UK’s Film Distributors’ Association (FDA) President, David Puttnam's Annual Keynote Address

LORD PUTTNAM OF QUEENSGATE CBE

FDA KEYNOTE SPEECH – AT BAFTA, LONDON

10.00am WEDNESDAY 18 APRIL 2018

As Delivered

Good morning, everyone.

It’s a genuine pleasure to see so many of you here this morning, especially as Mark said, it’s exactly ten years since I became President of Film Distributors’ Association, a role I’m delighted to hold.

In that first year, 2008, the UK’s highest grossing release was Mamma Mia!

With a UK box-office haul of ￡68 million it remains one of our all-time top ten grossing pictures.

Back then, it helped reconnect the industry with a whole generation of female cinemagoers. 

It’s follow-up, Here We Go Again, is unleashed on audiences this summer – more of which a little later.

The current ‘superhero’ boom can be traced back to 2008, when Robert Downey Jr. first took off as Iron Man. 

He’s back with us next week in Marvel’s latest Avengers epic.

The Academy Award for Best Film in 2008 went to Danny Boyle’s 

Slumdog Millionaire; while In Bruges, the debut feature of Martin McDonagh, made waves of its own.

Later today, a new book will be published, tracing the transformation of the British film industry over, not just one decade, but the last three. 

It’s the story of our resurgence since its lowest ebb in the mid-1980s.

It’s author, Geoffrey Macnab, asked me to contribute a foreword, as I had two years ago for his previous work, Delivering Dreams.

I’ve seen an advance copy of the new book, entitled Stairways to Heaven: Rebuilding the British film industry, and despite the inadequacies of the foreword I thoroughly commend it to you.

It’s a terrific study of a period of transformation in the UK industry.

So, in what’s become a kind of annual address for FDA, it seemed logical this morning to opt for ‘transformation’ as an over-arching theme.

As we all know, an ever more complex set of challenges has gripped the international media landscape, as a result of which things are changing at a pace that is simply unprecedented.

In fairness the film business is one sector that’s never stood still – change per se is, to us, hardly a recent phenomenon.

But the impacts of digital technology on the delivery and consumption of media, and the accelerating speed of change, are so profound that, in many respects, our business has altered out of all recognition - even during my time as FDA President.

So just for a moment, let’s revisit 2008.

As most of you will recall, it was the year in which the global economy changed forever. 

In fact, it’s fair to say that the after-tremors of that year’s financial earthquake are still with us today.

The so-called ‘credit crunch’ arose when a hike in interest rates caused many thousands of US homeowners to default on their mortgages. 

In the ensuing turmoil, governments had to buy controlling shares in banks and insurance companies, just to prop up their financial systems.

Despite the bail-out, Bank shares – and the FTSE as a whole – still plummeted. 

In fact 2008 was the FTSE 100’s worst-ever year – hundreds of billions were wiped off the value of British companies, pensions and house prices.

Just recounting it today, it seems rather like fiction – yet it was all too real; and a chilling reminder of the toxic effects of fear and uncertainty.

Nowhere has the complexity of ‘credit default swops’ been better explained than in this scene from one of my favourite movies of recent years - ‘The Big Short’

[3 minute clip from ‘The Big Short’]

But even in the midst of what was an economic maelstrom, new capital was secured. 

The DCI specifications for digital cinema standards had just been published, and cinema operators, or their intermediaries, successfully raised finance to procure DCI-compliant digital projectors and servers. 

The release of James Cameron’s phenomenon, Avatar, in 2009 accelerated those installations.

Today, a decade on, UK film distributors continue to pay off the third-party loans for equipment and related fees.

So let me take a moment to make a few essential points about the wider role of film distributors – not just from observations over the last decade, but as a producer spanning five decades, who worked with independent and studio-backed distributors around the world.

The ‘enabling’ contribution that distribution makes to the film industry’s eco-system is unique – in fact it’s pivotal.

Distributors are required to take huge risks – calculated, but still huge – in funding the production of films on whose commercial potential they’ve been required to make a bet at what’s often a very early stage. 

But their commitment extends much further than that – they’re required to also fund the release of the film, with campaigns that not only motivate audiences, but also help to drive employment in other areas of our creative industries.

