Spielberg's new project cost $2bn for mini-films that last ten minutes
The future of storytelling – or short-changing cinema fans? Steven Spielberg’s epic new project cost $2billion… for mini-movies that only last ten minutes
- Quibi is a subscription streaming service for a new way of telling stories
- It delivers dramas, documentaries and game shows straight to smartphones
- Hollywood’s most distinguished film-makers have given it their blessing
- Steven Spielberg has signed up with the service to make a horror series
Almost 70 years after the expression ‘fast food’ was coined, the entertainment industry finally has its own version.
Its backers have already invested a fortune, almost $2 billion, in the idea that by catering to ever-shortening attention spans, they have secured their future on screen (even if it’s very little screens).
Called Quibi, a contraction of ‘Quick Bites’, the new subscription streaming service, unleashes a whole new way of telling stories — delivering dramas, documentaries, cookery or game shows, lasting ten minutes or less, to smartphones.
Some of Hollywood’s most distinguished film-makers — the very people you might expect to resist a new, bite-sized way of telling stories — have given it their blessing.
How to use Quibi
Quibi is a smartphone app, which you can download on your mobile from Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store.
The company is offering a 90-day free trial, after which subscription will cost £7.99 per month — roughly the same as Netflix.
All content is designed to be watched on a phone screen.
Foremost among them is Steven Spielberg, who has signed up with Quibi to make a horror series.
As with all Quibi’s output, Spielberg’s drama is intended to be downloaded via an app onto the diminutive screen of a smartphone by people who don’t have the time or the staying power to commit to anything longer.
Spielberg’s series is titled After Dark. Ingeniously, it will download only after sunset, depending on the location of the phone.
There is plenty of ingenuity behind Quibi, which launched last month, not least in the way it is pouncing on significant shifts in the way we live our lives.
Fifty years ago, families went to the cinema together. Watching television, too, was a communal experience, binding not just individual households but the entire nation.
In schools, factories and offices, at bus-stops, street corners and launderettes, we talked about what we’d all seen the night before.
Steven Spielberg (above) has signed up with Quibi to make a horror series
That doesn’t happen any more. Now, we choose for ourselves when, where and how we spend our screen time.
Even in our state of lockdown, families are fragmented in the way they make their entertainment choices, either gazing at phones or tablets or laptops in different rooms or, perhaps even more dispiritingly, in the same room.
This is the cultural convulsion which Quibi seeks to own, offering individualised entertainment on the ultimate handy contraption — a phone.
Rival streaming platforms to Quibi include the video-sharing app TikTok, which allows users to post their own short videos and has boomed in popularity since the lockdown.
But Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg says that comparing the two is ‘like comparing apples to submarines’.
Streaming websites Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu are competitors, too, but in catering specifically for the contracting modern-day attention span, Quibi provides a service they don’t.
Another recent entry in this increasingly crowded field of video on-demand streaming is Disney+, but with 10 million sign-ups in its first 24 hours, it hardly needs to worry about Quibi.
Moreover, with its bite-sized format it is tailor-made for a society which prefers not to dwell on anything too long, before moving on to the next.
We used to joke about people who couldn’t focus, saying they had the attention span of a goldfish.
Now, the world’s goldfish could make the same crack about human-beings. Their average attention span is nine seconds. Ours, believe it or not, is barely eight.
Typically, we pick up our phones more than 1,500 times a week, more often than not to look at something we last looked at just moments before. All these changes are grist to Quibi’s mill.
The company’s founder is Jeffrey Katzenberg, the 69-year-old mogul who ran Walt Disney Studios and then DreamWorks Animation.
Like so many cinematic innovations, Quibi began with a ‘light-bulb moment’. In this instance, the light above his head flashed while he was reading Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code.
The book’s colossal global success, he reasoned, had a lot to do with its structure: more than 100 chapters, averaging just five pages each, far fewer than usual chapters of between 20 and 40 pages.
Perhaps, Katzenberg thought, he could apply the same idea to visual entertainment, exploiting a diminishing appetite for going to the cinema to see feature-length movies.
Cinema-going is not what it used to be. Here in the UK, in the past decade, cinema admissions among 15 to 24-year-olds have fallen by more than 20 per cent.
Among other age groups the number has stayed fairly static, but there is a similar downward trajectory among young people in the States.
Why? Partly because ticket prices have become too expensive; not so long ago you could treat an entire family to a night at the cinema for what it now costs to buy a single ticket.
But also because more and more people are getting all the entertainment they need from their phones.
Katzenberg wanted to get in on the act, and in March last year, with Quibi well into development, he was encouraged by another hard statistic: his target consumers of mostly younger people watched an average of 70 minutes per day of ‘short-form video’ — mainly through social media platforms and video applications such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vimeo and TikTok.
The company’s founder is Jeffrey Katzenberg (pictured above). The 69-year-old mogul ran Walt Disney Studios and then DreamWorks Animation
That growing figure shows no sign of slowing — and Katzenberg said he wanted his fledgling company to grab, with original programming, a minimum of 20 of those 70 minutes.
Well, Quibi launched last month and the jury is still out. Of course, there was no welcome party and limited razzmatazz in the media. Katzenberg hardly expected a pandemic-enforced lockdown as the backdrop to his launch, which at a stroke removes busy commuters from the equation.
They, millions of them, devouring Quibi’s content on buses and trains, were very much part of his light-bulb moment.
Yet even without them, Quibi reported 1.7 million downloads in its first week of business, taking advantage of a 90-day free trial. After that, it will cost £7.99 per month.
In its first year, Quibi has guaranteed more than 175 original shows, with production costs of over $1 billion, and A-list talent such as Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Guillermo del Toro, Idris Elba, James Corden, Will Smith, Cara Delevingne, Jennifer Lopez and Laura Dern all committed to projects.
