Jeffrey Katzenberg Fired Everyone at Quibi —Then Quoted a 'Trolls' Song

It’s St. Patrick’s Day. Four years ago today, my eldest was diagnosed with cancer (he’s OK now!), so my family tends to keep things low-key—- just a quiet work-at-home day together, acknowledging the milestone while also just getting through it.

This morning, I asked Spotify to play something upbeat to set the mood. The second song it picked right after “Build Me Up, Buttercup” was “Get Back Up Again,” performed by Anna Kendrick in the 2016 film Trolls. Naturally, this was the exact moment one of my daughters walked into the kitchen, catching me listening to a song from Trolls. The mocking commenced immediately.

Later, after the twins baked muffins, they brought this up again — to mock me, of course — only for all the kids (who were four and nine when Trolls came out) to launch into a hilariously detailed recap of the entire movie, complete with dramatic line readings, including the classic “Singing killed my grandmother!” The retelling spiraled into tangents, and because my eldest seemingly knows even more useless pop-culture facts than I do, they managed to connect Trolls to something I’d never heard before, which brings me to this article:

Remember Quibi? Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form video platform—the $1.75 billion answer to YouTube that assumed people would clamor for eight-minute episodes of a revived Punk’d or a series of ten-minute installments of Dummy, starring Anna Kendrick? That show, by the way, was based on creator Cody Heller’s real-life discovery that her boyfriend, Dan Harmon (yes, that Dan Harmon), owned a sex doll.

Quibi lasted all of six months, which is wild considering how desperate COVID-era America was for new content (it launched a month into lockdowns). But here’s the part I didn’t know: When Katzenberg announced Quibi’s shutdown, he attempted to lift the spirits of his newly unemployed staff by suggesting — on a company-wide video call — that they listen to Anna Kendrick’s “Get Back Up Again.”

Needless to say, it did not go over well.

For the record, Roku bought Quibi’s entire library for $100 million, so presumably, somewhere in the depths of The Roku Channel, you can still find a reboot of The Fugitive starring Kiefer Sutherland, and a fan-made recreation of The Princess Bride.

Bad move for an employer, but honestly, it was kind of the perfect song for the family to hear this morning.