The Fixer: How Variety Vanguard Honoree Tony Vinciquerra Reimagined Sony Pictures Entertainment for the Streaming Era

After seven and a half years at the helm, Tony Vinciquerra will leave a significant handprint on the 100-year history of the studio now known as Sony Pictures Entertainment when he steps down as CEO on Jan. 2. His legacy will be measured as much by what he didn’t do during his time as the top as it will by the initiatives he took to restructure and reimagine the company for its second century.

The seasoned executive, who orchestrated a much-needed turnaround of the studio, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Variety Vanguard Award recognizing individuals who have made a significant contribution to the global business of television. The kudo will be presented to Vinciquerra on Oct. 21 at the Mipcom global content market and conference in Cannes.

In shoring up one of Hollywood’s foundational studios, Vinciquerra restored the health of a key industry employer. For steering the ship through tough industry headwinds, the onset of the streaming wars, the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 writers and actors strikes, Sony Group Corp. chairman-CEO Kenichiro Yoshida hailed the studio chief for his “deep experience and expertise in the entertainment space, his strategic vision and his outstanding leadership.”

Vinciquerra will hand the CEO reins to his hand-picked successor, Ravi Ahuja, who is currently SPE’s president and chief operating officer. Vinciquerra will remain with SPE as non-executive chairman through December 2025.

“He’s got the experience that we need in the person that is going to run the company. And he’s very calm, very level-headed, very smart,” Vinciquerra says of Ahuja’s promotion.

Under Vinciquerra’s leadership, SPE was deliberate in its positioning at a moment of massive transition for the pay TV sector. Sony did not join its larger rival studios in rushing to build direct-to-consumer streaming platforms. The one money-losing streamer that SPE had under its roof when Vinciquerra arrived in mid-2017 — Crackle — was sold off less than two years later.

“Early on, we decided not to go into the general entertainment streaming business. All of these companies had jumped in feet first and really didn’t have a plan, except that they were going to be desperate for subscribers. And instead of us diving in to do the same thing, we made the decision to be the arms dealer, and we bulked up on our bench of [TV] creators and did very, very well with it,” Vinciquerra tells Variety.

Instead, SPE embraced Sony Corp’s strength with anime production through its Japan-based Aniplex banner to assemble a subscription anime streamer that taps into the rabid fandom for the serial animation format. Today, SPE’s Crunchyroll streamer boasts more than 15 million subscribers, and it delivers a profit.

“We could see that [anime fans] were growing and it was relatively inexpensive product. We weren’t spending $5 million an episode. We’re spending $200,000 to $400,000 an episode. So we jumped in with both feet, and now we’re in a good place with Crunchyroll,” Vinciquerra says. “We’re still searching for the next very specific, genre-based streaming service. We think there’s more to do there.”

Vinciquerra’s reinvention campaign also included getting a grip on SPE’s more than 20 in-house production banners, which were spread far and wide in Europe, Latin America and Asia to a degree that didn’t make financial sense for the studio.

“We decided to focus on the places where we thought we could really win,” Vinciquerra says. Chief among them is the U.K., where international TV production chief Wayne Garvie has steered SPE to scoop up prosperous production outfits, including Jane Tranter’s Bad Wolf (“His Dark Materials”), Eleven (“Sex Education”) and Eleventh Hour Films (“Alex Riter”).

Vinciquerra’s first 18 months at the studio was marked by a whirlwind of restructurings, layoffs and management changes. He also sold or shuttered dozens of international cable channels that were a drag on earnings. He had strong convictions about what needed to be done, drawing from his experience that includes 10 years of running Fox Networks Group and six years as a media advisor to private equity giant TPG.

“I was on the board of Pandora, I was on the board of DirecTV, I was on the board of Qualcomm and a bunch of other companies. So I saw very clearly what was happening in our business from the outside,” Vinciquerra recalls. “When I got here, the company was in rough shape.”

He had strong feelings about what needed to change but he did second-guess himself occasionally during the go-go years leading up to the shock of the pandemic.

“I questioned myself — am I right not getting in the streaming service business? Because everybody told me how stupid I was for not doing it and getting rid of the cable networks. People here questioned that a lot,” he recalls.

Vinciquerra stuck with his instincts to streamline SPE operations. The need to rehabilitate struggling assets has been a constant in his career, ever since he got his first job in radio sales in Albany, N.Y. Years later, he learned an important lesson when he he took over as general manager of Westinghouse Broadcasting’s WBZ-TV Boston. It was just about the time the parent company slashed costs and took the station’s head count to 200 employees, down from 350.

