pre-loaded.

Recognition is the only reliable variable in an environment where content is infinite and attention is scarce. You can stress-test a franchise across a hundred audience panels before a frame is shot. You can model global revenue across seventeen demographic slices. You can buy proof of concept and call it development.

Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary, based on one of my favorite epic sci-fi novels, opens later this month. Andy Weir spent years writing something genuinely unique. Funny, warm, and scientifically obsessive in a way that reflects one specific mind working through one specific set of enthusiasms. It found its audience slowly, before anyone in Hollywood got involved. The studio showed up after the uncertainty was gone.

That's the whole model now. Authors absorb the risk while Hollywood acquires the result. The "based on" credit is a financial instrument disguised as a tribute.

When a single acquisition costs more than the GDP of a small nation, the pressure to eliminate risk and costs restructures everything: what gets developed, what gets a writer on payroll for two years to find out if something strange might become something real. The next Charlie Kaufman will either self-finance, or write something upon which they can easily brandish a "based on" label.

Standup survives because you can't spend $100 billion+ acquiring a point of view. The stage is still democratic.

Every industry consolidating around certainty is running the same calculation. Proven formulas over unproven perspective. Acquisition over development. Recognition over authorship.

The question isn't whether your market exists. History is pretty clear that specific, genuine points of view find their people.

The question is whether the $100 billion+ players in your industry have already decided the risk isn't worth the bet.

If they have, that could be your opening.

Up and to the right.