YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Chernin

lines on the record: 69
first: 2026-06-15
most recent: 2026-06-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Then I can. Look, I am interested in being interested in stimuli. I'm interested in spending more time with my family. You know, I have a charity that I've been involved with for a very long time malaria no more that I'm deeply interested. I have a new charity that I just started called Billion Scale Health where we're doing extraordinary things trying to use technology to build health scale solutions for a billion, for potentially a billion people. So I'm engaged in that. I still want to do creative things. I have projects that I'm producing and that I'm interested in. I will help this French company of which I think I'm the larger shareholder. So I'm interested in being stimulated and fulfilled and I'm interested in helping the greatest satisfaction from a business perspective for me right now is helping talented young people.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's the ultimate hubris. Four or five business people a century. Have a legacy. So that's ridiculous thing to think about So, I have no legacy. I'll be dead. That'll be that.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sports are going, you know, there's enormous competition for people's times. Netflix is a streaming long-form video service. YouTube right now is, I guess, largely a short-form video service with a little bit of a essentially virtual cable channel, you know, virtual MSO thrown in there, although that's a small part of their business on a relative basis. So, you know, individual people who work in the business are not waking up saying, should I go with YouTube or should I go with Netflix? There's zero competition. So this idea that they're competing with each other, they're competing each other in the same way that you're competing with Netflix or that you're competing with the New York Times or you're competing with Video games. You're competing for people's times.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“YouTube zaps who with one, but to say, you know, I don't buy, which is the Netflix argument, or was the Netflix argument when they're in, I don't believe that YouTube and Netflix are direct competitors right now, right? I think everything is competitive for people's times, everything, but that's like saying Netflix is competing with video games or Netflix is competing with...”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that It depends on success. If Paramount could succeed, that's better because what the world badly needs is a competitor to Netflix primarily right now. So in that sense, Netflix wouldn't have been. Netflix certainly wouldn't have been a better owner in the short term. But if it goes out of business, I guess would be a better owner That's the sense in which I said I was rooting for to be successful because I think.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think I said this before I'm not inside their books, it's very challenging. You know, it's challenging to make 30 movies. It's challenging to continue to build the streaming service. And it's doubly challenging while your core business, which is linear channels, is in decline. So they've got they're the ones making the bet, not me. They've got a God bless them. I hope they succeed because it'll be good for the business”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the giant questions to the degree they end up controlling these things outright is can they get good at managing creativity? And there are huge differences, which I'm not sure they've thought about, between managing technological innovation and managing creative innovation.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Larry Ellison personally is bigger than Disney, is bigger than Comcast, bigger than, you know, is bigger than, and so when you look at YouTube, YouTube's part of a, what, three trillion dollar company? You know, the biggest media company right now, I would call it Netflix a tech company. In that case, the biggest media company is Disney, which is $200 billion company, you know.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not. Trust me, I know. I get that. It may be down the road, and that's what they're. But it's not yet. No, look, I think that It is certainly a big, big challenge for Hollywood and someone who understands something about both worlds like you should be thinking about this more, is that these are small companies”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that I worry about I think in the current situation, what would be the single best thing to happen is another strong competitor. And whether or not it becomes that, I can't tell you. It'll be a function of how smart and talented and strategic they are. But if they became another strong competitor, it would be good for the industry.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believe that that would be more valuable from a regulatory point of view than regulating consolidation. I don't think consolidation is wonderful But I think that if you were to be able to regulate one thing, I think regulating vertical integration would be far more valuable.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get paid, and you're also not incentivized to kill yourself to make a grade. You're not incentivized to promote things as they used to be, etc. And so I think vertical integration is really bad for the system. I think to the degree I'm scared, you mentioned what I'm terrified of is vertical. The impact of vertical integration. On the Hollywood storytelling community, because the stronger those vertically integrated companies get, they will look to squeeze talent because it's just a cost. It's a widget. It's the cost of a widget. If you're in the widget business, drive down the cost of widgets”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The third thing is, I believe it's bad for creativity because you have every single creative decision funneling through one hierarchy. And creativity thrives where it's messy, where there are people arguing about things where, you know, if one person doesn't get it, somebody else is going to get it somewhere else and will innovate somewhere else. And so I believe it's very valuable to have creativity thriving. And then the fourth thing I would say is that What's happened in this process is there's no economic hits for talent. There's also much less economic failure for talent. There's unemployment for talent and unemployment is meaningful. But once you make something, there's no failure. You're getting paid the same whether something succeeds or it fails. That's a terrible thing.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And by the way, it becomes just an old piece of content on Netflix versus you look at the number of things that became hits on the second platform they were on when they got marketed again or look at Seinfeld, which was, by the way, a big success on NBC, not in the first year. It was a big success later, has become ubiquitous in syndication. So that's a bad thing.