Distributors hire trailer cutters, poster designers, and create innovative digital advertising; they also pay for and organize the world-class premieres that are regularly staged around London.

And all of this commitment is made, often running into millions of pounds, without any guarantee of a commercial return. 

Distribution is not a business for the faint-hearted, which is why, to my mind, every decision-making body across the industry that includes a distributor or two, such as Film London, becomes that much more effective as a result.

The respect I’ve long held for the business skills, the experience, and the passion that drives the film distribution engine - continues to be boundless.

Meanwhile, the benefits of digital cinema have been eagerly enjoyed by the cinema operators.

They’ve been able to hire far fewer technical staff, and they can program a lot more flexibly, as the increasing success of ‘event cinema’ serves to demonstrate.

In the coming months, it’s reasonable to expect that many distributors’ fee payments will at last terminate – hopefully without disruption to release and booking-patterns - provided the various dates of termination aren’t spread too far apart.

I’ve recently received a well-informed, but totally independent estimate of the overall sum paid - by UK film distributors in digital cinema fees - during that ten year period.

It’s safe to assume that the total figure is rapidly approaching a quarter of a billion pounds. 

That’s quite a sobering amount, certainly if you’re a distributor seeking a bit of mainstream flexibility to build awareness of a niche release.”

Despite all these pressures, many of which I’ve long felt to be unfair, cinema-going has remained comparatively buoyant. 

Box-office receipts, which hit the billion-pound mark for the first time in 2009, have never looked back. 

And that top-line has remained robust, despite the seismic digital transformation unfolding across the wider world of media and entertainment.

In 2008, the BBC iPlayer was barely a year old. 

But it was already accounting for up to 5% of all internet traffic in the UK - regularly serving a million requests a day.

We all should have copped-on to what a watershed moment that was for on-demand media viewing – when from the very outset it took the form of long-form episodes, not just short videos.

In 2017, programme requests to the iPlayer had soared to 3.3 billion – or 63 million a week – on that one platform alone.

The stratospheric rise in the popularity of streaming video, on the iPlayer, YouTube and so many other channels, was enabled by the roll-out of broadband.

Once you’re connected it’s easy to forget that the way we live, and communicate, has been revolutionised by broadband internet.

Vast libraries of films and TV shows are now available at the tap of an app. 

95% of UK homes and businesses now have access to super-fast broadband – offering speeds of up to 24 Megabytes per second or faster.

Even in rural Ireland I now have almost 1,000 megs!

The internet is, of course, the defining technology of our age – and practically everything I have to say today reflects its influence.

In government policy terms, fast connectivity is viewed as a modern utility – and, by 2020, will have become a legal right for everyone.

Data has been branded the “oil of the digital era”. But to my mind, even that analogy doesn’t do it justice. 

Oil is a finite natural resource, whereas data grows perpetually and exponentially as every connected activity leaves some form of digital trace. 

In the age of algorithms, traditional figures of authority no longer enjoy the same respect – although as I’ve continually argued, much of that reputational damage has been self-inflicted.

Different generations now ascribe differing levels of trust to various sources of information. 

Navigating people quickly towards content, and building positive ‘word of mouth’ among peer groups, is a fast-evolving, yet utterly essential, business skill.

Film distributors have always understood this – it’s part of their job.

And in today’s super-abundant digital era, the skills needed to ‘cut through’ and connect content with audiences - on a continuing and sustainable basis - have never been more essential, certainly if the industry is to maintain its place at the heart of the creative industries.

From the 25th of next month, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, will apply in the UK as well as right across the EU. 

It will give individual citizens more control over how their personal data is used, and introduce much tougher enforcement measures, with a view to building trust in the growing digital economy. 

And judging by everything we read this business of ‘trust building isn’t happening a moment too soon.

The GDPR will affect how you manage any of the data you harvest, including that of your own employees, so for one thing, I’d urge all of you to ensure that your employment contracts are fully compliant. 

If you haven’t already, please get this done.

I also believe that, when evaluating the ‘public interest’ aspects of any merger or take-over, the relevant authorities should - alongside other criteria - take far greater account of a companies’ ‘data assets’.

The US internet titans – the so-called FAANG group – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google – have a combined worth of $2.8 trillion. 

Even after this month’s drop in the value of Tech stocks, this still amounts to about 10% of the entire US stock market!

