Mother Nature threw Ravi Ahuja a curve ball for his first interview since taking the reins as president and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), conducted at the Variety Summit at CES today at the Aria in Las Vegas. While his conversation with Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton covered a wide range of hot studio strategies — from deal structures to maximizing Sony IP — the most pressing topic was the devastating wildfires burning in Los Angeles.
“Obviously, the situation…is very fluid,” Ahuja said. “You want everyone to be OK. Some of our employees have lost homes, many are displaced, but then there are other parts of the city that are OK. The decision is: Do we close our lot? Our lot has its own power and actually is in some ways a refuge for some people. So we strongly encourage people to work from home, but are keeping the lot open.”
Ahuja took over on Jan. 2 for outgoing SPE president and CEO Tony Vinciquerra, who had run the Culver City, Calif.-based studio since 2017 and will remain onboard in an advisory role as non-executive chairman through the end of the year.
Under Vinciquerra’s leadership, SPE made a number of key acquisitions — including anime-centric platform Crunchyroll and U.K.-based production outfits such as Bad Wolf and Eleventh Hour Films. It also stood apart from other Hollywood studios, which went all-in with bespoke in-house streaming platforms, instead choosing to be an agnostic producer of content for the global market.
“We’ve got to sell to other people, so we’ve got to have the highest standards in direct-to-consumer,” said Ahuja, who referred to the studio as “theatrical first” and an “arms dealer” when it comes to TV. “I thought it was a great decision [by Vinciquerra] not to do what everyone else was doing, a general entertainment streaming service, but instead to focus on a particular area where we could be different” with Crunchyroll, which is extremely popular with the Gen Z and Gen Alpha demos.
Going forward, Ahuja says SPE’s strategy will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. One of the key areas he’s eager to evolve is the cost-plus deals currently favored by streaming services, and he’s willing to trade upfront cash for shorter windows on the streamers’ exclusive rights. “We have said to streamers [that] we will make it for less of a premium, but we want it back faster,” Ahuja said. ”So we’ll believe in the success of the show. I think the streamers, while there’s an intellectual openness to that, they haven’t quite gotten there.”
“I think we’ve just been through this huge gold rush,” he added. “The peak TV thing and a lot of the business practices got skewed. And I think some of them will be completely new and different, but some will return to normal because they just don’t make sense.”
Ahuja joined SPE in March 2021 as the chairman of its Global Television Studios and its corporate development operations, and was promoted to president and COO of SPE in March 2024. He was one of the key architects of the studio’s June 2024 acquisition of dine-in movie chain Alamo Drafthouse, managed under its newly established Sony Pictures Experiences division.
A potential area for growth is further collaborations with sister subsidiary Sony Interactive Entertainment and its PlayStation Studios division to harvest video game IP for film and TV spinoffs. They’ve already scored a hit with their adaptation of Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic franchise “The Last of Us,” which will premiere its second season on Max in April.
Ahuja said SPE gives “a little bit of a push” to encourage these inter-divisional collabs, but he stressed that the projects must be “organic” with involvement from the game’s creator.
“You have to have somebody who really lives it and feels it,” he explained. “Otherwise, if each group is kind of doing their own thing, it can be a bit of a mess. We don’t have a committee that forces people to do things and says there must be four collaborations this year. It’s collaboration without bureaucracy, so everybody feels good about it and leans into it.”
Ahuja also touted the success of SET India, the third most popular YouTube channel in the world, and SPE’s multiplatform play with the “Karate Kid” franchise, which will follow its successful six-season run of the Netflix series “Cobra Kai” with a new theatrical feature “Karate Kid: Legends,” starring Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan, set for release in May.
Prior to coming to Sony, Ahuja was CFO of the Fox Networks Group, then spent a year and a half as president of business operations and CFO of Walt Disney Television, where he was instrumental in merging Disney/ABC Television with Fox Networks following the Walt Disney Company’s acquisition of Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019. Ahuja departed Disney in November 2020.
Asked how a boy from Ohio came to be a CEO in Hollywood, Ahuja credited his endless curiosity about the media business, leadership and winning business strategies.
“It’s really just building skills along the way there,” Ahuja said. “I suppose before the Fox-Disney deal, I viewed it as I was going to stay at Fox forever. But then things happen, and you just try to keep growing and you try to keep learning. And then you find the right thing — like the place that I’m in now — and you do your best.”