Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren didn’t mince any words. “CEO pay is out of control,” she posted on April 22, singling out Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, whose team has had a rocky road integrating two companies since the…
Whatever fate befalls Paramount Global after the smoke clears, one of the Hollywood Trivial Pursuit questions someday will be which heavy hitters have issued statements of support for Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Paramount’s holding…
“I have no illusions,” Oscar winning-director Damien Chazelle said on a podcast in March. “I won’t get a budget of Babylon size any time soon, or at least not on this next one.” Chazelle was reflective about his 2022 Paramount Pictures…
It was another tumultuous year in Hollywood thanks to the dual labor strikes in 2023, the fallout on the film pipeline and the box office remaining below pre-COVID pandemic levels, among other factors. The positive: the global box office…
On a visit to Anaheim in April, a crowd of parkgoers wearing Loki horns and Ratatouille chef hats cheered as a robotic Spider-Man swung through the air and slid upside down to the ground at Disney California Adventure’s Avengers Campus.…
In the stock market, the story is everything. If you are a public company, you want to tell a story about your business. A story of growth, of ambition, of what your future holds and what your ceiling can be. When it works, it can send…
Just minutes before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was set to get underway in April 2023, New York Post editor-in-chief Keith Poole and star columnist Miranda Devine were on a mission to find an extra seat. Inside the Washington…
The moment that it started to seem possible that Bob Iger could lose the battle to keep dissident shareholder Nelson Peltz off the Disney board was on March 21, when leading proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services announced…
The Disney family may have given up the reins of its business decades ago, but there is still no shortage of powerful families in media holding sway. Shari Redstone controls Paramount Global, though for how long remains unclear as she…
If there is one craze that’s taken hold on Wall Street, it is the growth potential of generative artificial intelligence. “If we succeed, everyone who uses our services will have a world-class AI assistant to help get things done,” Meta…
If Bob Iger were a Marvel superhero, his power would be persuasion. The Disney CEO has long leaned on his ability to convince others of his plans. From film and TV writers, directors and stars, to Disney shareholders, to the company’s own…
While David Zaslav and Bob Iger’s tax-optimization strategy of deleting films and TV shows from their streamers has triggered plenty of agita among creators, the custodians of Hollywood’s digital era have an even greater fear: wholesale…
Europe is staking its claim to be the world’s digital cop, with a series of new laws aimed at regulating the world’s biggest tech companies. Following last year’s Digital Services Act, which targeted abuse on social media, comes the…
In July 2023, near the peak of animosity between scribes and studios during the writers strike, a picket outside ABC’s The View in New York welcomed an ally: Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. Behind closed doors, the writers union…
On March 4, major Hollywood crew unions began negotiating their health and pension benefits with studios and streamers, with Hollywood Teamsters head Lindsay Dougherty saying, “We will strike if we have to” during the talks. But some Los…
Corporate board room proxy battles can be frustratingly unpredictable. Even a company confident in its leadership and strategy cannot afford complacency when someone is seeking to depose board directors. It’s something Disney CEO Bob Iger…
Just weeks after the company he founded entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy last May, Shane Smith jetted to the French Riviera. But this wasn’t a vacation for the 54-year-old flamboyant former Vice CEO to drown his sorrows. Smith landed in…
The first-ever television commercial ran on July 1, 1941, during a Brooklyn Dodgers-Philadelphia Phillies baseball game airing on the local New York TV station WNBT. The 10-second spot, for Bulova Watches, featured a graphic of a Bulova…
Picture this: In a future not too far away, HBO is mulling whether to greenlight a new Game of Thrones spinoff but is on the fence about the project. So instead of dumping tens of millions of dollars to shoot a pilot it might wind up…
In the bowels of the Washington Hilton in April, just hours before the White House Correspondents’ dinner, several ABC News staffers were seen hastily carrying furniture, including couches and high-top tables, out of a room on the terrace…
Just over a year ago, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was set to take Marvel Studios to the next level. A new villain was going to be introduced, setting the stage for several years’ worth of storytelling. And the movie itself was a…
A highly amusing, albeit scathing New York Times restaurant review of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar that went viral in 2012 is being used by attorneys acting for the Times in their lawsuit against OpenAI to illustrate just how…
Not long after he returned as Disney’s CEO in late 2022, Bob Iger sat down with Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s head of parks and experiences, and Sean Shoptaw, the company’s head of games, to be briefed about the media habits of young consumers.…
When Vince McMahon stepped into the New York Stock Exchange on Jan. 23, he was on hand to celebrate what was supposed to be a triumph for TKO Group Holdings, the company for which he was executive chairman, and the owner of the WWE, the…
In the basement of a car dealership in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district last spring The Messenger chairman and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein addressed a throng of New York’s media elite. Finkelstein was there to unveil his grand plans for a new…
The runaway success of Suits on Netflix in 2023 gave the show the biggest year ever in the short history of streaming viewing measurement. It also headlined a banner year for library series (aka shows that ended their run years ago) across…
In Netflix’s global smash hit Squid Game, the penultimate challenge sees the last few surviving competitors make their way across a glass bridge. One wrong move, and the player falls to their demise. But as the players progressed, they hit…
The end of Scott Stuber’s seven-year tenure as head of film at Netflix did not come as a shock. But it had seemed to be coming for so long that one producer who’s done business with the streamer says when he heard that it had finally…
By 2018, Will Compton, a 28-year-old backup linebacker on a one-year contract with the Tennessee Titans, knew his playing days were numbered. Contemplating a career after football, he considered going into real estate or coaching but…
According to his resignation announcement, Kevin Merida’s abrupt Jan. 9 exit as executive editor of the Los Angeles Times came about through a “mutual agreement” with the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech magnate turned…