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Led to every single one of those studios which were dying in 1970 became the dominant television producers Disney Fox Universal Paramount Warner's all became the biggest television producer and it's really what led to their growth in that 25 year period What you have right now so I believe it would make the ecosystem far more vibrant That's number one Secondly is this idea that things don't go from one platform to another because all rights are held in perpetuity it's just bad for things circulating”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Netflix app, by the way. Netflix is no worse than Apple, Amazon, right? Disney. All of these people want to control everything. There are a couple of big negatives to that. If you go back to the 70s, which you refer to as the 70s and 80s, where really when Hollywood exploded, and you had two things that separated that, you had a consent to Cree, which said the studios weren't allowed to own movie theaters. And so it separated movie production from movie distribution. And you had the financial interest syndication rule in the television business, which said the networks could not own the shows they made. They could only license them, right? It led to the explosion of the movie business.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vertical integration just means that one company is controlling the entire process. They are making things, owning things, and distributing things. They produce, own the production, own all rights in perpetuity, and distributed it only on their platforms.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It should play a meaningful role in driving down costs. And if you can drive down costs, you can innovate more. And I think in some ways the thing I would be most excited about is the match of 22-year-old genuine storytellers and AI because they're going to be some young people with great imaginations who are going to get better at the technology than anybody else who are going to make 500,000 hour movies that are great and who are going to and there should be a hundred of them being able to be made. That's great for the art form. That's not a bad thing. That's a great thing for the art form. And anybody who's interested in the art form should be interested in any innovation that has the opportunity to drive down costs because the single most challenging thing to the art form right now is how expensive it is to make things. When the average studio movie is whatever it is today, $80 million.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody can say that's not what it looks like because we weren't there. But what I want to go back to what I said earlier, which is what I think Hollywood and particularly young people should be excited about is to the degree that it's a valid tool to make things.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's to me the most impressive stuff. You know, look, we are the company that we invested in Promise Studios, which is doing a wide range of stuff, all of it interesting to me. And we invested mostly because we believed in the leadership and because we were really interested in learning. I would say if you ask me to judge today, television animation good enough to make television animation today, good enough to make commercials today, good enough to make some reality show. Level quality stuff today. Good enough to make special effects. Getting closer on feature film quality animation and still pretty far away of making true narrative storytelling with actors, right?”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just making stuff, just saying, do a caveman drama or do the fall of Rome. Right using AI. And I've seen 10 or 15 minute segments that they've done 100% AI that are fascinating and really impressive.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most interesting thing is, and I won't name them because it hasn't come out yet, there is a cable network that has started experimenting with some large-scale documentaries, 100% AI.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At my point, in my view, copyright is copyright and it should be sacrosanct. And I do believe that, by the way, I think Hollywood should be more aggressive about copyright, right? Much more aggressive about copyright. And I think it's going to be real. The copyright questions around AI are going to be fascinating over the next five to ten years. But restricting AI, I don't get it. I don't think it makes any sense. And I think that to the degree, look, it may not be meaningful. It may be partially meaningful, or it may be meaningful, but in any of those answers, Holly would be playing a part in it.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, it may also give you tools to actually create new art forms with. We'll see. And it's interesting to embrace all those things to the degree you're interested in, telling stories to human beings you should be interested in. The other side of it is rather than trying to restrict Hollywood from using it, because to the degree it's meaningful, you know, all you're going to do is make Hollywood smaller and smaller and smaller as these other things coming. Hollywood has generally been a place that is really good at, as I said earlier, the manufacturing process of storytelling. It should be extended to new art forms. Absolutely. It would be really stupid not to do that, so it should be. The same time, I think it's important to say you should be relentlessly focused on copyright. You should be focused on you can't steal, you can't steal from these works to train large language models. You can't steal actors like thises. You can't do those things. Those are very valuable.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, my simplistic view of AI is use it as a tool aggressively. Now, that tool, it may be just a tool. It may be a way to streamline the cost of pre-production. It may be a way to, obviously it has huge implications for special effects.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's completely overhyped. By the way, you know, if you look at what most technology has done is Extended the power storytelling. And so to the degree microdramas, and I tend to agree with you that most of them aren't very good now. We'll see if they become good, but they're not killing Netflix or YouTube or anything else or movies. They are a new forum. And to the degree they are a valuable new form, you'll start seeing more actors in it. And the reason they have AI actors in them is they are done incredibly cheaply and it doesn't matter. that they're not high quality to the degree that they become all of a sudden super valuable. People start casting actors in them.