What Jonathan Glickman Has Learned About Producing Franchises From James Bond and Rocky

When Jonathan Glickman led MGM’s Motion Picture Group, he had two franchises that endured and were the main drivers for the studio. The first, the “Rocky” franchise, he thought was on the ropes until director Ryan Coogler helped revitalize it with “Creed.” The second, James Bond, had just found a new face for Bond in Daniel Craig that gave the series a shot in the arm.

In both cases, Glickman argues that individuals had a clear, singular vision for each brand but more importantly had control over what they wanted to do with it and didn’t allow it to be run into the ground — a production lesson he took away from the experience.

“One of the things that was I know frustrating to some of the people on the finance side of the company was how strong the economics were for the producers and also how strong their creative controls were,” Glickman told TheWrap of working with producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson on the Bond series and Irwin Winkler on “Rocky.” “But those are the franchises that lasted because there are custodians there that are permanent custodians.”

During Glickman’s career as Spyglass Entertainment president beginning in 2002 and then as MGM’s film group president between 2011-2020, he oversaw the releases of Bond films “Skyfall” and “Spectre,” which together were just shy of $2 billion at the worldwide box office, and also continued to oversee last year’s hit “No Time to Die” after he exited. He, alongside Coogler, revived “Rocky” as “Creed,” which in 2015 grossed $173.5 million. He’s now producing “Creed III,” which is the directorial debut of star Michael B. Jordan.

As Glickman now launches his new independent production venture Panoramic, he’s looking at figures like Broccoli and Winkler as the model for the type of producer he wants to be. In a day and age when ownership of IP and control over the type of project you want to make is as important as ever for a producer, the old-fashioned level of rights wielded by Broccoli is exactly what he feels is necessary to make commercial properties and franchises that last.

“Even though on a deal-for-deal basis it could be frustrating for some, there’s a Bond movie whenever Barbara Broccoli wants to make a Bond movie. You can’t go out there and say we’re going to have five TV shows, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do a video game. It’s completely up to her and Michael Wilson in terms of how they continue to produce whatever content they want to out of Bond,” Glickman said. “They’re also both pretty great producers on both sides, so that’s part of what makes them so successful, but they’re also so successful because they have the control and they’re able to exercise how smart they are.”

Glickman’s Panoramic, which launched last week with a stable of top-shelf new investors including Gary Barber, Spyglass Media Group, Eagle Pictures, Lantern Entertainment, Pinky Promise, and United Talent Agency (UTA) to fund film, TV, podcasts and digital, is for him all about that degree of control and making sure that the talent he works with each have “skin in the game.”

For Glickman, that means packaging and developing a story to its fullest and being able to make it at his pace and on his terms. Time and again he’s heard from studio execs who say, “God I really love this, but we don’t have the appetite to develop.” But instead of waiting for them to be interested, he wants Panoramic to be in the driver’s seat.

“I want to pay to develop that take and package that film, and I want to get the actors involved and make these people my partners so when we go to town, it isn’t a flier for them, it isn’t a flier for us,” he said. “And they may want to make the movie, they may not want to make the movie, but they will make it with the package we present it to them, the budget we presented to them and the timeline we want to make it, so we have some control in the decision-making as to how this is getting made.”

For example, Glickman has a project in development — which he declined to name — that has a hook timely enough that rather than wait for a TV series to be developed, he can release it as a podcast through a deal he has with iHeartMedia that also allows him to retain the project’s underlying rights. He’s been able to get the story to market and plant his flag but control the IP to still develop it at his pace rather than be at the whim of a long tail process at a studio.

“By taking that outside of the studio development process and packaging process, what it does is allows us to do it internally and take it to the moment when we are ready to make the film, TV, podcast, whatever we choose for it to be,” he said. “The key thing for a producer right now or a production company right now, forget just a producer for even the major studios, is to have as much flexibility as you possibly can have, and how the story you’re putting together is getting to the audience.”

In another instance, Glickman said he had a separate music-themed project he could have set up as a TV show, but that deal would have handed that network the music rights. It’s now being developed as a podcast to which Panoramic controls not just the underlying rights but 12 songs created for the project that he can leverage when shopping it to another network.

All that said, Glickman realizes that it’s increasingly a luxury to have a say in terms of how your story is getting released and that deals like those for the Broccolis are becoming fewer and farther between.

“You don’t have control over whether it’s going to be streaming or whether it’s going to be theatrical, and outside of Christopher Nolan, there’s very few people who have that sort of control. There are some, but it’s not me,” he said. “The more you have it together, the more you have the package, the more you have the talent attached, the more leverage you have to make the better deal for yourself and to get some ownership.”

But it’s the spirit of those deals and that they’ve been involved since the beginning that have made both Bond and “Rocky” so successful for so long. And as the head of a studio at MGM, Glickman’s been on the other side of it when he’s felt the financial pressure to wring as much juice out of a hit franchise as possible. And while he didn’t single out any modern film franchises, he points to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” which was on “five days a week, and then six months later it stopped being a hit.”

“There’s an instinct, because I was on that side,” he explained. “I was involved in making films from franchises where the control wasn’t as strong, and you have such pressure on you financially, and IP travels so well, especially internationally, your instinct is what can we do to make money off of it? What can we do to continue to make money off this franchise? And where are we not exploiting it? And there isn’t as much of a macro, 50,000-mile high view of what will this do in the long run for the franchise?”

Glickman is currently in production on “Creed III,” as well as the Netflix series “Wednesday,” based on “The Addams Family” character. But just as he found success with original properties like “Rush Hour,” “The Vow” and “27 Dresses” earlier in his career, Panoramic still hopes to find hits with original properties and acknowledges not everything has to have a sequel or a franchise.

But the company’s DNA and mission of developing commercial stories and having a stake in the decision-making remains the same.

“We want to make things that are going to get a wide audience, and I don’t make any sort of apologies for it in this business,” Glickman said. “I certainly want to make high quality stories, but whatever we do has to break through.”