Good morning.
As many of you at the studio know (mostly just Senior Management), I have been in a Seychelles maximum security prison for the past two years.
Don’t feel too bad for me, the prison was on the beach and the food was decent (though the king crab was shitty). I was allowed to have my personal chef cook for me after a couple of months because I paid El Presidente a cool eight hundred bucks. The only caveat was my chef – Andres – had to stay with me in prison in a non air conditioned cell next to me.
While Manka Bros. senior management was aware of my imprisonment, most of the rest of the 100,000 global employees were told that I had testicular cancer.
That was not true but I didn’t want to tell the work force (and, especially, the Board of Directors) that I was in jail for tax evasion in my adopted country – The Seychelles.
In my defense, I was not aware taxes had to be paid in The Seychelles. Why, the fuck, would anyone live there unless it was to avoid taxes?!
Anyway, I didn’t have cancer and now I’m back!
So… starting today we’re going to do things A LOT differently.
Here the basic message: THE OLD MOGULS ARE BACK, MOTHERFUCKERS!
Sorry, “new” Hollywood – or whatever anyone under 30 is calling it. Me, Bob Iger, Rupert, Bakish – we’re not going anywhere and we’ll decide what happens in this town. Capisce?
To paraphrase Logan Roy – “WE HAVE YOU BEAT!”
FIRST, THE WGA STRIKE:
Good news, Writers. We are going to settle the strike. I mean, duh, of course we are.
And if I may echo “The Who” – “Meet the new deal… same as the old deal!”
Yep, we’ll settle and you’ll get nothing new or maybe a couple of measly percentage point minimum boosts, and we’ll both figure out how to spin it as a WGA victory. But we know the #Truth – and we know you’ll settle just like it’s 2007.
Sorry. #Truth.
On top of that… we’re going to do things the same way.
We’re putting movies in theaters.
We’re putting TV shows on TV.
We’re making video games and will still sell the majority of them on cartridges.
We’re spending billions on football, baseball, basketball, hockey – because that’s what 60+ year old people want to watch!
So fuck off!
SECOND, AI:
Yeah, we’re keeping that one for ourselves. You’re welcome to use it if it helps the studios but we own this shit and we’ll do with it what we want.
Manka Bros. has been ahead of the A.I. curve for years. You may remember we replaced our CFO David Chang with A.I. about five years ago. This has worked like a charm. I’ve learned that I don’t need a highly-paid human to tell me that our business sucks.
And… I can shoot as many of those machines as I want after hearing bad news and then just plug a new one in once I’ve calmed down. Incredible!
There’s no turning back and it’s about to get even more disruptive.
Imagine if I need a first draft of a reboot of “Dadbot.” I’m not going to hire Scott Frank for a few million dollars just for a serviceable first draft. ChapGPT is doing the first draft for free and then I will hire some hack to punch it up, add a few jokes that the under ten-year-olds might find amusing and that’s it. It’s a freaking movie about a robot dad raising four human children under the age of twelve. I don’t need Scott Frank for this. I need a machine to pump it out and we make an easy profit. That’s the risk we’re now willing to take.
THIRD, MankaGoNow:
Manka Bros. is going to rebrand MankaGoNow into a more generic service – something that no one is really going to care about but will be too lazy to cancel – like an old dial-up AOL subscription.
The rebranding announcement and new name is coming hopefully in July.
It seems people were confused by “Manka” being in the channel name so we’ll probably go with something like “Go” (Disney owns, though) or “Now” – much less confusing – but new name and brand to come soon.
We paid millions to a branding agency who came up with possibilities for the name such as “GoNow” and “NowGo” – we’re getting close to a final decision.
Oh, yeah, and we’re doing massive layoffs and cost-cutting… details to come.
So… there we are. I’m out of jail, back in Burbank – safely in America – and ready to roll.
Is Hollywood ready?
Khan Manka, Jr., Chairman & CEO – Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s LARGEST Media Company