After seven and a half years at the helm, Tony Vinciquerra will leave an important mark on the 100-year history of the studio now known as Sony Photos Entertainment when he steps down as CEO on January 2. measured as much by what he didn’t do during his time as by the initiatives he took to restructure and reimagine the company for its second century.
The seasoned executive, who orchestrated a much-needed turnaround at the studio, was chosen as this year’s recipient of the Choice Vanguard Award, which recognizes people who have made a significant contribution to the global television business. The accolade will be presented to Vinciquerra on October 21st at the Mipcom international content market and conference in Cannes.
By supporting one of Hollywood’s founding studios, Vinciquerra restored a major commercial employer to health. For steering the ship through strong business headwinds, the onset of ongoing wars, the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 screenwriter and actor strikes, Sony Group Corp. Chairman and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida praised the head of studio for its “deep expertise and experience in the leisure sector, its strategic vision and its excellent management.”
Vinciquerra will hand over the CEO reins to his hand-picked successor, Ravi Ahuja, who is currently president and chief operating officer of SPE. Vinciquerra will remain at SPE as non-executive chairman until December 2025.
“He acquired the experience we need in the person who will run the company. And he is very calm, very sensible, very sensible,” Vinciquerra says of Ahuja’s promotion.
Under the management of Vinciquerra, SPE decided to position itself at a time of great transition for the pay TV sector. Sony has not been part of its larger rival studios in accelerating the construction of direct-to-consumer streaming platforms. The only loss-making streamer SPE had under its roof when Vinciquerra arrived in mid-2017 – Crackle – was sold less than two years later.
“Early on, we decided not to get into the latest entertainment streaming business. All of these companies jumped in first and didn’t really have a plan except that they were going to be determined for subscribers. And instead of diving in to do the same thing, we made the decision to be the arms supplier, and we joined our bench of (TV) creators and we did very, very well with that,” says Vinciquerra. Selection.
Instead, SPE has embraced Sony Corp’s power with anime production through its Japanese banner Aniplex to create a subscription anime streamer that taps into the rabid fandom for the serialized animation format. Currently, SPE’s Crunchyroll streamer has over 15 million subscribers and generates revenue.
“We could see that (anime fans) were increasing and it was a comparatively cheap product. We weren’t spending $5 million an episode. We’re spending between $200,000 and $400,000 per episode. So we jumped in with all our feet and now we’re in a great position with Crunchyroll,” says Vinciquerra. “We’re still looking for the next very specific genre-based streaming service. We anticipate there is more to do there.”
Vinciquerra’s reinvention campaign also included control of more than 20 of SPE’s in-house production banners, which were spread widely across Europe, Latin America and Asia to a level that didn’t make financial sense for the studio.
“We decided to focus on the places where we thought we could really win,” says Vinciquerra. Chief among them is the UK, where global head of TV production Wayne Garvie has guided SPE to acquire rich production equipment, including Jane Tranter’s Dangerous Wolf (“His Dark Materials”), Eleven (“Training Sex” ) and Eleventh Hour Movies (“Alex Riter”).
Vinciquerra’s first 18 months at the studio were marked by a whirlwind of restructuring, layoffs and administrative changes. He also sold or closed dozens of international cable channels that hurt profits. He had strong convictions about what he wanted to achieve, based on his experience that includes 10 years operating Fox Networks Group and 6 years as a media consultant for personal justice giant TPG.
“I’ve been on the board of Pandora, I’ve been on the board of DirecTV, I’ve been on the board of Qualcomm and several other companies. Then I realized very clearly what was happening in our enterprise from the surface”, recalls Vinciquerra. “When I bought here, the company was in a difficult situation.”
He had strong emotions about what needed to change, but he sometimes questioned himself during the busy years before the shock of the pandemic.
“I asked myself – am I right not to get into the streaming services business? Because everyone told me how silly I was for not doing this and eliminating cable networks. People here questioned this a lot”, he recalls.
Vinciquerra used his instincts to streamline SPE’s operations. The need to rehabilitate distressed assets has been a constant in his career since he got his first job in radio sales in Albany, NY. Years later, he learned an important lesson when he took over as general supervisor of WBZ from Westinghouse Broadcasting-TVBoston. It was just about the time when the parent company reduced prices and raised the station’s headcount to 200 workers, down from 350.
“You need to have a vital mass of workers to know what the problem is, methods to solve it, and what to do to get to the place you need to be,” he says. “When you get a vital mass of people to believe that, the naysayers go underground.”