Undoubtedly, while they’ve prospered, they’ve improved our ‘connected’ lives – through their search engines, newsfeeds and same-day deliveries.

But – as has become all too apparent, data can be misused to a point at which it begins to threaten Democracy itself. 

I sincerely welcome last month’s declaration by the DCMS Secretary of State, Matt Hancock, that “the Wild West for tech companies is over”. 

The truth is, tighter regulation and tax rules are embarrassingly overdue.

For too long these global giants have described themselves as purely tech companies, when they are of course mega-media brands, powered by consumer preferences and advertising. 

Facebook and Google’s combined share of the digital advertising market is a whopping 60%. 

They employ legions of advertising sales staff, busy developing their own direct relationships with people and businesses around the world. 

One result of these ‘over the top’ customer relationships is that the sheer range, depth and originality of TV content on offer has become extraordinary.

Today, on Netflix UK, you can find 3,500 movies, and 1,300 TV shows. 

And the FAANG brands are commissioning ever more original programming of their own. 

This year, Netflix alone will invest over $8 billion in content; and if that sounds a lot consider that in just the first quarter of this year they added 7.5 million subscribers – 5.5 of them in what’s termed ‘international’.

In fact they now reach a total 125 million subscribers. 

And we shouldn’t under-estimate Facebook’s ability to engage mass audiences in the new formats of so-called ‘social entertainment’ which it’s currently developing. 

For this reason, as Mark Zuckerberg admitted in his testimony to Congress just last week, his company has to be regarded as, at least in part, a publisher, not merely a platform.

But, as media platforms, they have to accept responsibility for what they publish, just as, say, newspapers have always assumed differing levels of legal responsibility for their content – whether written by journalists or readers.

The development of cinema and technology have always been intertwined – look at the investments film companies have made over the years in sound, colour, digital animation, visual effects, DCI standards and more.

A DCMS report on Digital Culture, published last month, describes the UK’s cultural and technology sectors as “the ultimate power couple”. 

It rightly focuses on the how synergies between the two sectors could drive even more audience engagement across very many fields.

Digital technologies, including Video on Demand, now offer a form of what we used to call ‘instant gratification’. 

If your movie doesn’t load or play properly, you probably have less than five seconds before your viewer, that’s to say your potential customer, taps elsewhere.

For a generation born with online interactivity as the norm, a cinema screen stands out not just for its size, but also because it’s the only screen they come across which, if they try to touch or swipe it, nothing happens!

Maybe there’s not all that much new about this – Hollywood folklore had it that American audiences would always be resistant to sub-titled movies because they’re taught at school to read with their fingers!

More seriously, through digital technology, the voices and choices of consumers have been empowered as never before.

And this doesn’t simply affect their use of media, it fundamentally and irrevocably shifts perceptions and attitudes.

I’m going to risk sounding like a broken record as far as ‘release windows’ are concerned, because this is one issue where - quite exceptionally - precious little has changed in the last decade.

But let me, for the record - broken or otherwise - suggest that the public will ultimately have the last word. 

Imagine a business, any business, having launched a product that may have cost hundreds of millions to produce, promote and distribute, exposes it to the marketplace for, say, six weeks, before withdrawing it from any form of legal consumption for a couple of months or more - before being allowed to cost-effectively reissue it. 

That is manifestly not a business that’s maximising the interests of its customers or its shareholders. 

Yet that’s a precise parallel of what the UK’s theatrical window arrangements do to distributers.

Independent films, in particular, can only lose out as a result of this hopeless lack of commercial flexibility. 

This issue ought to be a source of burning embarrassment to the entire industry.

But the prodigious supply - maybe over-supply - of new films, week in week out, helps to disguise it. 

Cinema operators tell me they need a protracted window of exclusivity, affecting all mainstream releases, to protect their investment in real estate, otherwise cinema visits would fall. 

But I’ve still seen little or no evidence of that being the case.

A study by Saffery Champness for the FDA last year found no causal relationship between the shortening of the theatrical window and box office revenues. 

Films with shorter windows can earn just as much as films with longer windows. 

Not all that surprising, given that most films earn 90% or more of their revenues within the first 42 days of their release.

