Sometime in the near future, the NBA will sign a new TV contract that will roughly triple the value of its current deal. The league is likely to get a $70 billion-plus windfall (from ESPN and, most likely, NBC Sports and Amazon) — even…
By now everyone in Hollywood seems to accept that streaming is a cutthroat business. It may not be zero sum (most studies suggest that consumers will pay for about four streaming services at a time), but it is mighty close to it. And with…
Six months ago, a deal to sell Paramount Global (or at least control of the company via Shari Redstone’s National Amusements) seemed all but certain. Deep conversations were happening with a consortium led by David Ellison’s Skydance and…
In the first episode of When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s bleak drama about the Central Park Five, Linda Fairstein, then head of the sex crimes unit investigating the case, gives an order to dispatch an army of officers to Harlem. “Every…
If 2023 was the year of “streamflation,” to use a term coined by the consulting firm KPMG, 2024 is shaping up to be a fast sequel — Streamflation Part 2: They’ll Keep Paying. Streaming services across video and music are raising prices…
Within minutes of the actors strike ending on Nov. 9, Ryan Reynolds was making plans to get back to London and the set of Deadpool & Wolverine, one of the many movies shut down in mid-July when the walkout commenced. He and director Shawn…
At the Fox upfront on May 13, the network’s free ad-supported streaming service, Tubi, got just as much stage time as its traditional broadcast channels. Those so-called FAST platforms are becoming a bigger part of the entertainment…
For decades, TV shows lived and died by their ratings among adults 18-49, the demographic sweet spot for advertisers to reach a wide swath of potential customers with money to spend but without the lifelong habits about how to spend it.…
Lately, it seems as if there are new headlines every day about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence — everything from the technology ruthlessly taking our jobs to it perilously increasing our carbon footprint to fuel the necessary…
Veteran unscripted producer Wendy Miller was attending a gathering for women over 40 in unscripted television who are unemployed when she had the idea. Though the get-together could easily have turned maudlin, one woman brought levity to…
“The gatekeepers are gone,” Colin Jost told a roomful of journalists at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 27, before pivoting to the punchline: “Did you know that 90 percent of people now get their news exclusively from…
In the last week of March, NFL officials and team owners huddled at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando for the league’s annual winter meetings. The gathering is an important date on the NFL calendar, with changes often made to the rulebook and…
Peak TV may be over, but even in a time of industrywide contraction, another era is forging ahead unabated: Welcome to Peak Franchise TV. Spinoffs of successful series are almost as old as network TV itself — the first ones premiered in…
If the 2023 upfronts were about disruption, the 2024 upfronts are about Disruption with a capital “D.” Last year’s events were quite literally disrupted, with striking WGA writers on picket lines outside the New York City venues and the…
Two years ago, Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, ventured to Bentonville, Arkansas, with his management team to talk creators — and chocolate. Donaldson, a giant on YouTube (252 million-plus subscribers), was aiming to leverage his…
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…