Vinciquerra remained in broadcasting, working as a senior director at CBS television stations and Hearst in the 1990s, when the company went on a station buying spree. He credits Peter Chernin, the revered media investor and former head of 20th Century Fox and chairman of Information Corp. from Rupert Murdoch, for bringing him into the big leagues of showbiz. Chernin pushed Vinciquerra to oversee Fox’s broadcast community in addition to its cable properties.
It was a goal that basically paid off — especially since Vinciquerra remembers trying to dissuade Chernin from giving him the job at first. Years later, he is grateful that Chernin didn’t pay attention to him.
“Logically, it didn’t make sense to hire me to run the Fox broadcast network because I had never had network experience,” recalls Vinciquerra. I ran TV stations. It’s really a totally different endeavor.”
Among his achievements at Sony, Vinciquerra cites overcoming two completely different challenges. When he took the role in 2017, Vinciquerra told company leaders that the studio lacked opportunity because it didn’t work more closely with technology and content franchises owned by Sony Corp.’s PlayStation gaming division. Sony management in Tokyo was supportive. But from his experience at Fox, he also knew that such collaborations couldn’t be dictated from above.
“It doesn’t work for those who say, ‘Do this.’ It’s essential to get (creative) teams to work collectively and get their artistic energy flowing,” he says.
Sony gathered about 40 top artistic executives from gaming and photography, put them in a large convention room, and equipped them with a whiteboard. The directive for both Tokyo teams was to find ways to work together “without fear of who will pay for what,” recalls Vinciquerra.
“They spent two days together and created 12 or 14 different initiatives to work on together. We’ve already reached seven or eight,” he says. The list includes HBO’s acclaimed drama series adaptation “The Final of Us,” which is heading into its delayed second season, 2022’s “Uncharted” and 2023’s “Gran Turismo” and “Twisted Steel.”
On the music front, Bruce Springsteen is involved in an impromptu venture with Sony’s TV division. Dangerous Bunny, the best-selling reggaeton star, had a small role in the 2022 Brad Pitt-starrer “Bullet Prepare,” and he will appear again in an upcoming Sony film.
Another notable milestone during his tenure was the extensive renovation and renovation of the large SPE site in Culver City, once the hallowed surface of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Some of the studio’s soundstages had not been well maintained for many years. The wooden boards between the walls were warped, creating a fire hazard among other things, not to mention the other aging infrastructure inside. A strong earthquake may have simply toppled several.
At the beginning of his tenure, Vinciquerra’s group created a five-year plan to make updates and improvements to the infrastructure. Then COVID happened. With the land empty of employees and production activities for months, much of the heavy construction work was completed within 18 months.
“We ended up redoing almost every wall and every level during the rest of the pandemic,” he says. “Even now, we are not adequately caught up.”
The Culver City lot is such a storied part of Hollywood history that one of its buildings — known as the Scenic Arts Building — has been designated a historic landmark that cannot be radically altered. The only downside – the building itself was about to fail due to time and decay.
SPE’s response was to erect a new multistory building adjacent to Scenic Arts, which provides support to the 1920s building. The Scenic Arts facility was constructed with an ingenious pulley system that allowed administrators to film scenes against backdrops painted on large scale, offering everything from scenes of New York City boulevards.
The historic Performing Arts components have been preserved, but the interior has been redesigned to function as meeting areas, which are now available for rent by outside entities.
Meanwhile, the new building was purpose-built to be a storage space for “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” audience members who frequently come to the location to tape SPE’s venerable game shows. It’s conveniently positioned near the “Jeopardy” and “Wheel” stages. In fact, it’s full of a gift shop.
Where there is a will, there is a way. This has been a guideline for Vinciquerra throughout his profession. The last seven years at Sony have been an invigorating experience that has required him to bring together all the skills he has developed over the years and more.
“I’ve always liked the mental challenge of defining a strategy to solve a problem,” says Vinciquerra. “Every job I’ve ever had has had major changes happening. Reworking organizations is second nature to me now.”
Each scenario has its own challenges, but Vinciquerra relies on a few simple rules he’s come to trust.
“You keep your ego out of it. You hire good people and also allow them to take the bows for good work,” he says. “I’m pleased to see the people I work with doing well. And there are a lot of people across the industry that I’ve worked with who have achieved very good results. In fact, I am proud and completely satisfied with it.”