And when even the French announce a review of their outmoded practices on windows, as they recently have, then you know we’ve fallen seriously behind the curve!

As it happens, UK cinemas have been only too happy to screen TV programmes day & date with their terrestrial broadcasts.

And if the experience they deliver is as consistently superb as we know it can be, then their protectionist fears are surely unfounded.

Here I’d like to take a moment to salute those cinemas which booked Monster Family last month, reportedly the UK’s widest-ever day & date release, opening in a reported 137 sites.

They may of course have been swayed by Sky’s massive investment in promoting its own production - cannily distributed by the theatrical team at Altitude.

I’m also looking forward to the report of the BFI’s Independent Film Commission, chaired by Zygi Kamasa; in the hope that its recommendations for supporting the hard-pressed independent sector are energetically pursued.

There are any number of reasons why, from all the many ‘going out’ options available to them, people continue to choose a trip to the cinema.

In each case, the experience, the service and the ‘value’ they receive can be the key to them returning. 

And on that matter of value – no one can have failed to notice the plethora of cinema ticket discount offers that decorate our media pages and supermarket shelves. 

This is, of course, a retail matter – cinema operators rightly compete on price, as in every other sector.

But few other sectors have a prevailing revenue-sharing business model in which a retailer can run discounts that have an immediate impact on its suppliers, and without any prior discussion at all.

This frankly seems pretty crazy.

Now obviously I’m not party to individual commercial dealings, and 

the point I’m trying to make is a generic one, it’s about the quality and sustainability of the UK marketplace. 

I’d simply encourage the whole industry to seriously think about the benefits of an appropriate, bilateral examination of sustainable new business models - models that possibly venture well beyond the world of long-standing concepts of revenue sharing, and focus instead on ‘revenue optimisation*’!

My reason for suggesting this is that business practices that restrict consumers’ legal choices, and today’s digital value chains, are ultimately going to fail.

Writing in the FDA Yearbook for the first time, a decade ago, I made what must have appeared a very broad observation:

“Choice-empowered audiences must not be allowed to become indifferent: the challenge for ‘brand cinema’ is to retain their affection, their trust and their respect.”

Today, I entirely stand by what I said.

The 2018 edition of the FDA Yearbook was published a few weeks ago, and if you don’t yet have your free copy, I hope you’ll pick one up before you leave this morning. 

Once again it serves as a pretty comprehensive record of what the UK film audience is actually responding to.

Each year I try to pick out for honorable mention a few people or organizations.

This year I’d like to start with our National Film and Television School.

So many releases feature the work of crews who’ve graduated from the NFTS – Darkest Hour, Blade Runner 2049, Paddington 2, Loving Vincent, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, Star Wars: The Last Jedi – that’s just a handful of recent examples.

Last year, I was incredibly honored to be asked to become President of the NFTS, succeeding my greatly missed friend, Richard Attenborough. 

Two months ago, the NFTS were awarded a BAFTA for its ‘Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema’ – for helping generations of young filmmakers to fulfill their potential. 

Which allows me to feel ‘doubly-proud’ that, for well over a quarter-century, FDA has sponsored the NFTS on behalf of film distributors. 

That level of commitment is pretty unique, and cumulatively that contribution now runs well into seven figures. 

Naturally, wearing two separate ‘Presidential hats’, I’m especially thrilled that the distributors’ commitment to the School continues into 2018.

So this morning, on what’s a fairly special occasion, to receive the first tranche of this year’s FDA sponsorship, I’d like to invite the Chief Executive of the NFTS, Dr Jon Wardle, to come up to the stage, but before I do here is a short reminder of what the School achieves on behalf of the industry.

(2 minute promo clip of the NFTS)

Pretty amazing - congratulations Jon.

Over the last decade, skills-development has been one of FDA’s core work-streams on behalf of distributors. 

This programme ranges from foundation level to future leaders, and I sincerely hope that Creative Skillset’s publicly-funded support will continue, in an adequately resourced, properly inclusive manner, to embrace all branches of the industry. 

In recent years I’ve presented what’s billed as a ‘masterclass’ to successive, and incredibly diverse cohorts of FDA interns, all of whom have been placed on traineeships across the sector. 

They’ve been pretty impressive groups – some, I know, are here this morning – and I’m sure we’d all wish them every scrap of luck for their on-going careers.

