The Big Flop - Quibi Bites the Dust with Connor Ratliff & Matt Bellassai | 1

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Remember Quibi? The app with short videos you could only watch on your phone? No?! That's because it only lasted SIX months before shutting down. On the first episode of The Big Flop, host Misha Brown is joined by Connor Ratliff (Dead Eyes) and Matt Bellassai (Diss & Tell) to spin the tale of the little video platform that couldn't. Come for the rapid rise, stay for the even more rapid fall.Follow The Big Flop on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Big Flop early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to The Big Flop early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. It's October 2020, and actor Thomas Lennon is sitting butt-naked on a bucket. He's filming a scene for his new movie, Reno 911, It's a Wonderful Heist. and actor Thomas Lennon is sitting butt naked on a bucket. He's filming a scene for his new movie, Reno 911, It's a Wonderful Heist. Here's Lennon on AV Club. I had my pants completely down and I was pretending to poop in a bucket. Do you all remember Reno 911?

It was that instant classic when it premiered on Comedy Central in 2003. And now, 17 years later, they're shooting the revival for a brand new streaming platform called Quibi. Quibi claims it's a brand new way to watch TV and movies. Hollywood quality content in 10 minutes or less. Only available on your phone. The idea came from some of the biggest names in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The app seemed to have everything going for it. But right in the middle of a take,

Thomas Lennon starts to notice whispers among the crew. Everyone's suddenly uncomfortable. And it doesn't seem to have anything to do with his butt. When we finally cut, everybody's like, hey, Quiggy's doesn't exist anymore. I was like, oh, that was weird. Because all the thing, the pooping on the bucket was definitely, this was for Quibi, so. If you think that's undignified, then just wait until you hear about the rise and fall of Quibi,

which lasted less than a year before it kicked the proverbial poop bucket. The short-form streaming service Quibi, the startup, is shutting down after just six months in operation. This was the hot new thing in Hollywood, a short-form but now stunningly short-lived streaming service.

Still, how is it that with so much star power, Quibi, the billion-dollar promise, could possibly flop? We are on a sinking ship. From Wondery and at Will Media, this is The Big Flop, where we chronicle the greatest flubs, fails, and blunders of all time. I'm your host, Misha Brown, social media superstar and your wife's gay best friend at Don't Cross a Gay Man. And today we're talking about the short life of the short form platform, Quibi. Hello, I'm Emily and I'm one of the hosts of Terribly Famous,

the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy. OK, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttlecocks, you know who I'm talking about. No? Short shorts? Free cocktails? Careless whispers? OK, last one. It's not Andrew Ridgely. Yep, that's right. It's Stone Cold icon George Michael. From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet,

join us for our new series, George Michael's Fight for Freedom. From the outside, it looks like he has it all. But behind the trademark dark sunglasses is a man in turmoil. George is trapped in a lie of his own making, with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wanderie Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. And here to help me tell the tale of this ill-begotten union of Hollywood and tech is Connor Ratliff, comedian and host of the podcast Dead Eyes, and Matt Bellassai, comedian and host of the new Wondery podcast, Dis and Tell. Welcome to the show, guys.

Thank you for having us. Thank you. Connor, what is your personal experience with Quibi? Well, I knew a couple of people who had either auditioned for or been cast. A friend of mine, Zach Cherry, was in a Quibi that I don't remember if it ever got released or not. And I don't believe I had any experience with Quibi while it existed. And then post-Quibi, I watched a few things on the Roku channel that were Quibi. Matt, we asked you earlier about your connection with Quibi offline,

and you said you felt like you're the only comedian who didn't have a Quibi. Matt, we asked you earlier about your connection with Quibi offline, and you said you felt like you're the only comedian who didn't have a Quibi show and that you absolutely did not watch a single second of it. No disrespect to all of the wonderful people involved. Well, I have gone far enough into the black hole that is Quibi. So for a lot of people in 2020, there was basically no daylight between finding out that Quibi existed and finding out that it had gone up in flames. But the Quibi story actually begins much, much earlier. And to understand Quibi, we first have to talk about The Da Vinci Code,

Dan Brown's best-selling novel. Okay. Obviously, right? Yeah. So it's the early aughts, and Hollywood super producer Jeffrey Katzenberg picks up the mystery thriller like so many other people, and as he blasts through it, he has an epiphany. He realizes that the best thing about The Da Vinci Code is apparently how short the chapters are. I had no idea we were going to start there. All the way back.

