Great directors are once again becoming the main draw for audiences because of the high trust they’ve earned from them (Nolan/The Odyssey, Coogler/Sinners). If I were building a new movie studio, I’d act like a label and sign next generation directors with bold visions (Barker, Parsons, Ullom), back their next 5 movies up to a certain budget size (with option to raise additional capital for more ambitious projects), split IP ownership, give them broad creative control, and build a studio brand off our taste in filmmakers we sign and gain audience trust from the freedom we give them. I’d also take a page out of the Sundance Institute and create an in-house fellowship program to develop new voices we find online and connect it to a micro-budget fund that finances a handful of shorts from each filmmaker we’d post on YouTube free for everyone to watch to grow their audience, and treat the revenue loss as R&D for a future pipeline of filmmakers we’d hopefully want to sign. I’d probably have a branded division to rep our filmmakers in the commercial space and offshoot some of the financial risk of the studio by producing those jobs in-house and taking agency/prod co fees off the top. And I’d have half the marketing team be uniquely focused on growing the personal brands of each filmmaker we’d sign because the entire model relies on their ability to become household names. I left traditional Hollywood years ago because I care more about the hours we spend consuming media online every day than the one movie you see a month, but I love movies and if I ever came back it would probably look something like that.