Let me now turn from one defining issue of our time – extending equality of opportunity – to another:

Britain’s place in Europe and the wider world.

Barely eleven months from now we’re due to enter some form of transition period, prior to our withdrawal from Europe.

As many of you will know, I profoundly regret the outcome of the 2016 referendum and where it’s taken us.

But like everyone else, I want only the best possible outcome from this piece of self-imposed lunacy – the negotiation of which will surely go right down to the wire.

My question this morning is – what sort of country do we want to emerge the other side? 

What will Britain seek to represent in the world of today and tomorrow?

The referendum result showed the UK as a whole was split on the ‘in’ or ‘out’ question – 48 percent to 52.

In fact only 37% of the electorate voted for the momentous outcome.

To my mind, Brexit, and a whole set of consequential economic woes, are likely to keep this country divided for many years to come. 

Last month, the Prime Minister acknowledged in a speech that, post-Brexit, the country must be ‘brought back together again’. 

She described the kind of country she wished for as:

“Modern, open, outward-looking, confident and tolerant – a nation of pioneers, innovators, explorers and creators, a country that meets its obligations to others.”

So far, perhaps, so good. 

But trying to define ‘Britishness’, or for that matter any other nationality, is rather like trying to paint the wind – 

not least because, of course, they’re constantly evolving.

To those characteristics mentioned by the Prime Minister, I’d add our sense of humour, and our core instinct for fair play, freedom and a visibly plural democracy.

Anyone from our industry thinking about ‘Britishness’ will quite quickly alight on the body of films we’ve produced, from the Ealing and ‘Carry On’ comedies, to the escapades of Messrs Bond and Potter – iconic characters, instantly recognisable around the world.

A couple of months ago, at the grand old age of 97, the producer/director Lewis Gilbert passed away. 

Across the second half of the 20th century, Lewis successfully defined ‘Britishness’ on screen, from Reach for the Sky, to Alfie, to three Bond spectaculars, to Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine and many more.

It’s a pretty enduring legacy – stories of bravery and heroism, often about ordinary people, told with enormous humour and panache. 

Lewis Gilbert’s eclectic body of work remains about as British as it gets, and he was a lovely man to boot.

As was another quiet, but enormously influential figure, 

Barry Norman, whose Memorial service was held here in London just last week.

Both men were admirers of the documentary filmmaker, 

Humphrey Jennings, who was himself greatly preoccupied with the issue of national identity.

His wartime work, which could be defined as ‘propagandist’, deliberately offered an inclusive vision, focusing on a sense of shared purpose, unity; his films were full of symbols that connected people, such as phone boxes, and Post Office vans.

Here is a short sequence from a Channel Four documentary entitled ‘The Man Who Listened to Britain’ which will, I hope, offer some sense of what I mean.

[Three minute clip from ‘The Man who Listened to Britain’]

It’s worth mentioning that all of Humphrey Jennings films are available on the BFIPlayer

A few weeks ago, as the European Withdrawal Bill made its way through parliament, I put down an amendment in the House of Lords in the hope of provoking a discussion on the impact of withdrawal on the UK’s creative industries. 

To my mind, our collective ‘asks’, in what is an extremely complex process, are broadly four-fold:

One. A new immigration system that allows the creative industries to go on attracting the best talent in Europe and beyond to come and work in London and elsewhere in the UK.

Two. An agreement that enables our future trading arrangements to be as frictionless as possible. 

This should include reciprocal market access for the distribution of UK and EU member states’ film and TV productions. It must be made as easy as possible for UK businesses to work with partners in the EU, and it’s imperative that the existing flexibility to license content on a territorial basis is preserved.

Three. That the UK continues to be recognised as one of the best countries in the world in which to protect and enforce intellectual property rights. 

It’s essential that a robust IP regime enables creators to turn their ideas into revenues.

Four. Where possible, continued access to new iterations of some specific EU programmes, such as Erasmus Plus for student transfers, and Creative Europe which, has for many years helped to support qualifying film companies and their audiences.

As things stand today, the door seems open to the UK having at least some elements of continued access, which would, I believe, benefit the remaining EU-27 - as well as ourselves.

I welcome the recent publication of the government’s ‘sector deal’ for the creative industries, which shows us at least being taken seriously, and our needs properly considered as Brexit approaches.

