Business Features
Netflix Spikes the Football: Behind Its NFL Megadeal
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 its media deals always a hot topic. This year, commissioner Roger Goodell revealed that […]
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Peak TV Is Over, Welcome to Peak IP
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 the late 1950s. The current state of the business, however, with its nearly […]
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An Asteroid Is About to Hit Upfronts
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 annual presentations to advertisers blunted by a noted lack of star power, as actors proved unwilling […]
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From MrBeast to Logan Paul: Why Wall Street Is Infatuated With Influencers
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 audience to build a real-world business: a candy line called Feastables. And Walmart, based in Bentonville, signed on as a […]
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The Hollywood CEO Mega Pay Chart: Top Executives’ Compensation Revealed
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 mega-merger that created the Hollywood conglomerate, dealing with a high debt load and shoring up profits. Zaslav […]
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As Paramount Steers Into Unknown, David Ellison Woos A-Listers to Boost Flagging Bid
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 company, National Amusements Inc. — and which didn’t. Even as the Paramount special committee passed on the offer from David Ellison’s […]
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Why It’s Never Been Easier to Land in Director’s Jail
“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 epic that starred Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, received mixed reviews and grossed $63 […]
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Studio Profit Report: A Year of Major Transition
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 jumped 31 percent to $33.9 billion, led by Barbenheimer. But TV studios’ financials were hit by […]
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Disney Bets $60B Its Parks Will Power the Future
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. Across the way, at Disneyland, the wait times for the sleek battle ride Rise of […]
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Netflix Subscriber Numbers Fueled a Decade of Frenzied Streaming Bets. That Chapter Is Over
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 your share price soaring (just look at Nvidia and […]
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How MAGA Took Back Murdochland
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 Hilton hotel, the pair had a very special guest that they needed to accommodate and their […]
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Bob Iger Bruised, But Not Broken, After Disney Fight
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 its support for the activist investor. Days later, the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) took it a step […]
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