Listen, he's got a point. Well, fast forward to 2018 and Katzenberg, because of this, wants to create a subscription-based, smartphone-only streaming platform for shows that are only six to nine minutes long. Here he is talking at Axios' Smarter Faster Revolution conference. Listen, I don't think people have as many 30s and 40 minutes today. I think that giving them the convenience, if they got 10 minutes, they can read a chapter or two. If they've got an hour, they can keep going. By the way, I would say there minutes, they can read a chapter or two. If they've got an hour, they can keep going. By the way, I would say there's not a single thing lesser about the Da Vinci Code other than the length of the chapters.

We're going to disagree on that, but that's okay. It's funny because it's almost like you're in a pizza restaurant and you look over and you see someone didn't finish a slice of their pizza. And being like, oh, I know what people want, half slices. And then saying like, I'll start making a pizza restaurant where we don't cook the whole pizza, we just make half a pizza. And it's just sort of like, he's not wrong that like sometimes people don't want to watch a 40 minute thing, but it's such a fascinating leap. It's pre-anticipating something that's happening naturally and saying like, well, let's make it exist that way. Yeah, I mean, as a millennial though,

I mean, our favorite pastime is binge watching a show that we don't even particularly like in one sitting, you know, and then doing it the next day, like without batting an eye. But I do understand, like, there is obviously an appetite for short form. We've seen a lot of success with that. But I mean, does he know that we can pause things? Like, would the whole thing have been, like, avoided if he knew that the pause button existed? Yeah, there's a weird thing about

timing because people will binge watch 12 episodes of a TV show. But if you release a 12-hour movie, people say, oh, that's too long. I don't want to watch it. And it almost feels like Quibi did the opposite of that, which is like, we don't actually want you to give us a short thing. We'll find short things on our own. Well, they originally called it New TV, but quickly changed it to Quibi, which is short for Quick Bytes. Although, shouldn't that be pronounced Quibi? Anyway, what would you have named Quibi if you had the chance? It does feel like it's very much just first idea that came to mind. Yeah. Netflix had a thing where they tried to split into two companies, and their second company

was called Quickster. The discs were going to be one thing and the streaming was going to be another. And they're like, no, no, never mind. And a lot of it is just if the name sounds dumb to people. I probably would have called it like Lil Movies or Lil TV. I don't know. It's hard not to come up with a dumb name for something like this. How about like TV Minus? We got Discovery Plus, Disney Plus. Throw in a minus.

Yeah. Give us less. Oh, I love that. Well, goofy name aside, if there was ever a person who could make this the next big thing, it is Katzenberg. So if you don't know who Jeffrey Katzenberg is, he was the chairman of Walt Disney Studios from 1984 to 1994. That's the era of mega hits. The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Aladdin. Wow. The movies Mermaid, The Lion King, Aladdin. Wow.

The movies millennials grew up on. Katzenberg's resume doesn't just stop at Disney. He co-founded and was CEO of DreamWorks Animation, where he oversaw more massive hits, things like Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon. My favorite thing about Katzenberg is that he partially inspired the Hercules villain Hades. Specifically his chant, guys, guys, listen to me. But my favorite Hades line is, please, he's a guy. This one is different. He's honest and he's sweet. He would never do anything to hurt me. He's a guy.

Ahead of his time. Yeah. Also very gay coded. I don't know Jeffrey's personal life, but, you know, Hades at least. He had some things going on behind the scenes. Well, obviously Katzenberg is a smart guy with a winning track record. But running an animation studio isn't the same as building a platform. So he seeks out one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley to be the tech yang to his