Clearly, the UK does have a ‘productivity’ challenge – we lag well behind countries such as France, Germany and the US. 

We need to draw on the very brightest and best – whatever their background – if we are to really address this problem.

I was especially pleased to learn that the government will make up to ￡2m available to support an industry-led creative careers programme aiming to reach at least 2,000 schools and 600,000 pupils in the next two years. 

Needless to say, it’s essential that the business of distribution is incorporated into the heart of those plans.

Likewise, the proposed new Codes of Practice in social media, digital advertising and the online marketplace will help protect the value of copyright, and in particular help to ensure a reduction in the harm done to the value of the theatrical business by online piracy.

I also welcome the emphasis on ensuring that the dividends from the growth of our creative sectors are spread across the UK and not restricted to London and the South East, through investment in clusters across all four nations.

It’s clear that the Government have now accepted that the creative industries, and film in particular, can play an important economic and social role in the coming years. 

Part of that role should be binding together and helping heal these wretched divisions, in the hope of heading-off the post-Brexit ‘blame game’ which will unquestionably follow if jobs are lost, and the economy falters.

Just as those documentaries made by Humphrey Jennings and the Crown Film Unit reaffirmed that the sacrifices of WW2 had been worthwhile, so there can be no better medium than film for conveying a contemporary vision of a multi-cultural Britain that’s upbeat, and potentially dynamic.

That national treasure, Grayson Perry recently said: 

“The most beautiful and complex artwork that we can make - is our own identity”.

I couldn’t agree more.

That would suggest an increased investment in the production and distribution of movies which, in one way and another can deliver the form of national ‘re-branding’ I’m alluding to.

In case that sounds unrealistically jingoistic, here is a quote I picked up last week from a Chinese commentator, explaining the recent decline in popularity of Hollywood blockbusters in her marketplace.

“Until about ten years ago, in the absence of a well-articulated set of national and cultural values, Hollywood stories, and the ethics they promoted, were ‘aspirational’ to many Chinese.

But now we’re becoming tired of them.

They strike us as being at best conventional, at worst irrelevant”

In a world unquestionably shifting on its axis, I sincerely believe that content - with a distinctive British voice - could play an important role as we seek to redefine our relationship with other nations.

But for now, with the specter of Brexit transition running through to December 2020, all of this remains somewhat ‘up in the air’.

So, undaunted and undeterred, I’d like to turn to my final topic this morning – which is the shape of things to come over, let’s say the next five to ten years.

Although I don’t have a crystal ball - or at least one that works - there are some emerging trends that are likely to remain highly influential, and therefore well worth a moment or two’s reflection.

Let me say straight away that the various annual reports of the demise of the cinema are not merely exaggerated, they are to my mind absurd.

The rapid spread of domestic broadband in the first decade of this century was helpfully paralleled by the rise of ‘boutique’ cinemas, which continue to prosper by offering a premium experience.

In any cinema, whether boutique or multiplex, an overwhelming sensory experience is essential if they’re to compete against other screens which, whilst smaller, smarter, more convenient and less expensive – are still less than the ‘real deal’ when it comes to sheer enjoyment.

But we can’t assume that will always be true; at this year’s Mobile World Congress, held a few weeks ago in Barcelona, you may have noticed the latest smartphones came equipped with nothing less than high-res video cameras, and Dolby Atmos sound!

Today’s audiences expect access to a choice of high-quality content - wherever they go.

More and more films are being promoted with VR and AR trailers. 

AR – Augmented Reality – is a layer of text or imagery added to a real-world photograph, and millions of smartphones already have AR apps built-in.

VR, on the other hand, is a simulated, 360-degree CG environment – in which the creative possibilities, and practical applications, are pretty well limitless.

Certainly, VR trailers can make horror films feel memorably more suspenseful.

I expect to see the film industry delve much more deeply into both AR - and VR. 

Within ten years I’d personally be surprised if there wasn’t a UK wide network of ‘VR-plexes’, showcasing a range of interactive entertainments.

Digital technologies will certainly continue to blur the lines between, say, film and theatre, or VR and animation.

And one way or another, as the new technologies redefine the very concept of a ‘screen’; the industry will increasingly need to explore fresh ways to tell stories, and to find viable new business models for the production and distribution of those stories.

