Stan McCoy Remarks at Venice Film Festival 2024 for MiC special event
Italian Pavilion, 31 August, 2024
“Into the Future: Creativity and Innovation in the Audiovisual Industry”
Remarks as prepared for delivery by MPA EMEA President and Managing Director Stan McCoy
Thank you to the Ministry and everyone involved in this session for inviting me to be a part of it.
I’d like to start by sharing the best news I’ve heard in Venice. Two days ago I was talking with the president and director general of the Italian exhibitors’ association, Mario Lorini and Simone Gialdini. And Mario told me that earlier this summer, Italian exhibitors had to order emergency overnight deliveries of extra popcorn to cope with the massive audience response to Inside Out 2. And I said Mario that is the best news you could possibly tell me, and bravo for Disney and bravo for every other studio that took the risk to release this summer, and bravo for summer cinema in Italy – long may it thrive!
There are two things I especially love about this news of Italy’s strong summer cinema season.
The first thing is, it shows that we can change things. We don’t have to just sit around and accept the status quo. Thanks to the partnership of the industry and the Ministry and Undersecretary Borgonzoni, we are bringing our innovation and entrepreneurship to the table, with government support, to overcome the inertia of slow summers and build exciting momentum in the other direction. That counts as innovation.
The second thing I love is the idea that families right across Italy came together to the cinema to share a film about the inner struggle of being a young person. And they walked out with deeper sympathy for each other. And this is the great treasure of the work we get to do in this industry – to touch people, to shape conversations and create understanding.
On the screen you see some of my favorite examples of films that did exactly that – showing the power of film to connect us to each other and our environment and our shared future in a way that is so deeply powerful.
This industry is no stranger to technological and societal challenges. Well, I believe we are at a key moment in time, with an opportunity for new thinking (and reinvention), just like the creative resurgence that followed the influenza pandemic of 1918.
It was the “Roaring Twenties,” when people felt the need to embrace life in NEW ways, and to think and act differently. And during that time, this industry was coming to life.
The Motion Picture Association was founded in 1922. Paramount and First National were barely a decade old. AMC, MGM, Warner Bros., Walt Disney, they were also founded in the Roaring Twenties.
But as we face a changing digital future, and a second century, the challenges are as daunting as they are uncertain. And throughout the challenges we have learned that if we work together, if we work in unity, we will prevail and can weather any storm that comes towards us.
For more than a hundred years, we have built one of the most successful and iconic industries in human history. And together, we will build an even greater one in the century to come. This is our Roaring Twenties.
As movie lovers, I’m sure you’ll agree that we all appreciate a great comeback story. Think of Rocky Balboa. Going the distance. Think of every superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Always fighting to regain their superpowers so they can save the world.
In the movies, those stories are resolved usually in one sitting. But in real life, as our industry works to deliver on its post-Covid resurgence, sometimes that can take a little bit longer. And in the midst of that we are challenged to constantly adapt to rapid advancements in technologies that will become increasingly relevant to our work in the years ahead.
An essential driver of how we overcome challenges are those millions of people who work in this industry. So one of our key tasks is create a path for today’s young adults to become tomorrow’s biggest storytellers.
Our job is to actively recruit and welcome them into the creative community…to open the doors enough so they can burst through them and not just succeed, but grow a more vibrant industry, culture, and society.
Every MPA member feature film shoot in Europe pumps an average of 28m euros into the local economy and supports 1,100 local jobs. When HBO shot season 2 of The White Lotus in Sicily it brought in 38m euros in spending, not to mention a wave of tourism.
To sustain those kinds of jobs and revenues we also need smart policies
At the MPA our watchwords when it comes to policy are flexibility, proportionality, and legal certainty.
“Legal certainty” is easy to explain: In this industry, we want all of the drama to be on the screen, and none of the drama to be in the accounting department or the legal department. So whether it’s production incentives or anything else, we need stable, predictable, boring rules.
“Proportionality” means, for example, if governments require financial contributions from audiovisual operators they should not be excessively high or disproportionate to market size. They should respect the single market, leave doors open to new entrants and diversity of offerings, and above all let’s avoid reducing investment in making great film and television into a bureaucratic exercise.
And finally “flexibility” for us means, for example, letting production partners choose how to allocate the risk and reward and rights between themselves when they sit down to make a deal, rather than having regulations that shrink the universe of the possible deals.
Our goal with all of those recommendations is to create an enabling environment for the work you’re going to be hearing about from the extraordinary panelists in the next two panels who are all experts in making sure every story, is not only imagined and produced, but that it reaches all its audience, creates momentum, develops the ‘event’ not to be missed.
They are going to share with us: How these initiatives also pave the way for aspiring industry professionals … How they strengthen the industry… How they spur better, more diverse, and more dynamic ideas…
And I think they are going to demonstrate that at the end of the day, innovation in the face of high risks is fundamentally part of our industry’s DNA, and it will need to continue to be that way if we are to build…
the resilient and successful industry we need…
for the NEXT one hundred years.