How Tony Vinciquerra Reimagined Sony Pictures Entertainment trendy blogger

After seven and a half years at the helm of the company, Tony Vinciquerra will leave a significant mark on the 100-year history of the studio now known as Sony Pictures Entertainment when he steps down as CEO on January 2. As much through what he didn’t do during his time at the top as through the initiatives he took to restructure and reimagine the company for its second century.

The veteran executive, who orchestrated a much-needed turnaround for the studio, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Variety Vanguard Award recognizing individuals who have made a significant contribution to the global television business. Kudu will be presented to Vinciquerra on October 21 at the Mipcom Global Content Market and Conference in Cannes.

By supporting one of Hollywood’s founding studios, Vinciquerra restored the health of one of the industry’s major employers. For steering the ship through difficult industry headwinds, the start of the streaming wars, the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 writers and actors strikes, Kenichiro Yoshida, chairman and CEO of Sony Group Corp, praised the studio chief for his “deep experience and expertise in the entertainment space, strategic vision and leadership.” Outstanding.

Vinciquerra will hand over the CEO reins to his hand-picked successor, Ravi Ahuja, who currently serves as SPE’s President and Chief Operating Officer. Vinciquera will remain with SPE as non-executive chairman until December 2025.

“He has the experience we need in someone who is going to run the company. He is very calm, very balanced, and very smart,” Vinsekera says of Ahuja’s promotion.

Under Vinciquerra’s leadership, SPE is positioned at a moment of tremendous transformation for the pay TV sector. Sony has not joined its larger rival studios in the rush to build direct-to-consumer streaming platforms. The only loss-making streamer SPE had under its roof when Vinciquerra arrived in mid-2017 – Crackle – was sold less than two years later.

“Early on, we decided not to go into general entertainment broadcasting. All of these companies had jumped in head first and didn’t really have a plan, except that they were desperate for subscribers.” Instead of diving in to do the same thing, we made the decision to be an arms dealer “We gathered in our (TV) creators’ chairs and did a very good job of it,” says Vinciquera. diverse.

Instead, SPE has embraced Sony Corp’s strength in anime production through its Japan-based Aniplex banner to put together a subscription anime streaming service that taps into the rabid fanbase of the serialized anime format. Today, SPE’s Crunchyroll streaming platform has more than 15 million subscribers and is profitable.

“We saw that (anime fans) were growing and the product was relatively inexpensive. We weren’t spending $5 million an episode. We’re spending $200,000 to $400,000 an episode. We jumped in with both feet, and now we’re at Good place with Crunchyroll.” “We’re still looking for the next very specific, genre-driven streaming service. “We think there is more to do there.”

Vinciquerra’s reinvention campaign also included taking control of SPE’s more than 20 in-house production banners, which were so widespread in Europe, Latin America, and Asia that it did not make financial sense for the studio.

“We decided to focus on places where we thought we could really win,” says Vinciquera. Chief among them is the UK, where head of international TV production Wayne Garvey has guided SPE to snap up thriving production companies, including Jane Tranter’s Bad Wolf (“His Dark Materials”), Eleven (“Sex Education”) and Eleventh Hour Films (“Alex Ritter’s” ).

Vincequerra’s first eighteen months at the studio were marked by a whirlwind of restructuring, layoffs, and management changes. He also sold or closed dozens of international cable channels that had been a drag on profits. He had strong convictions about what needed to be done, drawing on his experience that included 10 years running Fox Networks Group and six years as a media consultant for private equity giant TPG.

“I was on the board of Pandora, I was on the board of DirecTV, I was on the board of Qualcomm and a bunch of other companies. I saw very clearly what was happening in our business from the outside,” Vinciquera recalls. “When I got here, “The company was in a difficult situation.”

He had strong feelings about what needed to change, but he would occasionally check in with himself during the heady years that preceded the shock of the pandemic.

“I asked myself – am I right not to get into streaming services? Because everyone told me how stupid I was for not doing it and getting rid of cable. People here remember that a lot.

Vinciquera stuck to his instincts to streamline SPE’s operations. The need to rehabilitate distressed assets has been a constant in his career, ever since he got his first job in radio sales in Albany, New York. Years later, he learned an important lesson when he took over as general manager of Westinghouse Broadcasting’s WBZ-TV. Boston. That was the time when the parent company cut costs and increased the station’s staff to 200 employees, from 350 employees.

