Film, TV, and podcast producer Will Packer’s projects—which include NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton and the Ride Along series—have made more than a billion dollars at the box office, all while centering stories of Black Americans. His latest project, Fight Night, is a Peacock series set in 1970s Atlanta and starring Kevin Hart and Don Cheadle. Packer came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about the series, share career advice from his book Who Better Than You? The Art of Healthy Arrogance and Dreaming Big, and tell us why he thinks AI will could ruin Hollywood.
You’ve described Fight Night as the origin story of Atlanta. What do you mean by that?
Every city has an inflection point in its growth, when it starts to get taken seriously on an international stage. This is that story. In 1970, after Muhammad Ali refused to go to Vietnam, he couldn’t get a sanctioned boxing match because he was blackballed. So he took an unsanctioned boxing match in Georgia that was put together by this hodgepodge of government officials, promoters, and con men. They got Ali down to Georgia, and the event attracted a who’s who clientele within the African American community of celebrities, athletes, and gangsters. There was this after-party at an underground casino, and it got robbed. All these gangsters were at this party, and guys came in with guns and masks and stripped everybody down. It made national news. Then the police needed to solve the crime. Back then, Atlanta was home to a lot of dreamers and a lot of hustlers. The show is a love letter to Atlanta. It really is an authentic depiction of what life was like during that time.
Fight Night is based on a podcast you produced. Tell me about developing that IP into a series.
Hollywood has always been very risk averse—always following the trend. [Adapting existing] IP helps to mitigate the risk. It proves that there’s a brand, an audience for an idea, versus just a pitch. Fight Night actually started as a pitch for a feature film, but the film didn’t get the green light. Later, we came back and made a podcast with the intention of telling the story. What we did along the way was create IP. The podcast opened the door for us to revisit [the idea]. I had something tangible that I could send out. The first thing I sent to [Fight Night star] Kevin Hart wasn’t the pitch or me telling him about it. I was like, “Just listen to this podcast. Just listen to the first 20 minutes and tell me what you think.”
The show was originally pitched as a movie. A few years ago, turning it into a limited series could have been considered a downgrade. Now that’s not the case.
Five years ago, anything that wasn’t big screen cinematic content wasn’t looked at as premium. Obviously, that’s not the case anymore. What that means from a producer standpoint is that I have a lot more avenues. Now you’ve got major stars and talent playing in movies, limited series, unscripted, digital, and most importantly, the audiences are very open to top talent being in all those spaces.
You’ve mentioned that fewer projects are getting made, poststrike. How are you navigating that?
It used to be that you could come in with a pitch and [studios] would be like, “Oh wow, we love this idea. We’ll figure out who’s going to star in it, who’s going to direct it, who’s going to write it.” Now you’ve got to come in [with] a plan. The great idea is just the start. Everything is so execution dependent. [Studios and streamers] are looking for full packages. They’re asking, “Who’s going to star in it? Who’s going to write it? Who’s going to direct it?”
Why do you think less is being made?
For a moment, Hollywood went all in on streaming. Streaming hasn’t paid off from a profitability standpoint the way that the industry hoped that it would. So there’s a pulling back. During the pandemic, we put all this money into streaming and changed viewing habits and told audiences to stay home and watch stuff at home. Now we’re realizing a big successful theatrical film is much more profitable for a studio than a big streaming project. Then you couple all of that with two work stoppages last year. The cumulative effect of all this means that you’ve got a lot of nervous folks within the media-finance system and a lot of downsizing and consolidation that’s happening. Unfortunately, you’ve got a lot of jobs that are being lost.
There’ve been a lot of brand partnerships with movies recently. I’m thinking of brand tie-ins in Deadpool Wolverine, for instance. How much is that part of the pitch process?
Anything you can do to offset the level of resources that a single entity has to commit helps. The oversaturation of content means that advertisers are fighting for the eyeballs, and they’re chasing the content that everybody’s going to see. So if you’ve got something like Deadpool Wolverine that’s going to get millions and millions of eyeballs, that’s prime real estate for an advertiser. I tell people all the time, Don’t think of the movie business, the advertising business, the television business, and the podcast business [as separate]. It’s all part of one single ecosystem that is trying to get the consumer to pay attention and then ultimately to spend their money either on a specific piece of content or on a brand that’s associated with that content.
How much does the streaming service distributing a show matter?
The content is what drives audiences. Maybe you’re not on Tubi every day, but if you hear about this great thing and it’s only on Tubi in a group chat, you’ll find it. You’ve got multiple media platforms that are accessible to everybody. If the price point’s not too high, you’ll go just for a particular show that everyone is talking about.
How do you know when a project isn’t working and you need to change tack?
Sometimes you have to pivot. [With any potential collaborator] you have to figure out what they want, and how to align what they want with what you want. Stomp the Yard was my first number-one movie. It almost didn’t happen because nobody wanted to make it. Stomp the Yard is set at an HBCU. And when I was pitching this years ago, I would go to white executives and be like, “I got this great movie. It’s set at a Black college. It’s about these fraternities.” They didn’t get it. I got told no by every studio. I went back to the same executives with that movie pitch, but I had to tilt it to make it palatable. Dance movies were working at the time, so I went back and pitched a dance movie that had an interesting backdrop where someone who did traditional dance moves met these other dancers who did a totally new type of dance. I was able to sell it in a way that was palatable to the folks that I needed to support me.
With fewer things getting greenlit these days, do you think the environment is more difficult for creators of color?
It’s always harder. What I will say though is that more content is being made now that features storylines, actors, themes of communities that normally aren’t showcased in Hollywood content. More of that’s being made because it makes money. That’s the key. It’s not because all of a sudden Hollywood woke up and said, You know what? This is our amazing social agenda and we’re progressive. What happened is that Will Packer has made a billion dollars at the box office. Issa Rae has made a bunch of money and a lot of people watched Insecure. Black Panther made billions around the world. And Tyler Perry makes a lot of money. All these creators who center storylines around African Americans have been successful, and Hollywood is nothing if not reactive.
Do you think AI will help producers, creators, and artists?
We’re all dead. We’re all going out of business. If you’re not in the industry now, don’t try. It’s over. I made a movie called Beast starring Idris Elba [going up against a] man-eating lion. We used AI and CGI: We did a full-body scan of Idris because he had to fight a lion and there were some scenes that weren’t safe. The lion was computer generated. If we can figure out the right balance that still allows human creators to be in the driver’s seat, that is the best version of AI application. It can make our stuff more engaging and we can do it less expensively, and thus we can go to whole new worlds. Here’s the problem: The industry and human nature is not such that we try to protect the artist. We just say, Alright, we’re trying to get from A to Z. What’s the fastest, cheapest way to Z?