Hollywood Tech Evangelists are bullish on NFTs and Web3 Storytelling

• Amidst the FTX scandal and declining NFT sales, the Web3 chatter has quieted down in Hollywood.
• But proponents of NFTs and Web3 storytelling are banking on the technology’s entertainment potential.
• Executives at Fox and startup StoryCo said they are trying to attract consumers by using less crypto jargon.

Just a year ago, Matt Damon touted the benefits of crypto in a Super Bowl ad, and legacy entertainment companies including Warner Bros. and ViacomCBS (now Paramount) rolled out NFT collectibles commemorating everything from ‘The Matrix’ to ‘SpongeBob Squarepants’.”

Even Disney CEO Bob Iger had skin in the game with an investment in NFT maker Genies, one of the business moves he made after stepping down from Disney and before stepping back in November. Hollywood evangelists of Web3 – the decentralized, blockchain-based future of the web that includes crypto and NFTs – were out in full force.

Now, in the wake of the spectacular implosion of FTX, falling valuations of bitcoin and other alt-currencies, and declining NFT sales, that chatter is several clicks quieter.

Believers in Web3 — who say the underlying blockchain technology remains healthy and a powerful force for disruption — may now face a more uphill battle to convince both consumers and entertainment industry executives that the technology is worth investing in as they try to differentiate reeks of cryptocriminals from their own endeavours.

“People will need to understand the nuance of what actually happened [to FTX] to understand that this is not a bad blockchain thing,” said Justin Alanis, the founder of StoryCo, a blockchain-based storytelling platform. “It’s a bad, fraudulent crypto thing,” he continued, amid “the lack of regulation and the lack of oversight that happens in a free environment like we have in crypto right now.”

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been charged. Alanis said the industry is now going to “keep an eye on what kind of regulation is going to be put in place, and what kind of scrutiny is going to be put in place.”

Alanis and his brother JP – the latter once worked in TV development at Lionsgate – remain focused on building out the company StoryCo, described as a platform “where communities can come together to create, contribute to and ultimately co-own the next generation of history series.” (Executives from major Hollywood talent agencies WME and UTA talent are among their investors.)

For Melody Hildebrandt, Fox Corp’s chief information security officer and the president of the company’s Blockchain Creative Labs, it’s important to make the space more accessible to laypeople and shift away from Web3 jargon.

“It’s been a pretty wild year,” Hildebrandt said. “As we talk to executives, talk to consumers, I think we’ve refined even the way we talk about it.”

She has worked to distance the creative and storytelling potential of NFTs and other blockchain-based technologies from the cowboy representative of the digital currency world. “We wanted to abstract away some of the more speculative crypto-riding-that-wave kind of mentality,” she said, adding that such a mentality “was never really how we thought about our business.”

Fox and Blockchain Creative Labs need to “just meet the fans where they are, in terms of experiences they want and experiences that are new to them,” Hildebrandt said. That means adapting their messaging from “claim this NFT” to “unlocking the ultimate fan experience,” for one thing. The Alanis brothers have done the same with their new interactive storytelling project, “The Disco Ball,” offering a “StoryPass” to attendees without calling it an NFT.

“Rick and Morty” and “Community” co-creator Dan Harmon’s upcoming Fox animated series “Krapopolis” will be “curated exclusively on the blockchain,” according to the broadcast network, and has released a collection of NFTs ahead of its 2023 premiere. But instead of making fans go through a crash course in setting up a crypto wallet, people can sign up with an email address and pay for items with a credit card.

“We did a lot of R&D” in 2022, Hildebrandt said. “We worked on different chains, different wallet providers, different payment infrastructures. We really landed on the stack of technologies that we think are kind of the right sweet spot that allows a fan to emerge.”

“We try not to unnecessarily put them on a complex crypto journey,” she added.

Equally important to developing consumer entertainment in Web3 has been educating legacy TV and film studios and production companies about the technology.

“Even the game changers of the last decade — the Netflixes — they’ve all worked within the traditional media system in one way or another,” JP Alanis said. Hollywood agencies have served as effective interlocutors to move the industry forward, he added.

The past two years have been a “hotbed of experimentation” as the entertainment industry and the blockchain space have “got to know each other more directly than ever before,” UTA’s head of Web3, Lesley Silverman, told Insider via email.

Hollywood in 2022 was heavily using NFTs as digital collectibles to build fandoms for everything from Fox’s “The Masked Singer” to “Law & Order” producer Dick Wolf’s latest project. Justin Alanis believes NFTs are going to evolve into something “much, much, much bigger than we ever imagined” because they offer a “wonderful way to represent your cultural values ​​through art and also build utility into them. ”

Despite the headline turmoil swirling around crypto, many tech-savvy investors still have faith in blockchain’s potential. Many in traditional Hollywood do too. The Alanis brothers’ StoryCo, for example, raised $6 million in seed funding, and the “Disco Ball” project was developed by Kyle Killen, the original showrunner of “Halo” and creator of the “Awake” and “Mind” TV series .”

At CES in January, technologists from Lionsgate, Universal Pictures and elsewhere expressed optimism.

“I’m excited to move Web3, blockchain technologies past kind of the hype cycle that we’ve seen with digital collectibles and NFTs,” Greg Reed, Universal Pictures’ VP of technology partnerships, told Variety.

Such studios may have to do it sooner rather than later.

“I think now is the time for legacy institutions to double down on figuring out their strategy over what’s going to be a 10- to 20-year period,” Justin Alanis said. “And if they don’t, what’s going to happen is there’s going to be even more FOMO.”