How Tony Vinciquerra Reshaped Sony Pictures Entertainment

After seven and a half years at the helm, Tony Vinciquerra will leave an important handprint in the 100-year history of the studio now known as Sony Pictures Entertainment when he steps down as CEO on January 2. His legacy will be appreciated as much for what he did not during his time at the top, but for the initiatives he took to restructure and reshape the company for its second century.

The veteran director, who has orchestrated a much-needed turnaround at the studio, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Variety Vanguard Award, which recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the global television business. The kudo will be presented to Vinciquerra on October 21 at Mipcom’s global content market and conference in Cannes.

By strengthening one of Hollywood’s most important studios, Vinciquerra restored the health of a major employer in the industry. For steering the ship through tough industry headwinds, the outbreak of the streaming wars, the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 writers and actors strikes, Sony Group Corp. chairman CEO Kenichiro Yoshida praised the studio chief for his “deep experience and expertise in the entertainment space, his strategic vision and his excellent leadership.”

Vinciquerra will hand over CEO duties to his hand-picked successor, Ravi Ahuja, who currently serves as SPE’s president and chief operating officer. Vinciquerra will remain at SPE as non-executive chairman until December 2025.

“He has the experience we need in the person who will lead the company. And he is very calm, very down to earth and very smart,” says Vinciquerra of Ahuja’s promotion.

Under Vinciquerra’s leadership, SPE was deliberate in its positioning at a time of tremendous transition for the pay TV industry. Sony didn’t join its larger rival studios in the rush to build direct-to-consumer streaming platforms. The only money-losing streamer SPE had under its roof when Vinciquerra arrived in mid-2017 – Crackle – was sold less than two years later.

“We decided early on not to get into the general entertainment streaming business. All of these companies were the first to act and really had no plan other than to desperately look for subscribers. And instead of doing the same thing, we made the decision to become arms dealers, and we sat on the couch together. [TV] makers and did very, very well with it,” says Vinciquerra Variety.

Instead, SPE embraced Sony Corp’s strength with anime production through the Japan-based Aniplex banner to put together a subscription anime streamer that taps into the rabid fandom for the serial animation format. Today, SPE’s Crunchyroll streamer has more than 15 million subscribers and is turning a profit.

“We could see that [anime fans] grew and it was a relatively cheap product. We weren’t spending $5 million per episode. We spend $200,000 to $400,000 per episode. So we jumped in with both feet, and now we’re in a good place with Crunchyroll,” says Vinciquerra. “We’re still looking for the next very specific, genre-based streaming service. We think there is more to be done.”

Vinciquerra’s reinvention campaign also included gaining traction over SPE’s more than two dozen in-house production banners, which were distributed far and wide in Europe, Latin America and Asia to an extent that did not make financial sense for the studio.

“We decided to focus on the places where we thought we could really win,” Vinciquerra said. Chief among these is Britain, where head of international TV production Wayne Garvie has directed SPE to bring in wealthy production outfits including Jane Tranter’s Bad Wolf (“His Dark Materials”), Eleven (“Sex Education “) and Eleventh Hour Films (“Alex Riter”).

Vinciquerra’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, which negatively affected revenues. He had strong beliefs about what needed to be done, based on his experience, which included a decade leading the 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 number of other companies. So I saw very clearly what was happening in our company from the outside,” Vinciquerra recalls. “When I came here, the company was in bad shape.”

He had strong feelings about what needed to change, but occasionally doubted himself during the go-go years before the shock of the pandemic.

“I asked myself, am I right if I don’t get into the streaming services business? Because everyone told me how stupid I was for not doing it and throwing away the cable networks. People here have often questioned that,” he recalls.

Vinciquerra stuck with his instincts to streamline SPE operations. The need to rehabilitate troubled assets has been a constant in his career since he got his first job in radio sales in Albany, NY. Years later, he learned an important lesson when he took over as general manager of WBZ-TV from Westinghouse Broadcasting. Boston. It was about the time the parent company cut costs and brought the station’s workforce to 200, down from 350.

“You need a critical mass of employees to understand what the problem is, how to solve the problem and what you need to do to get to where you want it to be,” he says. “Once you get a critical mass of people who 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 began buying stations. He credits Peter Chernin, the respected media investor and former head of 20th Century Fox and president of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., for taking him to the major showbiz leagues. Chernin forced Vinciquerra to oversee the Fox broadcast network and cable properties.

It was a goal that really paid off, especially as Vinciquerra remembers initially trying to persuade Chernin not to give him the job. Years later, he is grateful that Chernin did not listen to him.

“Logically, it didn’t make any sense to hire me to run the Fox broadcast network because I had never had any networking experience,” Vinciquerra recalls. I ran TV stations. It is a completely different profession.”

Among his achievements at Sony, Vinciquerra cites overcoming two very different challenges. When he took on the role in 2017, Vinciquerra told company executives 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 from the Sony Music division. Sony’s leadership in Tokyo was supportive. But his experience at Fox also taught him that such collaborations couldn’t be dictated from above.

“It doesn’t work if you say, ‘Just do this.’ You have to get the [creative] groups to collaborate and get their creative juices flowing,” he says.

Sony gathered about forty key creative executives in gaming and photography, placed them in a large conference room, and provided them with a whiteboard. The brief for both Tokyo teams was to find ways to work together “without worrying too much about who is going to pay for what,” Vinciquerra recalls.

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

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

Another notable milestone during his tenure was the extensive renovation and renovation of SPE’s massive Culver City parcel, which was once the hallowed ground of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Some of the studio’s soundstages had not been properly maintained for decades. Wooden planks between the walls were buckling, posing a fire hazard, among other things, not to mention the other aging infrastructure inside. A strong earthquake could easily have knocked down one or more.

Early in his career, Vinciquerra’s team developed a five-year plan for making infrastructure upgrades and improvements. And then COVID happened. With the plot empty of staff and production activities for months, the majority of the heavy construction work was completed in 18 months.

“We ended up redoing virtually every wall and every phase for the remainder of the pandemic,” he says. “Even now we are not quite ready yet.”

The Culver City lot is such a storied part of Hollywood history that one of its structures – known as the Scenic Arts Building – has been designated a historic landmark that cannot be radically changed. The only problem: the structure itself was on the verge of collapse from age and decay.

SPE’s solution was to build a new multi-story building adjacent to Scenic Arts, providing support for the 1920s construction. The Scenic Arts facility was built with an ingenious system of pulleys that allowed directors to film scenes against large-scale painted backdrops depicting everything from New York City street scenes.

The historic visual arts elements were retained, but the interior was redesigned to function as meeting rooms, which are now available for rent by external entities.

Meanwhile, the new building was purpose-built as a gathering place for spectators of “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune,” who regularly come to the grounds for tapings of SPE’s venerable game shows. It is conveniently located near the “Jeopardy” and “Wheel” stages. Of course it is complete with a gift shop.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. That has been a guiding principle for Vinciquerra throughout his career. The past seven years at Sony have been an invigorating experience that has required him to tap into all the skills he has developed over the decades, and more.

“I have always enjoyed the intellectual challenge of coming up with a strategy to tackle a problem,” says Vinciquerra. “Every job I’ve ever had has undergone tremendous change. Transforming organizations is now second nature to me.”

Every situation has its own challenges, but Vinciquerra finds himself leaning on a few simple rules he has come to depend on.

‘You keep your ego out of it. You hire good people and you let them bow out for good work,” he says. “I get my satisfaction from seeing the people I work with do well. And there are a lot of people in the industry that I’ve worked with who have done very well. I am very proud and happy with that.”