The Epic Fail of Hollywood’s Hottest Algorithm
New York magazine|January 25 - February 7, 2016

When he wasn’t hanging out with Bradley Cooper, or leasing a horse for Kate Bosworth, or negotiating a Golden Globes shout-out from Christian Bale, or bringing a baby wolf to the office, one Hollywood studio head was talking up the sweetest game in town: the chance to invest in movies that couldn’t fail. And plenty of people bought what Ryan Kavanaugh was selling.

Benjamin Wallace
The Epic Fail of Hollywood’s Hottest Algorithm

In an industry where no one knows anything, here, finally, was someone who seemed to know something: Ryan Kavanaugh, a spikily red-haired man-child with an impish grin and a uniform of jeans and Converse sneakers who had an uncanny ability to fill a room and an irresistible outlook on how to make money making movies. Not yet 30 when he founded Relativity Media in 2004, he very quickly became not only a power player in Hollywood but the man who might just save it. With a dwindling number of studios putting out ever fewer movies, other than ones featuring name-brand superheroes, Kavanaugh became first a studio financier and then a fresh-faced buyer of textured, mid-budget films. To bankers, Kavanaugh appeared to have come up with a way to forecast a famously unpredictable business by replacing the vagaries of intuition with the certainties of math.

Even Hollywood wasn’t used to a pitch this good. Kavanaugh alternately dazzled and baffled—talking fast, scrawling numbers and arrows and lines on whiteboards, projecting spreadsheets. “You get caught up in the enthusiasm,” a former colleague says of Kavanaugh’s powers of persuasion. “It’s like trying to analyze love. I know that sounds absurd. This guy’s charisma is really that good.”

この記事は New York magazine の January 25 - February 7, 2016 版に掲載されています。

7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。

この記事は New York magazine の January 25 - February 7, 2016 版に掲載されています。

7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。

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