Hollywood yang, Meg Whitman. And Whitman's resume is also super impressive. She was the CEO of eBay and is the one who made it the household name that it is, and is widely considered to be one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, Slay Queen. And she also ran for governor in California. Right. So Whitman and Katzenberg sold the idea of Quibi hard. I mean, this wasn't just any old app. It was a complete paradigm shift in the way that we consume media. Targeted at millennials, the latchkey kids raised on TV who now have their phones stuck to their hands. And so Katzenberg would drum up excitement by saying really grand things about the platform. Here he is talking about it on NBC News. And it's not dissimilar to what HBO did in the 1990s when

they came along and said, we're not TV, we're HBO. And we would say to you, we're not short form, we're quibby. I mean, HBO started in like the 1970s. They had a long time to establish themselves. I do feel like everything moves faster these days, but HBO had two decades of producing original content before they got to The Sopranos and Sex and the City. So there is an element of the quick rise and fall of Quibi that to me seems like they expected to be able to just instantly be a success.

Matt, what do you think about it? Does this reek of Hollywood cynicism towards its audience? Like, oh, these little millennials and their lack of attention span, let's make money off of them. It's cynical, I guess, but also like not wrong. Like conceptually, they had a point, like our attention spans were and continue to shrink. And like, yeah, I think there is hunger for shorter stuff. Yeah. So there is potential. And investors agreed because investors were all in. I mean, Quibi raised a whopping $1.75 billion. And according to the website, The Information, Katzenberg and Whitman also put in $10.5 million and $5.5 million of their own money

into the pot. Now, on paper, Katzenberg and Whitman seemed like the perfect power couple. But pretty soon, there was trouble in paradise. And almost as soon as Whitman signed on, the two were butting heads, like two parents who just stayed together for the kids. Whitman soon sends Katzenberg a list of grievances. According to the Wall Street Journal, she says he was dictatorial and treated her like an underling. He interrupted her when she spoke at meetings. And he was belittling, basically not letting her be a true CEO. Eventually, they worked out an agreement where Whitman would work on the third floor and Katzenberg on the fourth. They would just interact with each other as little as possible.

Who needs communication? I love it. Isn't the female lead in Hercules also named Meg? Yeah. Meg is Hercules' snarky, sarcastic, lovable wife and main love interest in the title film. Are you all right, miss? Megara. My friends call me Meg. At least they would if I had any friends. Wow. It fits.

Well, toxic relationship aside, Quibi still had a ton of money in the bank to make it work. And they threw that money behind signing a mind-blowing amount of celebrities to work on a first slate of 175 original shows. to work on a first slate of 175 original shows. They got people like Steven Spielberg, Ariana Grande, Liam Hemsworth, and Jennifer Lopez. You know, the big four. Once again, though, to be clear, they are spending Jennifer Lopez money,

not Jenny from the block money, on original content. And in roughly a year, the company spent almost $1 billion for some of these 10-minute shows. I mean, some of the episodes cost as much as an early episode of Game of Thrones. But, like, we're only 10 minutes of content instead of an hour. Wow. But let's see how that money was spent. So I want to play a game so that we can get to know some of the shows. So here are the rules.

I'm going to say the name of a Quibi show, and you're just simply going to guess whether it was a real show or not. So first one, the name of the show is Murder House Flip. Real or not real? I'm going to say real. That one rings a bell, honestly. So if it's not real, I'm going to say real. That one rings a bell, honestly. So if it's not real, I'm going to be mad. Well, it was a popular one.

And ding, ding, ding, ding. Yes, it was a real show. Murder House Flip is a real show, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Rotten Tomatoes says, Designers Joelle and Mikel remove the stains of the past and make once morbid homes marvelous. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 47% on our tomato meter. Here's a clip. We need to give this place new life and energy.

Are you trying to tell me that we'll find body parts? There's a distinct possibility, yeah. You take a shower where he dismembered her. Oh, no. I mean, us Americans, we love a true crime and we love flipping houses. There's nothing about that that seems like it wouldn't be a hit. Viral hit as well. Yeah.

All right. Round two. The name of this show is Dishmantled. Real or not real? I can't even envision what it would be. I am going to say that it's real. Yes, it is. That's a real show. And Matt, don't worry, because I also would have had no clue going to say that it's real. Yes, it is. That's a real show.

