Entertainment Lawyers Guide Hollywood Into Future of Disruption and Challenge

variety.com:

Todd Gilchrist It doesn’t take a team of lawyers to see how dramatically the entertainment industry has changed in just a few short years—but they are probably among the best people to help understand how to navigate it.Studios have shuttered, consolidated or acquired their competitors.

Streaming services have exploded in popularity and expanded their worldwide footprint. And starting in 2020, a pandemic forced virtually everyone to adjust almost overnight to these changes, from producers reacting to on-set protocols to consumers demanding more content delivered directly into their homes.The result: From private arbitration to public battles of will, bellwether cases to boilerplate deals, lawyers are increasingly shaping the industry’s future.

For John Berlinski, a partner at Kasowitz Benson Torres, one of the firms representing Scarlett Johansson during her dispute with Disney in 2021 over its distribution of “Black Widow,” the ongoing challenge has been synchronizing traditional methods of compensation with the rise of platforms that use different and often unclear calculus to determine a creator’s worth.“The actual value that talent is bringing used to be measured in things like box office receipts when it comes to film, or in television, Nielsen ratings or the longevity of a series,” Berlinski tells Variety.