For the past eight months I’ve been fascinated to explore matters such as these as a member of the Lords’ Select Committee on AI, whose final report was published on Monday morning.

What that report makes clear is that, although we’re rapidly heading into a world of greater automation, a whole set of paradoxes, opportunities and challenges lie at the heart of it.

One paradox being that computers excel at some tasks which we humans can take years to master, such as complex math’s or playing chess.

But – computers find it really difficult to do certain things that appear to come naturally to even very young children, such as recognising and interacting with other people, and being creative – making up new characters, new games, new stories.

And therein lies the opportunity. 

The economic importance of fostering original creativity in our schools and colleges, as well as in the workplace, cannot be over-stated, all the more so as the UK’s looks to export products and ideas to rapidly growing economies like India and China.

Get this right and we can position ourselves as ‘winners’ - as we did in the highly competitive and capital-intensive world of SFX.

Get it wrong, and we’re looking at possibly hundreds of thousands of middle-class job-losses - in areas that had traditionally thought of themselves as impervious to recession.

Meanwhile, many of you will already be thinking hard about another trend – consolidation.

The Royal Television Society put it neatly at a recent panel event – media companies find themselves facing a stark choice of 

‘Sale or Scale’.

In the internet age, no one can be surprised that the market for content is increasingly competitive, global, and dominated by a small number of media giants based on the west coast of the United States, companies that possess remarkable creative and financial firepower.

They’re likely to become ever more adept at using personal data to extend their engagement and further their growth. 

We can only hope they do this ethically, and appropriately.

Whenever there’s an over-supply of content, and a fragmented market, then consolidation seems an entirely rational response. 

Not only do I believe that this trend will continue in the coming months and years, but in a sense it’s natural that it does so.

I’d encourage all of you, wherever you’re working, to look at the opportunities offered by new partnerships.

Are there ways to increase your bargaining power? 

Are there ways to boost your own creative thinking, to reach new customers, to gain new audience insights and the data that comes with them?

And to do that before someone else, maybe a bona fide UK version of Movie Pass, does it for all of us?

Feature-length projects can take three or more years to develop, produce and release. 

As I’ve suggested, they require a huge outlay of capital, and a matching appetite for risk. 

The financial underpinnings of the traditional film industry are under significant strain, while audiences – younger audiences in particular – have rapidly embraced streaming on a mass scale.

The distribution of films, the engine of our industry, is only going to become more efficient. 

And many of you in this room will, I hope, play a decisive role in making that happen.

So, to wrap up:

I’ve sought to reflect on a few of the complex trends that are remodeling our business. 

And I’ve acknowledged the flip-side – that some important aspects are, regrettably, extremely resistant to change.

I’ve tried to look beyond the creative industries - at the challenges and opportunities that face the UK as a whole – what sort of country do we aspire to be? 

And how might our entertainment business best reflect that? 

Ten years from now, how will our industry have evolved - what will the ‘big screen’ prove capable of?

While audiences will still enjoy stories in ‘traditional’ formats – books, radio, films – the only certainty is that their expectations will continue to shift.

Even though the internet is still in its relative infancy, I remain fundamentally optimistic about the way it’s likely to evolve and mature. 

The demand for content, across many platforms, has never been greater – and I believe this will continue. 

In fact, the demand at present appears insatiable.

As social animals, storytelling satisfies a core human need. 

A tale well-told has long been, and will continue to be, a global product.

So, creating and owning great content is a terrific business. 

And connecting it with the right audiences at the right times will remain a fundamental skill – one that, as I suggested at the outset, is pivotal to the well-being of the whole industry.

Films can themselves be vehicles for empowerment, for transformation – but self-evidently only to the extent that they connect with audiences.

It was tremendous to see the 2018 cumulative box-office fly through the ￡400 million mark last week.

With a strong line-up of releases ahead, it helps illustrate the fact that our creative industries are now worth ￡10 million - every hour - to the UK economy.

‘Box-office’ revenues, on all platforms, will continue to roll in as campaigns and releases roll out.

So what better way to complete my first decade as FDA President than to offer a glimpse of the exciting feast that’s likely to quicken audiences’ taste buds this coming summer.