These won’t just be dramas. Quibi will also stream documentaries, reality shows, as well as news, comedy, lifestyle, sport and music programmes. Some will be daily, others weekly.
So is it any good? Is Quibi the entertainment of the future for busy people with limited attention spans but who like to binge?
As the Mail’s film critic, I decided to put it to the test…
50 STATES OF FRIGHT
First of 14
Rating: 
An anthology of scary stories apparently inspired by urban myths from all over the U.S.
The opener comes from Michigan and is the first of a trilogy of episodes called The Golden Arm, in which a lumberjack asks his high-maintenance wife, played by Rachel Brosnahan (from the American version of House Of Cards), to help him fell a huge tree.
Unfortunately, it topples in the wrong direction, trapping her right arm. She’s in agony and there’s blood everywhere.
The only way of saving her life is for him to grab an axe and, well, you know what.
Evidently this will turn into a horror story, though there’s nothing supernatural about the opening episode — it’s just very messy. It’s slickly done, though, and made me want to see more.
The director is Sam Raimi, who made three Spider-Man films for Marvel. Quibi has attracted some proper filmmaking talent.
A lumberjack asks his high-maintenance wife, played by Rachel Brosnahan (from the American version of House Of Cards and pictured above), to help him fell a huge tree
THANKS A MILLION
First of ten
Rating: 
An almost heroically silly and contrived variation on the chain letter, as Jennifer Lopez in a real-life documentary finds ten celebrities each to give $100,000 to a person who has made some kind of difference to their lives.
The proviso is that every lucky recipient must then give half of that money to someone who has in turn helped them, and so on, creating what J-Lo calls ‘a chain of gratitude and kindness’.
So each seven-minute episode starts with the celebrity bestowing their munificence in the form of wads of dollars.
It’s a magnificent slab of emotional kitsch, and J-Lo kicks it all off by rewarding a Hispanic girl with cerebral palsy and her mum, who came backstage at one of her shows and inspired her with their ‘strength’.
Worth seeing, if only to decide whether you approve. And also to watch for the tiny winces of distress as people are given $100,000, then promptly told they have to part with half of it.
J-Lo kicks it all off by rewarding a Hispanic girl with cerebral palsy and her mum, who came backstage at one of her shows and inspired her with their ‘strength’
DUMMY
First of ten
Rating:
Billed on the Quibi website as a ‘raunchy’ and ‘mature’ comedy, this stars Anna Kendrick as Cody, whose boyfriend Dan (Donal Logue) is a much older Emmy-winning screenwriter.
The pair have a lively sex life, but when she finds a suspicious lone sequin on his bed, he confesses he has a private fetish involving a life-size doll.
Cody takes this news in her stride — ‘Is she hotter than me?’ — but when Dan’s snoring wakes her in the night she looks for the doll and finds her in a cupboard.
The doll is definitely a ‘her’ rather than an ‘it’ because she can talk. Her name is Barbara. And, like Cody, she’s funny.
In due course, the two will become friends. ‘I got news for you, babe,’ says Barbara, ‘we’re all sex dolls until we topple the patriarchy’.
The doll is definitely a ‘her’ rather than an ‘it’ because she can talk. Her name is Barbara. And, like Cody, she’s funny
THE STRANGER
First episode of 13
Rating: 
A good Quibi drama must discard certain cinematic conventions. There is no time for scene-setting and The Stranger abides by those new rules.
In the first episode, Uber driver Clare (Maika Monroe) is on her way to pick up a fare. We learn that she’s a Kansas girl, an aspiring writer new to LA.
In the background, The Mamas & The Papas are singing California Dreamin’, and she appears to have landed her own California dream when the friendly passenger (Dane DeHaan) she collects from a mansion in the Hollywood Hills asks if she’d like to have dinner with him.
No sooner has she agreed than he tells her that it wasn’t his mansion, that he’s just murdered the family who lived there, and that she will suffer the same fate unless she can entertain him with a really great story. Yikes!
In the first episode, Uber driver Clare (Maika Monroe) is on her way to pick up a fare. We learn that she’s a Kansas girl, an aspiring writer new to LA
MOST DANGEROUS GAME
First of 13
Rating:
All these bite-sized dramas have to cram a lot of story into ten minutes or less, then end on a cliffhanger.
Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz (Bond baddie Blofeld in Spectre) star in this thriller about a cash-strapped athlete with a terminal illness who is desperate to provide for his pregnant wife and their soon-to-be-born son after his death.
This leads Dodge (Hemsworth) to ask a shady but suave businessman (Waltz) for a loan.
The Waltz character refuses, but says that if the aptly-named Dodge will agree to be the target in a life-or-death hunting game for his rich clients, all his financial needs will be met.
A recent film, The Hunt, had a similar narrative. But that wasn’t very good. This looks rather better.
Liam Hemsworth (above) and Christoph Waltz (Bond baddie Blofeld in Spectre) star in this thriller about a cash-strapped athlete with a terminal illness
FLIPPED
First of 11
Rating: 
On the basis of the opening episode, this might be the pick of Quibi’s original comedies.
It begins with a misanthropic husband and wife both losing their jobs on the same day.
Cricket (Kaitlin Olson) is fired by her boss at a DIY store for being rude, while her drama teacher husband Jann (Will Forte) is let go for insisting that the next school musical should be his own creation about a terrible factory fire instead of Guys And Dolls.
Licking their wounds, they see a home-improvement cable channel is looking for hosts. That becomes their goal, but in future episodes they end up entangled with gangsters. Also featuring Andy Garcia and Eva Longoria, Flipped is a proper hoot.
Flipped begins with with a misanthropic husband and wife both losing their jobs on the same day
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