“You have to have a critical mass of employees to understand what the problem is, how to solve it, and what needs to be done to get where you want to be,” he says. “Once a large mass of people believe in it, the naysayers go underground.”

Vinciquerra remained in broadcasting, working as a senior leader for CBS Television stations and for Hearst in the 1990s when that company went on a station buying spree. He credits Peter Chernin, the respected media investor and former chairman of 20th Century Fox and chairman of Rupert Murdoch’s news company, with bringing him to the big leagues of the entertainment industry. Chernin pushed Vinciquerra to oversee the Fox broadcast network as well as its cable properties.

The goal was indeed a success — especially since Vinciquerra remembers trying to convince Chernin not to give him the job initially. Years later, he was grateful that Chernin didn’t listen to him.

“Logistically, it didn’t make sense for me to be hired to run the Fox Broadcast Network because I had no network experience at all,” Vinciquerra recalls. I used to run TV stations. “It’s a completely different business.”

Among his accomplishments at Sony, Vinciquera cites overcoming two very different challenges. When he took the position in 2017, Vinciquerra told company leaders that the studio was missing opportunities by not working more closely with talent and content franchises owned by Sony Corp’s PlayStation gaming division and Sony Music division. Sony’s leadership in Tokyo has been supportive. But from his experience at Fox, he also knew that such cooperation could not be dictated from above.

“It won’t work if you say, ‘Do this.'” “You have to get the (creative) groups working together and getting their creative juices flowing,” he says.

Sony gathered about 40 key creative executives from games and photos, placed them in a large conference room and provided them with a whiteboard. The directive for both teams from Tokyo was to find ways to work together “without worrying too much about who will pay for what,” Vinciquerra recalls.

“They spent two days together and came up with 12 or 14 different projects to work on together,” he says. “We’ve done seven or eight now.” The list includes HBO’s hit drama “The Last of Us,” which is heading into its delayed second season His Strike, 2022’s “Uncharted” and 2023’s “Gran Turismo” and “Twisted Metal.”

On the music side, Bruce Springsteen is working on an unscripted project with Sony’s television division. Bad Bunny, the best-selling reggaeton star, had a small role in 2022’s Bullet Train starring Brad Pitt, and will appear again in the upcoming Sony film.

Another highlight of his tenure was the extensive renovation and renovation of SPE’s massive parcel of land in Culver City, once the hallowed ground of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Some studio tracks haven’t been well maintained in decades. The planks between the walls were warped, creating a fire hazard, among other problems, not to mention the other aging infrastructure inside. A strong earthquake could easily cause one or more to fall.

Early in its career, Vinciquera’s team established a five-year plan to make infrastructure upgrades and improvements. Then Covid happened. With the area empty of employees and production activity for months, most of the heavy construction work was completed in 18 months.

“We ended up rebuilding almost every wall and stage during the rest of the pandemic,” he says. “So far, we’re not done yet.”

The Culver City area is such a part of Hollywood history that one of its buildings — known as the Scenic Arts Building — has been designated a historic landmark that cannot be radically altered. The only problem was that the structure itself was on the verge of collapse due to age and decay.

SPE’s solution was to construct a new multi-storey building abutting Scenic Arts, which backs up the 1920s-era building. The Scenic Arts facility was built with an innovative system of reels that allowed directors to shoot scenes on large-scale painted backdrops presenting everything from New York City street scenes.

The picturesque arts historical elements have been preserved, but the interior has been redesigned to serve as meeting spaces, and is now available for rent by outside entities.

Meanwhile, the new building was specially constructed as a holding area for “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” audiences, who regularly come to the arena for tapings of SPE’s venerable game shows. It is conveniently located near the “Danger” and “Wheel” stages. Of course, it’s complete with a gift shop.

Where there is a will, there is a way. This has been Vinciquera’s guiding principle throughout his career. His past seven years at Sony have been an invigorating experience that required him to call upon all the skills he’d developed over the decades, and more.

“I’ve always loved the intellectual challenge of developing a strategy to deal with a problem,” says Vinciquerra. “Every job I’ve ever had has seen some massive change. Transforming organizations is second nature to me now.

Every situation has its own challenges, but Vinciquerra finds himself relying on some simple rules that he has come to rely on.

“You keep your ego out of it. You hire good people and let them bow to good work,” he says. “I get satisfaction from watching the people I work with do good work. And there are a lot of people I’ve worked with in the industry who have done really good work. “I’m really proud and happy about that.”