COMMERCIAL INNOVATION

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”

—Peter F. Drucker

commercial, N. : commerce : social intercourse : interchange of ideas or sentiments

Business Model

Prudence & Providence Facilitate Judicious and Courageous Decisions

In periods of great disruption come great opportunity. With the M&E storytelling industry in upheaval, and many arguing cinema is dead as an art form, Hollywood is covered in fire, burning down — failing, creatively and commercially, a function of many things, not least (in our mind) the following: (1) that the Marvelization/formulaic approach of the past decades has revealed deep dissatisfactions of immanence; (2) that “woke” (i.e., politically liberal, unreasonable and extreme vis-à-vis matters of race and “social justice”) leadership, which predominates in Big Hollywood, not only ignores the audience, but most often scorns it through nihilistic and bloody phantasmagorias;  (3) that the mechanisms for content monetization are now in considerable disarray; and, lastly — and most importantly: (4) the inefficiencies of the film industry have ultimately resulted in an unustainable business model, with incompetence and zero cost money enabling all of the excesses. Correspondingly, film has become an instrument of ideology; and the industry requires a revolution to move forward. Simply: Manalive’s time is now.

Thus, at founding we took to heart Peter Drucker’s clarion call that the best way to predict the future is to create it. Having then accepted the wager that in a time when certitudes have been shaken the marketplace will again reward leaders whose business practices are grounded in sanity (i.e., the normal, rational, and sensible) and creative and commercial excellence, we began to build the valuable company nobody else is building within the new M&E “Wild West”. In late 2020, we then plotted a course into the uncharted territory of Live Cinema — theorized by Francis Ford Coppola as the next frontier in film, the last great innovation to move cinema forward — with a laser-focus on developing thrilling, timelier, and more producible (i.e. lower budget) vignettes of witnesses, exemplars, and prophets for our time to delight the senses and feed the soul. 

Accordingly, innovation is manifest throughout our business model, the ongoing success of which will be realized beyond disordered Hollywood, and, ultimately, anchored in the creation of a new, decentralized storytelling ecosystem operationalized over the next five years through the Manalive Salon, and from which a new generation of creatives will emerge. Likewise, our production is not only the ideal “beta test” for what will become a repeatable, scalable, and profitable model, but will also provide the operational road map for the realization (and potential packaging) of our entire project slate over the next decade. Further, this business model perfectly lends itself to establishing a sizable niche — solidified and expanded through successive productions that consistently exceed the ongoing content expectations of our audiences, stateside and worldwide. 

patron experience

The Ultimate Value of Any Venture

Fundamentally, the crux of innovation is fulfilling patron needs, conscious or otherwise. With this understanding at the forefront of our minds — and recognizing that the idea at the heart of a commercial innovation cannot wait decades to be revealed in the marketplace — the confluence of the wholesale disruption of the M&E industry over the past decade with the whipsawing global events of the past four years makes clear that the time is ripe to trailblaze a storytelling innovation, one to profoundly influence for years to come the essense of the cinema, to the benefit of the art form itself and, correspondingly, the many millions who patronize it worldwide.

More specifically, the audiences of our Live Cinema production will be uniquely positioned to experience frisson as the story unfolds — participating, as they will, in a transformation: the raw, intimate conversions of Siegfried Sassoon and the Spirit of Death. This innovation in patron experience will not only “nourish the soul” (Manalive’s fundamental value proposition, inextricably linked to the deepest inner desire of each of us), but illuminate that golden thread that binds us to God, creation, and each other, the most important issue of the story.

Beyond the emotion borne of the Live Cinema experience is the downstream impact of social technology that will emerge from the event. Specifically, this production will not just be 150 people in a dark theatre. By providing high-level programmatic resources, Death Comes for the War Poets, as well as future Manalive Live Cinema projects, will spark and facilitate the creation of local break-out groups and emergent community, both of which will increase word-of-mouth awareness and establish captive repeat audiences, as well as extend the Manalive cause beyond our productions through a noble social arrangement. 

paradigm promotion

Advancing the Vanguard of Creative Renaissance

Though globalism is dead and the future is local, thanks to satellites and digital electronics cinema can be seen anywhere, in the home, the theater, the church or community center, and everywhere around the world. And because the cinema, like theater before it, is only relevant in the experience it provides, our production will immerse viewers in a profound thrill, uniting them in a spirit of wonder, whereby they will see and know that everyone is getting ready for a live show in which the outcome is unknown, wondering, on pins and needles, if it can all be pulled off and come together. To this end — being united in a sense of wonder — and embracing Chesterton’s axioms that not only is there a contradiction at the heart of all things, but that “a philosophy is always present in a work of art […] that you never work so well for art’s sake as when you are working for something else”, at the core of Manalive’s overarching creative and commercial strategy is necessarily a poetic paradox (the key to truth), which is : small is beautiful.

This operational paradigm of human-scale, decentralized, and appropriate technologies will undergird our creation of an entirely new framework to achieve success, including that of the Manalive Salon as it comes to serve as a guild for creatives in the coming years. Specifically, by tapping into the hunger from small theaters and owner-operators for a compelling story, manifest through technological innovation in experience, we open a large door to a winning dynamic for all project stakeholders via new content commercialization — to the benefit of patrons tired of “Big Hollywood”, theater owners, investors and strategic partners, and our company. Ultimately, and most importantly, this will be a win for the Common Man, who will be struck and amazed, comforted and embraced by our approach to storytelling, one he will find strange and familiar at the same time. (Important to note: any minor flaws in our performances will only enhance their beauty, crucial to making our story unforgettable, whereby our patrons will understand that it is impossible to experience what Manalive has to offer anywhere else but through us.) 

Lastly, as the vanguard of the creation of a new art form, as well as the founding of a new storytelling ecosystem — which will parallel ossifying Hollywood — we are necessarily leveraging the best tools of the current structure to expedite our strategic move beyond it. (This Manalive mindset is most aptly captured by Buckminster Fuller, who wrote: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.") Thus, we have begun to explore collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is interested in partnering on this project. (Should we move forward together, our production will result in a White Paper on the new genre’s commercial viability.)

“Leadership is the ability to rally people not for a single event, but for years.”

—Simon Sinek