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Nearly twenty years ago, Franklin Leonard started publishing his Black List which collected “an annual survey of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays.” The goal was to help undiscovered projects find funding and backers. More than 400 of the forgotten works on his list were eventually produced, including blockbusters like Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech. His efforts have … Read more
The Japanese anime series One Piece just hit its milestone 25th anniversary and has run for more than 1,000 episodes. The show has become a worldwide phenomenon and is the most popular manga comic story of all time based on sales, with a Guinness World Record to prove it. One interesting secret of its success … Read more
How does a company that offers more than a billion hours of programming make it less intimidating to find something to watch? This is a problem Netflix has been working on for well over a decade. In a rare behind-the-scenes interview, Fast Company shared a Q&A with Netflix VP of design Steve Johnson about how exactly Netflix … Read more
If you were cast into the role of a lifetime at the age of 11 and went on to play one of the most beloved bespectacled characters in modern movie (or book) history, what would you do when the series was over? Plenty of child stars struggle to leave the past behind, choosing to either escape … Read more
HBO announced they will now force people to wait four days before sharing on YouTube the highlights from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Of course, fans of the show online were pointlessly indignant. Their fury demonstrates exactly what the problem has become for most entertainment creators and news organizations alike online … people expect content to be … Read more
Last month my wife and I binge watched For All Mankind on Apple+. The show was highly original, smartly written and now that we’re done with Season 4, we are stuck waiting for a new season and we miss it. This is a familiar emotion for any of us who have gotten into a new … Read more
The first big meme of the year is Mickey Mouse finally entering the public domain, which means creators can use the iconic Disney character to create their own projects. Or does it? As this video explains, there is a difference between a character that is copyrighted and one that has a trademark. Not to mention there … Read more
Netflix’s latest reality show Deep Fake Love is portraying a dark potential future. The concept is simple and diabolical: a bunch of couples go on a reality show where they are separated and told to live in villas surrounded by hot single people. Then, every week they have to watch videos of their partners seeming to hook up with others. … Read more
An increasingly popular narrative arc in storytelling is to take a classic bad guy and humanize him to flip the story. The bad guy isn’t intrinsically bad – but becomes that way through some sort of trauma.
One thing that right and left wing media personalities have in common: they are both desperate to be hated. Attracting the hate of their ideological opposites has become a sad metric for success. If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re not doing your job. The same mentality has entered into the world of business and entrepreneurship. … Read more
Non-Obvious Thinking is my upcoming book about the 4 secrets of becoming a non-obvious thinker - coming 10/01!
Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company and the 3-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of ten books.
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In addition to Non-Obvious Thinking, Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.
