Inside a Confidential End-of-Year Presentation From Sony Pictures' CFO
The deep trove of documents stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment has taught us that Sony employees revile Adam Sandler and make very sad Powerpoints. Now, a confidential 2011 end-of-year presentation from SPE CFO David Hendler further shows how the company views itself, and how its employees view the company.
For instance, in 2005 Sony Pictures had the worst year in the company's history. Here, according to Hendler, are the movies to blame:
If you don't remember any of these movies it's because they all were terrible—and, from Sony's perspective, lost tons of money or barely made any at all. (Zatuhra, by the way, is a very real movie that Sony poured $60-plus million into, and there's no way you have any recollection of it. But it did star Josh Hutcherson and Kristen Stewart, just before anyone cared about them.)
Hendler didn't really like Sony's 2010 crop of movies either.
David Hendler is, at the very least, an honest critic. All of those movies suck.
The presentation then moved onto a survey of the SPE finance department designed to measure morale. SPE finance employees have two main gripes with their company: they don't get enough "rewards" and the company is not innovative enough. The latter one seems like a problem.
The survey also found that SPE finance employees all hate their jobs until they've been at Sony for over 20 years and are probably millionaires.
As you can see, the "My Job and Career" portion of the survey gets negative scores from every group except the employees that have been at SPE at least two decades. You'll also notice that all SPE finance employees hate their bosses regardless of how long they have worked there.
Here you can see how much SPE pollutes the earth:
And, finally, Hendler went over the company's finances.
As of 2011, SPE was projecting $8.5 billion in revenue and $365 million in earnings in 2012, with both those numbers steadily rising over the subsequent four years. You may not be shocked to learn that these numbers proved to be wildly optimistic: by October of last year, many of these projections were slashed. The 2013-2014 year, in particular, was going to be particularly tough for SPE in part because the Channing Tatum/Jamie Foxx film White House Down fell flat at the box office.
Now, of course, Sony has many other things to worry about.
Previously in Sony Pictures Entertainment hacking: