How Oscar winner Brian Grazer decides which streaming services are best for his films

FAN Editor

Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer told CNBC on Thursday that he wouldn’t just take his upcoming projects to whichever streaming service pays the best price.

Instead, the producer behind “A Beautiful Mind” and “Apollo 13” said the “personalities” of the services play the most important role in making sure that projects reach their full potential.

“Many times, every one of these streaming services, they all have different personalities,” Grazer said in an interview on “Closing Bell.” “So you want to match your show or movie or documentary to the platform that is going to best service that movie, television show or documentary.”

Grazer’s comments come just ahead of the debut of Apple‘s streaming service, the latest entrant in the streaming wars. AT&T‘s WarnerMedia announced details of HBO Max on Tuesday, Disney‘s service launches in about two weeks and Comcast‘s NBCUniversal will bring its own offering to consumers next year.

Brian Grazer

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All of these companies are seeking to compete with Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, creating an entertainment landscape that gives content creators all sorts of choices while forcing streaming services to spend billions on new shows and movies.

Grazer’s remarks suggest that big Hollywood producers are taking a multilayered approach when considering where they want to go.

Grazer said there are some films he knows fit with a particular company. For example, he said his upcoming project on Aretha Franklin, for the third season of “Genius,” works best with Disney.

“That’s a perfect Disney program,” Grazer said. “And I don’t mean Disney in the G rated … It celebrates genius, and that’s within the ethos of what they do.”

As for Netflix, Grazer said he has two movies that “really should be there.” They are the film adaptation of J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut.

“That’s perfect for that service,” he said. “Absolutely perfect.”

Grazer said that producers willing to do the research will find access to plenty of data to show them which services are best for which shows.

“Their algorithms pretty much do know what their audiences are,” he said. “Any good producer is going to take advantage of that data.”

Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

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