A Quibi executive says it was canceled because it was “not a strong enough script.” There’s one moment in it, though, that seems particularly apt: Spiegel’s Stanford mentor tells him about the Arch Deluxe, the hamburger introduced by McDonald’s in 1996 that was more expensive than its other burgers. Then a lot of 3-D schlock flooded the market, and a night out at the movies at $20 a ticket proved just too expensive for many families. “People know that when you sit down with Jeffrey for a meal, you get 30 minutes,” a longtime colleague says. That doesn’t exist on other platforms. “He’s a time suck of unbelievable proportions,” says a longtime colleague. But Quibi’s bigger problems were more conceptual. Every ten minutes, you’ll get a swerve, a fork in the road.” For producers of unscripted shows, Quibi offered a rare chance to make their silliest ideas, like Barkitecture (exotic luxury kennels are made for dogs) and Dishmantled, in which two blindfolded chef-contestants are blasted with a cannonload of mystery-food gloop and must identify the ingredients by taste, then use them to reconstruct the dish. There, too, he produced a series of monster hits: Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon. “We realized people want to take Swift Sips of content,” he says dryly. Instead, Quibi has foundered. Its biggest investors included Madrone Capital, an investment vehicle for the Walmart Waltons, and Alibaba, the Amazon of China. To combat the idea that Quibi would be providing something that already existed, Katzenberg leaned into making Quibi seem different. That first day, the Quibi app rose to No. That evening, she and Katzenberg had a long phone chat in which she explained why she makes a point of wearing her hair in a natural style on TV — so that, say, a little Black girl watching MSNBC could see someone authoritative who didn’t conform to the predominant white American standard of beauty. “That’s a microcosm of the Quibi story,” a producer who has worked with the company says. Journalist Kim Masters has known him for 30 years and wrote Keys to the Kingdom, which chronicles the Eisner-Katzenberg era at Disney. You\'ll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. Katzenberg was able to make hay of the studios’ involvement, too, as a show of industry support for his start-up, even though the investments were relatively small — “in the $20 million range,” a studio executive says. “But he ignores the possibility of failure in the pursuit of success. And, as Katzenberg says, this was “a marathon and not a sprint.”. “Every movie I’ve had a hit with was picked over, including Paranormal Activity,” he tells me. “He says, ‘There is none. The day it launched, the Quibi app rose to No. When he turned around and co-founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, it was the first new studio built in L.A. in 60 years. “People doubted that we’d ever be able to pull all the entertainment companies into one boat at one time to support the new venture,” he says. “Yep, Quibi Is Bad” was the headline on an article by one of this magazine’s TV critics. Katzenberg had originally wanted to call it Omakase, after the sushi tasting menus he enjoyed at least once a week at Nobu Malibu.

Jimmy Kimmel, hosting a virtual version of Disney-ABC’s annual upfront, said, “Here I am, standing here like a fucking fool with nobody watching. The movie ended up grossing $330 million and winning four Oscars. People on Quibi have $100,000 a minute to make content. “He’s just a machine.”. Quibi manages to miss every trend and tactic that could help make its app popular. T-Mobile, Quibi’s most important launch partner, could hardly flex its marketing muscle when most stores were closed. Filed by Eko, a New York–based interactive-video company that had met with Quibi employees several times, including once with Katzenberg, the suit claims the Turnstyle technology was stolen from Eko.

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