And Matt, don't worry, because I also would have had no clue what it was supposed to be about. But it's a real show hosted by Titus Burgess from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Two chefs stand on stage. A cannon is wheeled out that fires a meal into their face. And the chefs compete to recreate the dish based on what they can taste. I would not have guessed it. Again, this does not sound like a bad idea for a show. Yeah, I recall that now. Well, here's a clip. Oh, my God. Are they okay?

Would you guys do that for $5,000? You should have seen what I did for curly fries and cabbage. Hurry up. Time's ticking, kids. You should have seen what I did for curly fries in college. Hurry up, time's ticking, kids. I mean, I would do some questionable things for $5,000. I just, how much food can you get in your mouth when it's being fired at you out of a cannon? Yeah, it seemed like a lot of these quippy shows were about the shock factor.

A lot of these sound like fake shows from within like 30 Rock or something. You know, they sound like Jack Donaghy produced shows. A lot of those shows, when you see them referenced, there's a part of your brain that says, that's dumb, but also why is that not a real show? And the idea of watching two celebrity chefs have food fired at them,

and then them have to figure out what landed in their mouth and recreate it. To me, this seems like it also should be a hit. Like, the show is going to be six minutes long, right? Six, seven minutes long. That's actually the only problem with it is I'm like, you know, Katzenberg said people don't have a lot of 30s and 40s.

I think people have plenty of 30s and 40s for Dishmantle. Well, we'll bring it back. We can all produce it. So, round three. Jack Sparrow House. Real or not real? This one was on the tip of my tongue. This is a real one, and I'm obsessed with it.

Yeah, there's no way it's not real. Well, actually, Jack Sparrow House is not a Quibi show. Or real at all, for that matter. But, Matt, to be fair, it not a Quibi show or real at all for that matter. But Matt, to be fair, it was a rumored show and would have 100% been a hit. So in November of 2020, a fake Wikipedia article appeared saying that there was going to be a Quibi reality show coming out called Jack Sparrowhouse. Jack Sparrow, of course, being the popular pirate main character of Pirates of the Caribbean. The concept, 13 Jack Sparrow impersonators all live in a house together. So even though the show wasn't real,

I mean, it kind of spoke to what the type of content Quibi was going to come out with, right? If people believed this was true. So it went viral. My favorite detail about it, though, was they had to shut down the show because one of the Jack Sparrows was a registered sex offender and the house that they filmed in was within 500 feet of an elementary school. Oh my gosh.

So whoever made that rumor, like, really invested a lot in it. Well, now I want to play one of my personal favorites called The Golden Arm. This was a Quibi horror anthology called 50 States of Fright, where each episode recreates an urban legend from a different state. So a woman loses her arm in an accident and has it replaced with a golden one. She loves the arm so much that she refuses to take it off, even when a doctor tells her it's killing her. Here's a clip. The tests have come in that is pulmonary gold disease. As long as your body keeps absorbing the gold through your skin, there's very little I can do. You've got to take off that prosthetic.

No, I can't take off my golden arm. Ever. Sir? Whatever she wants. Not the labored breathing at the end. This one, I mean, is a whole story arc. The husband was a lumberjack and he's cutting down a tree and that tree falls on her arm and crushes it. And so he feels really guilty and he also randomly moonlights as a arm prostitution, as you do. So he makes her this golden arm,

which she falls in love with and, you know, she starts dying from it, as we heard in the clip, and refuses to take it off. So she dies. And he realizes he's in way over his head in debt. So he actually grave robs her to get the golden arm back. And then she haunts him. So much. Like Rachel Brosnahan as the woman with the golden arm. Yes. I was just going to say, Connor, you were in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel for a little bit. Rachel played Mrs. Maisel. So what do you think Mrs. Maisel would have to say about this show if she saw it? Oh, I think she could do an easy tight five about this show. Matt, did you happen to see that?

