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Condé Nast, like all media players, has been forced to reimagine itself.
Over the past year, the company has laid off 5% of its staff, citing the impact of TikTok and other digital competition; reached a settlement with union members; and dealt with a decidedly choppy ad market.
Despite running that gauntlet, however, the media industry mainstay has notably not curtailed its ambitions to make a mark in film and television. In fact, the company is starting to see encouraging returns on its commitment to a print-to-screen pipeline. Condé Nast now has 14 projects in production or post-production set up with distributors like Amazon, Netflix, HBO and Warner Brothers, plus another 23 projects in development with independent financial backers.
Two titles just out this month are based on Vanity Fair pieces. Breath of Fire, a multi-part docuseries on HBO and Max, explores the multi-million-dollar Kundalini yoga industry and its scandalous leader Guru Jagat. Anatomy of Lies, a Peacock docuseries, traces the rise and fall of Grey’s Anatomy writer Elizabeth Finch. Each of the company’s five major brands – Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Wired, and The New Yorker – will have a film or series released this year under the Condé Nast Studios banner. Recent projects have included FX series The Secrets of Hillsong, Onyx series Black Twitter: A People’s History and theatrical feature Lee from Vogue Studios.
The roster has taken shape under the aegis of Helen Estabrook, Global Head of Film & Television, and Sarah Amos, VP, Development and Production. The pair have seen their portfolios grow more prominent since the exit last fall of Agnes Chu, onetime top programming exec at Disney+, as president of Condé Nast Entertainment. Because the company is privately held, the financials of the film and TV push are all but impossible to discern, but the output and volume have clearly risen despite the industry’s broader contraction.
“Even as the world around us continues to change, the core tenet that makes Condé Nast and these titles so relevant has not changed,” Amos said in an interview with Deadline. “And that allows us to keep doing our job even as our industry is a bit in turmoil.” Estabrook framed the operative question for her team this way: “What can we do to take a 100-year-old legacy media company and make it relevant for the next 100 years?”
Estabrook, who once ran Jason Reitman’s Right of Way Films and has production credits on Oscar-winning films as well as notable TV titles like Mrs. Fletcher and Casual, says she treats each magazine brand as thought it were a mini production outfit. “We were brought in” in 2021, she recalls, “to align more within and underneath the magazines.”
CNE has a long screen history, with the advent of YouTube and social media fueling the production of thousands of short-form pieces during the 2010s under the leadership of onetime CW and Lifetime exec Dawn Ostroff. While feature and series adaptations have existed for decades, the focus on them intensified after Ostroff left the company in 2018 (for a senior gig at Spotify) as buyer demand exploded amid the streaming boom.
While appetites have eased across the industry as most players cut back on spending, the bet Condé Nast is making is that the company’s pedigree will still enable it to cut a desirable figure in a crowded marketplace.
“The thing that has never changed, even as different strategies or approaches or efficiencies are found is really powerful journalism,” said Amos, who came to Condé Nast from Marvel’s new media division. “And that is what we need to do our jobs. We need great stories. We need editors and we need journalists and we need editors who are really passionate about finding the most compelling pieces of IP and characters and bringing them to life in print, and then we are able to take that and translate that to the screen.”
To that point, the job of an editor has evolved considerably since Graydon Carter, Anna Wintour and Tina Brown created the paradigm in the turn-of-the-century zenith of magazines. Staff meetings often include Estabrook and Amos, who track stories from idea stage to publication. Their remit does not include podcasts or other realms.
“”I dorkily say that we’re sort of ‘yes, and’-ing the work that they’re already doing,” Estabrook says of editorial colleagues. “We’re always trying to be additive and we’re always making sure that we are hoping to strengthen this brand so we can meet audiences where they are in different mediums.”
As unified as the effort may ideally be within the company, all producers face a reckoning when a distributor gets involved, particularly a powerful one.
Estabrook acknowledges the age-old question remains in play, but says Condé Nast’s imprimatur helps distribution partners check their worst instincts. Titles on company’s slate “all say to the audience that this is about quality and it’s about thoughtfulness,” she said. “And it’s about making sure that you know when you see one of these names on your screen, whether it’s on the internet or on your television screen that there has been thought and care put into it.” Viewers can expect something that’s not “sloppy” or “just thrown up there,” she added.
Any producer at any level has had to reconcile themselves with the algorithm, Amos acknoweldged. She jokes that she initially “lost sleep” realizing that most viewers had no idea that Last Chance U, a docuseries on Netflix, originated as an article in GQ. Since the streaming run of that show, from 2016 to 2020, Amos said, “We have transformed our reputation and our place in the industry.”
As evidence, she recalled a recent event at her daughter’s school in Brooklyn, “One of the random moms came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, I saw the Vanity Fair / Anatomy of Lies thing in Us Weekly. I’m so excited, I’ve got to go watch it tonight!'” she said with a smile. “That would not have happened three-and-a-half years ago.” Realizing that her “40-year-old mom crew is all watching” the show, she added, “made me feel really excited. Like, oh wow, what we’re doing is working.”