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ever were in cell animation. And that's a pretty close analogy. If the guilds and people like that said, you got to protect human beings at all costs, we never would have had Toy Story and all of those wonderful sieging animated movies. And so, by the way, the same thing is true with special effects, special effects all used to be analog. They are every single one of them is digital right now, and there are more jobs and special effects than there have ever been. And there are higher quality of special effects than there have ever been. So this sort of knee-jerk paranoia about technology as bad is going to kill humans, it's going to be kill jobs, et cetera. I think is not smart.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already in big trouble and has nothing to do with AI. Can I guarantee, by the way, there's widespread terror about job loss everywhere because of AI. And certainly if you look at the economy today, inflation is a problem. Jobs aren't. So we've yet to see. It's always good to be paranoid. It's always good to be worried. But we haven't seen that. Look, what I would say, my instinct is the following, which is Nobody knows. We should all be super interested in what it is. You know, there's certainly an easy analog in the transition from hand-drawn cell animation to computer animation. That's an absolutely analog, which is it replaced humans with machines. Artistically, it was fantastic. And by the way, it was fantastic for jobs. There are more jobs in computer animation than there are.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me be clear. I said two minutes ago that jobs in Hollywood are down 35-40%. Right. I don't think there's a single job in Hollywood that has been lost to AI yet. Not one. So what's going on in Hollywood right now, which is devastating, and I'm deeply, deeply concerned about, I'd be happy to talk more about. Sure, please, has nothing to do with AI. So this, and by the way, it's typical, which is people are afraid of the wrong thing, right?”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The production companies have not. The production companies have never been global. The big European companies were never successful in the US. The U.S. companies never cared about the rest of the world. They were just like, we'll sell our stuff there. We won't make it. And I think there's a big opportunity for a global production company that is beginning to unite the highest quality talent all over the world.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's, you know, in essence, Hollywood has always been the center of global production. It has always been the center of looking for filmmakers in France and Italy and Korea and bringing them here. And it's just been a nexus for ultimately the financial underpinnings of that. You know, movies have always been made all over the world. Canada and England, you know, and other places. Probably, I don't think Hollywood has become less central. I do think that the world has become more global. And, you know, one of the things, you know, I mentioned earlier that I had sold my production company, which I have sold to a French company called Media Juan. And one of the reasons I did that was that I believe that if you look at the platforms, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, have all become global. They are global platforms serving the global community.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say two things. So jobs in Hollywood have declined by about 35, 40 percent Some of that is tax credit related. Some of that is global production related. Some of that, in my opinion, is about vertical integration. And by the way, I'm far more concerned with vertical integration than I am with mergers.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the point you asked earlier, the second thing that'll bring back risk is big failures. You know, you mentioned the 70s. The reason the 70s Hollywood innovated so much is all these big bloated spectacles that were playing it safe, big musical, probably the biggest of them was Hello the Dolly, which virtually bankrupted 20th century Fox at the time. All those movies started failing. All the things that they were doing, Hollywood Spectacle Musicals, Big Westerns, started failing. And they were forced to take risks.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you want to create an environment that makes people feel safe being creative. And you want to do the same thing with the people picking those things. You want to have bold people who both understand enough about the business, who learn the lessons from when they failed, but who also take risks.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And support them during failure. Because it's a really weird thing because you are basically trying to run a manufacturing process that is managing creativity. And creativity is very closely associated with failure. Very, very closely. You think about in lots of ways. One is it's the scariest thing on earth. Think about what it is to be an actor, you know, to put yourself out there and get judged by people and saying, I don't like it. I don't like her nose, or she's, you know, he's getting fat, or, you know, those are real, or look, he looks like an idiot with that choice. That's terrifying. Being a writer, you've been locked in a room for nine months. You bring your script down someone say, well, that sucks.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I ought to be also taking some. Budgets by definition, there's an inverse relationship between the size of a budget and risk-taking. And the creative community ought to understand that. To the creative community wants to take risk, make things a lower budgets. And by the way, I think, in my opinion, that's the really interesting question around AI. And then I think it's... Look, it's also the job of leadership, the job of leadership is to have really talented people that you support taking risks. You know, I believe the best thing you can do is find really talented young people, figure out the good ones.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a couple of things. First of all, you know, I think the danger thing is. To equate risk with recklessness. And there are a lot of people who think risk is reckless. Risk isn't reckless. You know, the wrong risk is certainly reckless, but your job is to figure out, your job is to ultimately make a series of bets all day long. And clearly, you know, you want to revitalize these things are nothing if not repositories of valuable libraries. There are two things. They're repositories of valuable libraries and lots of IP and they're a manufacturing system that is allowing you to make creative choices 15, 20 times a year. You can certainly take risk inside of that portfolio without being reckless. A, the first thing is to think about as a portfolio, which is I ought to be doing X number of these things that feel big and safe. I ought to be doing X number of things in the middle that are less risky.