Absolutely not. No. I asked because a clip of the scene Golden Arm went viral when comedian Zach Raffio tweeted it out. But if you look at his viral video, you might notice something strange about it. Something that points to another issue with Quibi, even beyond the off-putting tone and content that you're speaking of, Raffio had to use another phone to film his own phone that was playing the Quibi show. Because this was a smartphone-only app. It had no share button. I mean, how are you going to go viral without one? It's almost like they knew they

were going to go viral in the wrong way. Yeah, it's almost like they're combining the worst of different realms, which is like, what if social media had all of the accessibility of a cable box that you're just locked into into it that you can only watch it on your TV set. You know, the fact that you couldn't watch Quibi on a TV if you wanted to, you could only watch it on a mobile device. And it doesn't come with the benefits of a mobile device platform, which is that you can mail it around and share it. It's almost like they were checking boxes to create the least possible chance of something being successful. I hate any moment where I feel like I'm defending this idea. But you can't share TV

shows, right? And yet there are viral TV moments. I mean, you know, those are all just clips that people have pulled from streams or wherever and had to go out of their way to get. The problem is just that when we have short form stuff, like we're sort of trained based on all of those social media apps to be able to share them. But imagine if the only way that you could share the clip was to own a second TV that you use to film the first TV. Your Clippy Clips wants your mobile device unless you have a second mobile that you use to film the first TV. Your QuibiClip swaps your mobile device unless you have a second mobile device handy for filming. Yeah. So they didn't just throw gobs of money at celebrities. They pumped a ton of money into advertising, like a 2020 Super Bowl ad. And it's Quibi, so they should obviously know how to nail the shortest, most attention-grabbing form of

American entertainment, right? The ad featured a getaway driver watching a show on his phone telling his bank robber friends that he'll pick them up in a Quibi. Media Post reported that Quibi's bank heist ad was the fourth worst rated out of the Super Bowl's total 62 ads. worst rated out of the Super Bowl's total 62 ads. So really, all it did was rob the company of $5 million. They were really trying to get it to catch on, like people start using this as a... Mega verb. Yeah. Like a unit of time. It's kind of like when you give yourself your own nickname and you try to like get other people to do it. But even if that ad was a flop, at least they had millions of eyeballs on their upcoming product. And the Super Bowl timing was perfect since they were just a quibby away from their launch date of April 2020. Can y'all remember another notable thing that launched

around that time? Uh-oh. COVID. The answer is COVID. Part of why I don't remember the Super Bowl ad, because my brain just blocked out that period of time. The perfect time for an app designed for people on the go, who are just going from here to there. Perfect for when you're on the train, when you're heading to work, when you've got a few minutes in between the very busy and active schedule that you have. So what 10 minute quibby size gaps did you have to fill in during the quarantine? Just between cries, I guess.

If I needed to pick me up in the middle of my breakdown. Yeah, the 10-minute gaps between stuffing my face with potato chips. Connor, you wrote a tweet in May 2020 featuring a photo of the trees outside your window. Our producer Levi is going to put it on the screen here for you to read. I have no memory of this. My favorite show currently is these trees outside this window. It is formatted vertically like a quibi, but it lasts from whenever I wake up until whenever it gets dark.

Occasionally there is a bird or a squirrel, but other than that, it's just trees and sometimes rain. And then I have a long vertical shot of the trees outside my window because I was stuck in Missouri at my parents' house because I was on tour with the band Guster. I was opening for them doing comedy, and we were in St. Louis, Missouri, two hours away from where I grew up when the pandemic hit. Rather than fly back to New York City, I got on a bus. And so I spent most of 2020 in my childhood bedroom. And that is the view from it. And not a bad long form Quibi, I got to say.

Pretty beautiful view, occasionally some action, but it's pretty relaxing. I'm not a fan of the vertical formatting, but I think this is a good Quibi. Well, it is better than a lot of the content that Quibi came out with. Despite the pandemic and reviews, Quibi's numbers looked promising initially. Just one day after launch, the Quibi app was at the number three spot on the Apple App Store. And in its first week, Quibi was downloaded 1.7 million times for its free trial version. For context, Disney Plus was downloaded 12.5 million times in its first week. So not quite a Disney Plus, but pretty good. The only problem was hardly anyone stuck around after that free trial period.

