“The whole landscape of production financing is going to change,” media and leisure banking head at Opus Bank, Jeff Zaks stated
The novel coronavirus pandemic has already taken a toll on Hollywood and everybody who works within the enterprise, however the business is certain to face a tricky and probably vastly completely different street forward when the lockdown lifts and Hollywood productions are cleared to renew.
“Restarting a production is going to be difficult depending on how long this goes in terms of retaining actors, keeping the schedules available for the productions to restart, which means spending money to keep the production costs in place,” Jeff Zaks, senior vice chairman of media and leisure banking at Opus Bank, stated throughout TheWrap’s stay webinar on Tuesday.
Zaks, together with Banc of California head of leisure Adrian Ward and Viviana Zarragoitia, vice chairman of boutique lending agency Three Point Capital, joined TheWrap founder and Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman Tuesday on a Zoom digital meet-up to debate how the pandemic is, and can proceed to, impression movie financing.
“The whole landscape of production financing is going to change,” Zaks continued, “Primarily with how insurance companies are going to evaluate this moving forward.”
Whether manufacturing corporations can be coated, or have to soak up the losses incurred from productions that had been interrupted because of the unfold of COVID-19, turned a significant speaking level within the early days of the pandemic’s impression within the U.S. Most corporations, consultants stated on the time, weren’t coated and must take the monetary hit.
Zaks stated that these manufacturing insurance coverage packages are doubtless going to vary within the aftermath of COVID-19, with insurers together with exclusions for issues like COVID-19, although it’s unclear how broad these exclusions can be.
“Other than going out and finding separate insurance, which undoubtedly would be very expensive, then I think there’ll just be that risk there is either another outbreak or a reemergence of this which could obviously cause a lot of problems for the production,” Ward stated. “I spoke with one of the bond companies recently and they’re saying when production does start again there’s going to be a bunch of exclusions for COVID-19 and other things so it’s going to be a bit of different landscape as they won’t be covering those issues going forward.”
One potential brilliant aspect is that popping out of the pandemic — each time that occurs — there’s anticipated to be a clamoring for content material from of us confined to their properties. That too, nevertheless, comes with its personal challenges.
“There’s going to be a great need for content and in a few months once, hopefully, things return back and we can go outside again, people are going to want whatever is fresh,” Zarragoitia stated. “But it’s going to be very hard to sort of manage and schedule the productions that were already scheduled and the ones that were pushed.”
Zaks agreed the business ought to brace for some logistical challenges and anticipate an inflow of delayed and new content material, but in addition stated the considerations will doubtless be a lot graver as soon as the mud settles.
“It’s gonna be a bottleneck situation when resources are being clamored for by everybody at the same time,” Zaks stated. “And frankly as far as lending goes, we don’t know what the other side of this is going to look like and two or three months from now we don’t know what companies will still be solvent enough to be bankable.”
