Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer: Consolidation of streaming services likely

Go back to Squawk Box. I'm at the Aspen Ideas Festival. NBC Universal News Group is the media partner with Aspen. And joining me right now is Oscar, Golden Globe, Emmy and Grammy award-winning producer Brian Grazer. He's the founder, executive chairman of Imagine Entertainment. Easy peasy. We're here together at. I don't know what. It's early for you. Yeah, it's early. Yeah, I know it is. But we want to thank you for being here. I got a couple questions from Joe. He's got some questions for you about Hollywood and, OK, the movie theater business. I was actually even going to start there, which is whatever you want. Well, we want to talk about consolidation. We want to talk about sort of the changing nature of all of this. But what do you think about the fact that it feels like despite Barbie and Oppenheimer last summer, maybe people aren't really going back to the movie theaters? I happen to think no. Well, there's some evidence that that supports that. Imagine as always played in the zone where there is that chance, high, high probability of chance that it will be successful in a movie theater. And and so it's OK, it's great for us, right, because we've built over 30 years over 100 different products, brands, you know, whether it's Backdraft, which I'm now going to do today with Glenn Powell or whether it's 24 a movie that we're going to do in a very interesting way with Disney Fox. Wow. So these formats of the late 90s and the 2000s have become very important because the, the streamers or the people or, or studios are very right now even more of a risk averse. And So what they like to do, as you just pointed out, by doing Barbie like a, what is it 100 year old product or something? They, they like brands that are already established that people have high level of awareness do that where you actually add a new twist or really interesting casting, which is of course what we're doing with ours. We're doing something with Sydney Sweeney, which I'm very excited about. We're doing something with Scarlett Johansson also very excited about, I mentioned Glenn Powell with Backdraft. So. So we're doing how much of it is dependent, therefore on this. I, I want it's not as a former generation, but generations of people who grew up in a different era, effectively when it was a little bit less fractured, where you could actually create these moments. Backdraft was a huge picture. The question is, would Backdraft if you had to do Backdraft as an original today? Yeah. Could it be a huge picture? I think so. You think so? Well, because actually AI and digital effects have so far advanced themselves that you can have tiny little cameras almost imperceptible that will capture the physics of a fire in a way that's never been done before. So even when I saw, I'm sure you saw Dune Two, yes, that blew my mind. I thought it was absolutely so state-of-the-art and amazing and I that's that those are the benefits of AI and the advancement of digital effects. And so, you know, I think I think you can do that. What do you think that's the goal? That's the goal. What do you think is going to happen just to the streaming world right now? Because it feels like everybody's trying to make sense of it. There's a lot of talk about consolidation. We have an election coming up. There's a lot of folks waiting to figure out, you know, whether regulators should allow will allow. Do you, do you think that in the next year or two there will actually be demonstrable consolidation among the streamers? I do, you do, I do. I don't want that to be true. You don't want that to be true because it's not good for your business. Well, it's not opt optimal, right? It'll still be, they will still choose high quality entertainment. It'll always it. We're now in a time where we're not going backwards for and doing just shelf space content any longer. I don't think any streamer or any studio wants to do that any longer. They don't see that that the Super aggregator works. I think they see specific movies and television shows that are events or appointment. So that's interesting you say that because Netflix has become a super aggregator and you think the Super Netflix has made it work. They're others, they're unusual, they are in another category. But you think everybody else who's been chasing the fever dream of trying to be Netflix, you think that is is a fever dream, Maybe I'm saying it for you. Yeah. Thank you. You're saying it for me. What do you think is going to? I mean, we've all been talking about the future of Paramount. We've been talking about the future of Warner Brothers, this company which is owned by Comcast and Peacock. Do you see those when you think about the chess piece? Amazing CNBC. Love you. Love you Lionsgate. I mean, how do you see that all coming together or not? OK. If you were moving the chess pieces, if I were well, I think being a high quality single independent that had that creates partnerships with their IP and emerging talent stars. I think being an arms dealer to all of those streamers is a good business. I think the smaller financing entities, the smaller or or the companies that are the ones you just mentioned, right, they will probably have to be consolidated into bigger companies.