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have management that thinks long term. Because by definition, these franchises, certainly over the last 10 or 15 years, have been much safer. However, by definition, you're going to run out of them. And to the degree you are running one of these places, you should be thinking long term, which is I should be both maximizing my ability to monetize the existing IP that I own. And I ought to be creating new IP that's vital and vibrant, that will have the same kind of economic success over long term, and that you can't do it to the degree. All you're doing is just making sequels.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, innovation is a very, very challenging thing to manage. And managing content is essentially managing a form of innovation. They have very different kinds of elements involved in them, but it is managing innovation. And innovation and creativity are largely the same thing. There's some very different buttons and levers to push on both of them, but ultimately you are trying to get something new and exciting and fresh and original.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, on the one hand data is an extraordinary gift and an extraordinary tool doesn't necessarily lead to innovation. It leads to extraordinary knowledge about how your audience, how your users are currently behaving. But if you just say this is the way they're currently behaving, this is the way they're going to behave forever, you'll fail. Somebody else who does something brand new out of the blue will come up with something new and better.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, everybody, you know, it's very easy to come up and say Hollywood is old-fashioned. I touched the tech world. I don't know, you know, how many tech companies can you point to that have innovated repeatedly over a 20-25-year period? They are most of them built off of one extraordinary innovation. And then they're going to, you know, it's no accident that there are very few companies in the world that stay among the top 10 companies in the world for more than 20 years. Managing innovation is extraordinarily difficult and it's difficult in Hollywood and you know you reach the wrong lessons. I would also say that one of the challenges for tech is that”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you, um. The lesson is what I just said, which is go find the next YouTuber, go buy something off YouTube. It has no relevance. Your job every day is to find something great, exciting, new, innovative, etc. You know, look, I would say, and you can understand this, managing innovation is an extraordinarily complicated thing, equally complicated for people in the tech world.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I used to say, again, I've always said to the people who worked for me, if I pass on something that's good, that's your fault, not mine. And it's your fault for not convincing me. And you need to do whatever it takes to force me to pay attention, to convince me. And I used to say, you know, go burn down my car in the parking lot if that's what it takes. But you have to do whatever it takes to convince me that this is right because I'm by definition a two sat of touch, all those things. And you want to create that environment where you have aggressive, opinionated, passionate young people, and somehow you don't put up enough stupid barriers so that you're not capable of listening to them.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She said it's really cool to read this. And, you know, she has real credibility with me, and I'm interested in those opinions. And, you know, I think the key is to both have young people trust them and be interested in what they have to say. I think it's the job of young people to force you to pay attention.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're so isolated. people and I think you need to do two things which is You need to just force yourself, both force yourself and I guess instinctively be relentlessly curious. Just, you know, you've got to be looking at TikTok not as a study project, but just because you're interested. What's going on? What's this about? You got to be looking at YouTube. You just have to be curious and you got to be relentlessly curious. And then you have to surround yourself with as many young people as you can. And let me be really clear. Backrooms. Was not found by me at the company. It was found by a young executive named Corey Adelson, who brought it to me. And I said yes to it, but she deserves the cred”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your job, you're supposed to guess what they're going to be interested in two years in advance from now. And I say, if you were to design a job to isolate someone from the world's public, you would design the job of a studio head. Work behind gates, you generally live behind gates, you fly privately.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's plenty of them. Any number of moments where I'll miss any number of things. You know, it's not like I'm so wonderful or I'm somehow better or different than everybody else. I think that Know what I used to say When I was running Fox, and I think it's still true that ultimately those jobs as an executive and or producer is your job is to have some weird affinity for the zeitgeist of the world's public two years in advance.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things to put together with lots of nuances. And there's all sorts of reasons why they don't turn out. You're right to say people set out to make great things, but it's really hard to make great things.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's certainly not just Agem. You know, my very first job in Hollywood, I worked for a very well-known television producer who was an incredible micromanager. And probably 85% of what he did was really valuable and great. And 15% of what he did was really destructive. And I would watch that 15% ruin things. And it was a really valuable lesson for me because it made me realize these things are so fragile. It's so remarkably difficult to make something great. There are literally millions of decisions from, and you can have things with a great script in the wrong director or a great script in the right director, and there's no chemistry in the cast, or there's all sorts of reasons. You can have something that's not great, and all of a sudden the right piece of music transforms it. They are, you know, insanely complex.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Infrastructure of Hollywood is too old. These studios are, for the most part, run by people who are too old and going back forever. Irving Thalberg was in his 20s when he was doing this, but people were in their 30s and 40s at the peak of their careers. You know, I ran 20th century Fox in my early 40s, and I certainly didn't feel young at the time. I felt like But, you know, to the degree that, by the way, on all movies, the audience is still younger because those are the people who want to go out. To the degree you are separated from the audience by 20, 30, 40 plus years.”
2026-06-15 · On with Kara Swisher · Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms,’ Sequel Fatigue, and Hollywood Mergers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT