Where this was said
The Business of Bait and Hamlet
At 21:42 · chapter starts 19:00
Mendoza brings Hollywood's bigger challenges into frame — shrinking cinema audiences, streaming wars, AI, IP consolidation — and asks how Ahmed factors business thinking into his creative decisions. His answer is layered. Hamlet, he argues, has a long tail: contemporary Shakespeare adaptations endure, and there hasn't been one since Branagh's 1997 film. Bait was designed to break through in pop culture — and touch wood, it has. But the deeper insight is about how he defines success. The projects that have worked best, he says, are the ones where he wasn't chasing a commercial result. Bait's internal definition of success was genre-level: can Episode 2 be a Bond film? Can Episode 3 be a Bollywood soap opera? Can Episode 4 be a Linklater walk-and-talk? Nail those, and everything else follows. If you dance like no one's watching, that's the best dancing. [1] — Riz Ahmed "Episode 2 is a Bond film. Episode 3 is a Bollywood soap opera. Episode 4 is a Linklater walk-and-talk. Bait's definition of success wasn't …" 20:00
Ahmed notes there hasn't been a major contemporary Shakespeare adaptation since Kenneth Branagh's 1997 Hamlet, giving his own modern Hamlet a clear long-tail cultural argument.
Episode 2 is a Bond film. Episode 3 is a Bollywood soap opera. Episode 4 is a Linklater walk-and-talk. Bait's definition of success wasn't ratings — it was whether the team could pull off six wildly different genre experiments within a single story.
Trust your gut on creative decisions — then surround yourself with hard-nosed people who will tell you it will never sell. That's the balance. Don't try to hold both things yourself; outsource the commercial reality check.