“You have to have a critical mass of employees to understand what the problem is, how to solve the problem and what to do to get to the place you want it to be,” he says. “Once you get a critical mass of people believing in it, the naysayersgo underground.”

Vinciquerra stayed in broadcasting, working as a senior leader for CBS Television Stations and for Hearst in the 1990s when that company went on a station-buying spree. He credits Peter Chernin, the respected media investor and former head of 20th Century Fox and president of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., for bringing him into the showbiz big leagues. Chernin pushed Vinciquerra to segue into overseeing the Fox broadcast network as well as its cable properties.

It was a goal that really paid off — especially as Vinciquerra remembers trying to talk Chernin out of giving him the job at first. Years later, he’s grateful that Chernin didn’t listen to him.

“Logically, it didn’t make any sense to hire me to run the Fox broadcast network because I’d never had any network experience,” Vinciquerra recalls. I ran TV stations. It’s a very different business.”

Among his accomplishments at Sony, Vinciquerra cites overcoming two very different challenges. When he took the role in 2017, Vinciquerra told the corporate leaders that the studio was missing opportunities by not working more closely with talent and content franchises owned by Sony Corp.’s PlayStation gaming division and in the Sony Music division. The Sony leadership in Tokyo was supportive. But from his experience at Fox, he also knew such collaborations could not be dictated from above.

“It doesn’t work if you say, ‘You do this.’ You have to get the [creative] groups to work together and get their creative juices flowing,” he says.

Sony convened about 40 key creative executives from gaming and pictures, put them in a large conference room and supplied them with a whiteboard. The directive to both teams from Tokyo was to find ways to work together “without worry too much about who’s going to pay for what,” Vinciquerra recalls.

“They spent two days together and they came up with 12 or 14 different projects to work on together. We’ve done seven or eight now,” he says. The list includes HBO’s acclaimed drama series adaptation “The Last of Us,” which is heading to its strike-delayed sophomore season, 2022’s “Uncharted” and 2023’s “Gran Turismo” and “Twisted Metal.”

On the music side, Bruce Springsteen is working on an unscripted project with Sony’s TV division. Bad Bunny, the top-selling reggaeton star, had a small role in 2022’s Brad Pitt starrer “Bullet Train,” and he will again appear in an upcoming Sony film.

Another notable milestone during his tenure was the extensive renovation and refurbishment of SPE’s massive lot in Culver City, which was once the hallowed ground of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Some of the studio’s soundstages hadn’t been maintained well for decades. Wood planks between the walls were buckling, creating a fire hazard among other problems, not to mention the other aging infrastructure inside. A strong earthquake might have easily knocked one or more down.

Early on in his run, Vinciquerra’s team hammered out a five-year plan for making infrastructure upgrades and improvements. And then COVID happened. With the lot empty of staff and production activity for months, most of the heavy-duty construction work was completed in 18 months.

“We ended up redoing virtually every wall and every stage through the rest of the pandemic,” he says. “Even now, we’re not quite done.”

The Culver City lot is such a storied part of Hollywood history that one of its structures — known as the Scenic Arts Building — has been designated a historic landmark that cannot be radically altered. The only problem — the structure itself was about to collapse from age and decay.

SPE’s solution was to erect a new multi-story building that abuts Scenic Arts, which gives support to the 1920s-era construction. The Scenic Arts facility was built with an ingenious system of pulleys that allowed directors to film scenes against large-scale painted backdrops offering everything from New York City street scenes.

The historical elements of Scenic Arts were preserved, but the interior was redesigned to function as meeting spaces, which is now available for rent by outside entities.

Meanwhile, the new building was purpose-built to be a holding area for “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” audience members, who regularly come to the lot for tapings of SPE’s venerable game shows. It’s conveniently located near the “Jeopardy” and “Wheel” stages. Of course it’s complete with a gift shop.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. That’s been a guiding principle for Vinciquerra throughout his career. The past seven-plus years at Sony has been an invigorating experience that required him to summon all of the skills he’s developed over the decades, and more.

“I’ve always loved the intellectual challenge of setting a strategy to deal with a problem,” Vinciquerra says. “Every job I’ve ever had has had some massive change going on. Transforming organizations is second nature to me now.”

Every situation has its own challenges, but Vinciquerra finds himself leaning on a few simple rules he’s come to depend on.

“You keep your ego out of it. You hire good people and you let them take the bows for good work,” he says. “I get my satisfaction from watching the people I work with do well. And there’s a lot of people around the industry who I worked with have done really well. I’m really proud and happy about that.”