CBS CEO Les Moonves expressed a high amount of confidence in Star Trek: Discovery during the company’s quarterly earnings calls with investors. To emphasize the point, he told them they could have made a quick buck by selling the series the Netflix, Amazon, or Showtime. Instead, CBS chose to bet on itself.
“We could have put Star Trek on Showtime, on the CBS Television Network or Netflix, Amazon, they all wanted it for a lot of money,” Moonves told investors. “We determined that Star Trek would be far better for All Access and will earn us more money.”
When the subject later turned to the importance of entertainment industry sales outside the U.S., Moonves again brought up Star Trek: Discovery, saying:
“So every decision we make, the international marketplace becomes really really important. As Ted said, we couldn’t afford to do Star Trek, or the quality of the show, without Netflix help who bought the rest of the world, for a very nice fee may I add.”
CBS Corp. chief executive Les Moonves said the broad-reaching international sale of his company’s new Star Trek incarnation to Netflix paid for the show’s entire production budget.
“Netflix just took it off the table for the rest of the world,” Moonves told media investors at an annual UBS conference Monday. “Basically, Star Trek is going on CBS All Access for free.”
“The back end is now becoming more important than the front end,” Moonves added, noting that CBS couldn’t enable this model without back-end sales of the shows to buyers like Netflix.
While large SVOD platforms like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu provide this back-end sales solution, they are also a big part of the problem, the CBS chief noted.
With aggressive mandates to building up their original-series portfolios, “Netflix and Hulu have driven production costs up to astronomical levels,” Moonves said.