Quibi cost $5 a month, $8 if you wanted to go ad-free. So guess how many people stuck around after their trial ended? Oh, this is going to be a bad number. Almost none. Over 90% bailed. I mean, and some of those who stuck around are just people who forgot to cancel the subscription. I do that all the time. So Quibi fell off. They only got a few thousand dollars from subscriptions that first month. They dropped off the top 50 in the App Store. Advertisers started pulling out, and most people didn't even know what it was. There was even market research that said that most people thought Quibi was a food delivery service,

according to New York Magazine. Right. Because it's quick bites. How depressing for those people. It's like Quiznos has a delivery service you'd call a Quibi. Yeah. At this point, that Super Bowl heist ad is looking less like a funny joke and more like a concrete business plan

they might need to look into. And again, to some extent, compare it to Disney+. Disney has a century of brand building and content and generation upon generation of emotional investment. There are so many generations that have been traumatized by one Disney movie or another, whether it's Bambi or The Lion King or whatever. There's so much emotional connection. Plus, that's not even counting all the things that they own now, like Star Wars or Marvel, things like that.

Whereas Quibi just expected us to somehow get on board immediately. It stuns me to think that they expected us to pay $5 a month out of the gate without any real reason. If it had been $1 a month or if it had been 50 cents a month, they probably would have made more money. If they'd started with such a ludicrously low number that people were like, I can afford 50 cents a month, they probably would have gotten 100 times as many people sticking around. Yeah. And all this other short form content out there, you know, TikTok, YouTube, Pornhub, the big difference is that those are all free. I mean, Matt, do you have any ideas of like what or who is to blame? I mean, I'll blame COVID. She took a lot from us. But the only thing you could latch onto with Quibi was the concept and the name and like just kind of poking fun at it.

I am also just shocked. I would have expected the like retention rate to be higher just out of the I forgot to cancel nature of it. That's a lot of people who were like, I hate this so much that I'm going to figure out how to go into my subscriptions on my phone. That's not easy.

Trust me. No, it's not. Well, I think Katzenberg would love you using COVID as a little excuse for him because he also did that. Katzenberg initially blamed Quibi's poor performance on the pandemic. Just a few weeks after the launch, he told the New York Times, quote, I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus. Everything.

End quote. Well, yeah. I mean, the only problem with the blame it on COVID argument is that some of Quibi's major competitors thrived in 2020. YouTube's revenue grew 30%. Disney Plus's revenue more than doubled. TikTok revenue grew over 500%. I mean, I wouldn't be sitting here talking with you all today if it weren't for the pandemic.

Because like every other millennial I got on TikTok, blew up telling short, one-minute stories, you know, and gained millions of followers. The fact that Quibi arrived at the pandemic moment could have just as easily been the thing that made more people discover it. If they'd had even one good show that made people feel like, well, I have to have this $5 a month thing because otherwise, where am I going to see, you know, whatever the Quibi version of Stranger Things or Game of Thrones or, you know, if there had been one sensation and they didn't wait long enough for that to happen,

Quibi could be having their I told you so moment right now. I hope so. No, in some alternate reality. It won't be happening in our reality. No, I don't think so. But in some alternate multiverse, there is a version of Quibi that right now, Katzenberg is sitting back, his arms folded, saying, everybody loves Quibi now, but they didn't when we started out.

I'm going to do a fan fiction off that. So Katzenberg, six months into the pandemic, he backtracked on blaming everything on COVID. And in December 2020, the company officially closed its doors less than a year after its launch. And layoffs, they are a tough time for any company, especially when you have to lay off the entire company. I'm wondering, if you two were CEO of a company and you had to break the news to your staff that all of them no longer had a job, how would you do it? In a six to nine minute video, they have to download Quibi 4. Yeah, vertically formatted.

I hope it was not a mass Zoom layoff. Well, I think it's a little worse. So Katzenberg, he has a different method of laying off his staff. He chose to follow the mass firing to everyone by telling them to play this song to lift their spirits. Oh, God. Hey, I'm not giving up today.

There's nothing getting in my way. And if you knock, knock me over, I will get back up again. What was that? That was Get Back Up Again from the movie Trolls, which came out of Katzenberg's company, DreamWorks. I didn't get laid off, and just hearing that song, thinking about the idea of being laid off, was just like, nothing would feel worse than that.

