One weekend in the summer of 2016, Byron Allen walked over to the house of one of his Malibu neighbors, Bob Weinstein, with a hunch about a shark. Allen, a stand-up comedian who had built a lucrative small-screen empire out of low-cost court TV shows and comedy programming, was eager to enter the film business. He wanted to buy a movie The Weinstein Co.’s Dimension Films was about to dump onto the straight-to-DVD market, 47 Meters Down, which starred Mandy Moore as a woman who makes an ill-advised decision to cage-dive in shark-infested waters while on vacation.
A box-office data nerd, Allen believed shark movies were a sure thing, and against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean that day, he and Weinstein agreed on a seven-figure price tag. 47 Meters Down would go on to earn $44 million at the box office for Allen’s Entertainment Studios, making it 2017’s highest-grossing independent film so far (beating out The Big Sick from Amazon/Lionsgate). It was the first move in Allen’s bold push into the film business—one he just bolstered by acquiring a potential Oscar player, the Christian Bale Western, Hostiles, in addition to two major purchases at the Toronto International Film Festival last month.
“I want to build a media company that rivals Warner Brothers, rivals Disney,” Allen said during in a recent interview at his company’s Century City headquarters. “That’s who I think about. Rupert Murdoch . . . Walt Disney. I think about the biggest media companies in the world. That’s what I’m chasing.”
Allen, 56, is given to audacious pronouncements—in his office’s elevator lobby hang framed inspirational quotes of his own (“Choose Greatness!!!” says one), while nearby stands a movie theater display of an open shark’s mouth. Early in his comedy career he decided that being the talent wasn’t nearly as secure as being the one who writes the checks, so he set about assembling his own entertainment company from his dining-room table. Now, Allen says, he intends to release 15 to 20 movies a year, a mixture of acquisitions and fully financed productions, and he has his sights set on that crowded, high-profile proving ground Bob and Harvey Weinstein once owned: awards season.
At Toronto, Allen spent $4 million each for Chappaquiddick, a drama starring Jason Clarke as a young Ted Kennedy, and Replicas, a thriller starring Keanu Reeves. Allen plans to release Chappaquiddick on December 8, with the promise of spending a robust $16 million on prints and advertising. He’ll be entering the marketplace at the busiest time of year for prestige dramas—and on the same day as Fox Searchlight’s awards contender The Shape of Water and Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World for Sony. He'll give Hostiles a limited release in December as well, and has promised to spend about $15 million on prints and advertising for the Western, followed by a wider release in January, according to Deadline.
“We step to them,” Allen said of his Oscars-season competitors. “That pie is an $11 billion pie at the box office. We are making it clear that we feel we deserve a seat at the table. We like playing the game. . . . We’re committed to getting that movie out there in a good and big way.”
For audiences who know Allen from his days as a family-friendly comic and TV host in the 1980s, this Captain of Industry-era of his career might seem a little disorienting. But, to him, it’s been decades in the making. When Allen moved to L.A. from Detroit at age 7, his mother took an internship at NBC, forging a professional path for them both. Allen tagged along to her workplace—she eventually joined the marketing and publicity departments at the network—and spent the 70s watching Johnny Carson host The Tonight Show from inside the theater, Bob Hope make his TV specials, and Redd Foxx tape Sanford and Son. “I thought, ‘What a wonderful way to go through life, making people laugh,’” Allen said. At 12, he wrote a spec script for Sanford and Son and got encouragement from the show’s writers. As a teen, he started performing on open-mic nights at the Comedy Store and earning $25 a joke as a writer for Jimmie Walker. After graduating from Fairfax High School, he appeared on The Tonight Show—on the same set where he’d done his homework—and immediately got a job hosting NBC’s Real People, an early and successful entrant in the reality-TV genre.
As the only child of a single mother, Allen said he developed a sense of responsibility early on, and an insatiable drive. At 19, he introduced himself to TV executive Al Masini after watching Masini pitch Entertainment Tonight to local affiliates at a broadcasting conference, and the executive became a mentor to the young comic, who decided TV production ownership was his path. “I wasn’t waiting for anyone to give me that opportunity,” Allen said.
While he was trying to convince local TV stations to carry his shows, his home went in and out of foreclosure 14 times and he relied on movie-junket food for meals. Today, Allen has 41 shows on the air—mostly low-cost programming on the seven HD networks he owns, such as Comedy.TV. In 2015 he bought the independent-film distributor Freestyle Releasing, which came with an unusual output deal with Netflix that pays for films in proportion to their box-office grosses.
As a black owner of a media company, Allen is a rarity in the business. He is a plaintiff in a $10 billion racial-discrimination lawsuit against Charter Communications that alleges bias harbored by executives has prevented them from licensing African-American-owned networks. He dropped a similar suit against AT&T in 2015 after the company agreed to distribute his networks on DirecTV and U-Verse. “I had a white executive say, ‘Why is it important for [your company] to be black-owned?’” Allen said. “I said, ‘Well, [with] your kids, would you be comfortable with me as an African-American man controlling the image of white kids and how white kids grow up and see themselves and how white kids are depicted in this world and shown to this world?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Why would you expect me to be comfortable with you controlling how my kids look at themselves and how the world looks at them?’ I have to have a seat at the table. I have to have a say on how we, as African-Americans, are produced and depicted around the world. Along the way, I'll be very fair to white people.’”
Allen hasn’t gotten every movie he’s wanted—he lost out on bids for Fox Searchlight’s Birth of a Nation—which was ultimately torpedoed by a scandal involving its director, Nate Parker—and Netflix’s Mudbound, which was the breakout of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. With 47 Meters Down, Allen said, he knew he had to spend big—$30 million on prints and advertising for his little, almost straight-to-DVD shark movie—to convince audiences and filmmakers of his seriousness.
“I think you develop strong instincts when you’re a comedian,” Allen said. “You have to pay your bills by making people laugh every six seconds . . . or not. I had to do that for 22 years. I had to travel this country and stand in front of the audience and share my thoughts and either make them laugh or not. When you do that for 22 years, you develop a muscle that's unique and an instinct that’s strong. You get a sense of, ‘That movie will work.’”
