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Inside Facebook’s Pivot and Kevin Reilly’s Next Move

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Daily Courant, a members-only field guide to all our editorial offerings across Puck.

Today, we point you toward Matt Belloni‘s provocative conversation with Matthew Ball, the leading theorist of what Mark Zuckerberg calls the “metaverse”—large-scale, virtual-reality environments that are likely to succeed the internet as we know it as the next online platform. Fortnite, Roblox, and now Facebook are all contending to build that future. Can Hollywood get on board before it gets left behind? Belloni’s interview with Ball will change the way you think about the entertainment industry, the internet, and everything to come.

Plus, below the fold, don’t miss Dylan Byers‘ fascinating one-on-one with Zuckerberg, himself. It’s the first offering from Dylan’s new media newsletter, In the Room, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox here.

Hollywood Confronts the Metaverse: A Conversation with Matthew Ball

Shortly after Mark Zuckerberg announced he is pivoting Facebook to the “metaverse,” I called up Matthew Ball, a longtime proponent of the concept, to discuss how Hollywood botched the rise of the internet and what the industry can do now to get on board with virtual reality platforms and gaming before it misses the next wave.

Matt Belloni: You’ve written for years about the metaverse as a virtual platform where we will all eventually work and hang out and spend money and play games and watch TV. What I’m interested in is that last part, and the role that entertainment owners will play in the metaverse. And, more specifically, what they should be doing now so that they aren’t caught flat-footed like they were with the transition from linear to streaming video.

Matthew Ball: So, there was a report recently about when [Netflix co-C.E.O.] Ted Sarandos was first trying to get Hollywood filmmakers comfortable with the idea of direct-to-video, direct-to-streaming releases. And his argument, apparently, was that many of today’s biggest hits weren’t actually committed to the pop cultural firmament from their theatrical release. 1977’s Star Wars was incredibly popular in theaters, but it was actually decades of kids in their basements watching it over and over that made it what it is today. I think he’s underselling that phenomenon. It was also generations of kids in their backyards holding a stick and pretending that they were Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader. Today, Hollywood recoils at this strange pastiche of I.P. indiscriminately commingling on Roblox, but the truth of the matter is that’s been happening for decades but no one saw it.

So the co-mingling of I.P.-driven toys is just transferring from the backyard to the metaverse. But in the old days, no one except the toymakers and the consumer product divisions of the I.P. owners were profiting off that play. In the future, it might be Mark Zuckerberg. 

Donald Mustard, the creative director of Fortnite, had this funny tweet where he showed a Terminator riding the Silver Surfer’s surfboard, and he was talking about how incredibly strange that was. The truth is that no kid in a bathtub is paying attention to the sanctity of Ninja Turtles vs. Batman vs. Spider-Man. Their parents aren’t either. But, of course, every I.P. owner had this blissful view that every unit sold was played with on their own. But now content is being designed to mix.

For Hollywood, part of that is relaxing the creative strings. We’re several years into that now. Marvel’s Kevin Feige is taking a more permissive approach to I.P. management and canonization, with Marvel’s Sony partnership and so on. Hollywood has always been a linear stream of pixels on your screen. That’s not where most kids are going. How you tell a story in a bi-directional environment is going to be king…

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