Yeah, that would make me go from feeling, like, dejected to feeling homicidal. Yeah. You are engendering your ex-workforce with a hatred towards you that maybe didn't exist as potently as before. Yeah. They would have been flipping that office

on Murder House Flip. I had a golden arm, like, smack, right across the face. Honestly, that's the parting gift. Some people get a gold watch. Everybody should have gotten a golden arm. Well, the initial investment for Quibi was a whopping $1.75 billion.

That's with a B. And it's estimated that Quibi only brought in $3.3 million from subscriptions. And in the end, Variety says Roku bought a chunk of that catalog for less than $100 million. Quibi did have a few hundred million left, but they just gave that back to investors like, LOL, nevermind. So that's what happened with the money. Let's do a little where are they now? Katzenberg has produced some TV series since Quibi, such as The Now and Natural Born Narco, but it looks like he's shifted his focus and has been placing more bets in tech. Whitman is now the United States ambassador to Kenya. So I guess where are they now? Still super, super, super rich. All right. Before we go and before we say a quib-bye to this story, there are some silver linings that we want to mention.

We are positive people here on The Big Flop. So first off, to be clear, not all of the shows associated with Quibi were bad or even just like good bad. Some shows really pushed the envelope creatively and used the platform to do innovative things. Do you all remember when some celebs did a DIY remake of The Princess Bride and they just, like, shot it on their phones?

Yeah. Yeah, that was Quibi. One of their shows also won a couple of Emmys, Free Ray Sean, starring Laurence Fishburne and Jasmine Seafish-Jones. And people did like that they could watch any of their shows vertically or horizontally. So I guess if the content didn't work out, at least they managed to innovate the field of screen orientation.

The shows that survive as Roku originals on the Roku channel, these are all formatted in the horizontal because everything was filmed the two ways. So there was a safe zone in that middle square. If you picture like the cross that was Quibi, the tops and bottoms and the sides were all information you didn't need in order to understand the story.

That's the thing when you're watching the Roku original, you can sort of feel that the middle of the screen is where all of the important information is and the sides are extra material. But lost perhaps to history are the vertical format versions of those Quibis. So now that you both know the full tale of Quibi's demise, would you consider this a baby flop, a big flop, or a mega flop? I mean, mega flop? How many hundreds of millions were lost here?

It has to be a mega flop. Yeah. I don't know what scale the rest of the flops in this series are at, but that seems like a lot of money. Yeah, if we reserve mega flop for just trillions, then we're limiting ourselves. I think once you're in the billions, if it goes wrong, you're a mega flop. I mean, I guess you could say nobody died, but, you know, there's still Murder Flip House.

Someone had to die to make that show. You're ending up where the name of your entire thing is basically like a punchline. There's no recovering from that. And I do think not to blame it on COVID once again. Man, you really have it in for COVID. You will not let this go. There's one thing people should know about me. Not a fan of that COVID. But like, one compounding factor is the fact that you had hundreds, if not thousands of out of work comedians who are just sitting with their fingers on their phones

looking for something to punch at. And Quibi, I do think, was... It was just an easy punching bag at the time. So the biggest failure of all is that Jack Sparrowhouse was not a real show. And I will die before I let that idea go unproduced. Well, thank you so much to my lovely guests, Connor Ratliff and Matt Bellassai.

And thanks to you for listening to the premiere episode of The Big Flop. Come back next time to find out why energy and beer are two words that probably shouldn't go together. I'm joined by DJ EFN and Kanice Mobley to break down the short-lived blackout in a can, aka the original caffeinated for loco. These guys, they're going all the way till something happens. If you like The Big Flop, you can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

The Big Flop is a production of Wondery and Atwill Media, Hosted by me, Misha Brown. Produced and edited by Levi Sharp. Written by Marina Templesman. Engineered by Zach Rapone. Our executive producers are Rosie Guerin, Will Malnati, and Samantha Story for At Will Media. Developed by Christina Friel. Legal support provided by Carolyn Levin of Miller, Korzenik, Summers, Raymond. support provided by Carolyn Levin of Miller, Korzenik, Summers, Raymond. Producers for Wondery are Matt Beagle and Grant Rutter. Senior producer is Lizzie Bassett. Senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Managing producer is Ricky Wiebe. And executive producers are Morgan Jones and Marshall Louis for Wondery. We are on a sinking ship. We are on a sinking ship.