In a wide-ranging conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival that spanned Christopher Nolan, premium theatrical formats, TikTok and the Fast & Furious franchise, Universal’s Donna Langley talked about the state of her studio and the film industry.
“We’re seeing with young people, the Letterboxd generation, that they are really engaged in film,” said Langley onstage at Toronto’s Canadian Broadcast Centre during a conversation with festival director Cameron Bailey. “We saw it in Oppenheimer, they were going to the theater more than once, coming back, having an opinion, wanting to share that opinion.”
Langley added that younger audiences are looking for a premium theatrical experience, like IMAX, citing the recent move by Universal to sell IMAX 70mm tickets to Nolan’s next movie, The Odyssey, a full year before the film hits theaters. (The tickets quickly sold out.)
“It’s value for money and value for time,” she said of the interest. “It’s all about share of wallet.” Langley added that the downside of premium formats is that studios end up in a “rugby scrum” of available IMAX screens.
She also pointed to Nolan choosing to do a TikTok ahead of the Oppenheimer release (at the behest of his son, according to Langley), explaining how 70mm IMAX projection works, as a way younger audiences were brought to the theater: “People were really engaging with it.”
When asked how Universal generates conversation on platforms like Letterboxd, Langley said that it needs to happen organically. “You cannot manufacture that. It has to be authentic. Obviously, you can find the assets and get the information to the right people, who hopefully can evangelize on behalf of us to the audience, directly. We can’t do that,” she said.
Earlier in the conversation, Langley was asked about some of the studio’s landmark franchises, including the Vin Diesel-fronted Fast & Furious, which is made up of now nearly one dozen films. “Between four and five is when we made a conscious decision to pivot to a globe-trotting, heist-type scenario,” said Langley of the evolution of the franchise, buoyed by global popularity. The films, which have a combined gross of over $7 billion, have since traveled the world and even off-planet. In the ninth installment, two of the film’s characters got to space in a rocket car.
Langley did apologize to the TIFF audience for that narrative choice. “Sorry we sent them to space,” she said to laughter from the audience. “We can never get that genie back.”