David Reads The Trades

David Reads The Trades: May 6, 2026

Toplines

  • Super Mario Galaxy opened to $131.7 million domestic per Universal, slightly below the $146 million opening of Super Mario Brothers in 2023 but in line with expectations.
  • The Drama, starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, opened to approximately $15 million for A24 — matching Challengers’ opening weekend.
  • Project Hail Mary held 57% of its audience in its third weekend with another $30 million, though it appears unlikely to reach $300 million domestic or $300 million international.
  • Hopper has just passed $150 million domestic.
  • The total weekend box office hit nearly $200 million.
  • CBS is replacing its late-night programming with Byron Allen’s syndicated Comics Unleashed in the 11:35 p.m. slot, effectively abandoning original late-night television.
  • The WGA reached a new deal with the AMPTP, with a notably less adversarial tone under new AMPTP negotiator Greg Hessinger; DGA and SAG deals are expected to follow shortly.
  • Gulf States funding for the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery was reconfirmed at approximately $24 billion, including commitments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar Investment Authority, and Abu Dhabi — information that was known months ago despite being treated as breaking news.
  • Guy Lodge has been elevated to chief film critic at Variety, replacing Peter DeBruge, who left to run South by Southwest.
  • Dune Part 3 IMAX tickets are going on sale months ahead of release, following the model used for The Odyssey.
  • The Alien 3 assembly cut — roughly 30-40 minutes longer than the theatrical version — has landed on HBO Max.
  • The Glenn Powell/Judd Apatow comedy has been titled The Comeback King, with Powell playing a country western star in free fall. Universal is releasing.

A Personal Note Before the News

Before I get into any of this, a bit of personal news: my godson Darius and his lovely partner — I’m honestly not sure of their official status — just welcomed a baby girl. Tatiana was born on Easter Day over in Hawaii. I don’t know if that makes her my godniece or what, but congratulations to all involved.

Super Mario Galaxy and the Problem with How We Talk About Box Office

Super Mario Galaxy opened this weekend a little below Super Mario Brothers but not significantly so. Universal is reporting $131.7 million, which is great. It’s not quite the $146 million that the first film did three years ago, but it is what it was expected to be.

And that’s where I keep getting stuck. This constant celebration of the miraculous nature of the most expected outcomes is not a healthy methodology for how we talk about box office. Obviously, Super Mario Galaxy and movies like it are critical to getting to the bigger annual number. But when these movies come out, they’re not a surprise. Thank God they didn’t fail, yes, but nobody should be saying “Oh my God, I can’t believe Mario Galaxy did almost as much as the first one.” That’s the expectation. That’s why they’re making them. That’s why they’re putting the money into it.

There’s been a schism in the box office world for 20 years now, with these giant tentpole movies on one side. People who aren’t really knowledgeable about box office talk about how these films are everything, the whole thing, that’s all there is. Meanwhile, people in the independent world complain about these movies eating everything else. The way I see it, and have for quite a long time, is that what happened to the box office reminds me of Soldier Field in Chicago.

Soldier Field is a great old stadium, 80 or 90 years old, right on Lake Michigan. When they wanted to improve it, they basically built a modern facility on top of the old one — glass, skyboxes, modern features — planted right on top of this ancient stone structure. It looked like an alien ship had landed on an archaeological site. Actually, I was channel surfing yesterday and caught a bit of The Silver Chalice, that terrible movie that technically introduced Paul Newman. The plot involves an artisan who’s asked to create an ornate silver chalice to hold the cup that Christ drank from — the Holy Grail. The cup itself is nothing, just a plain vessel with no uniqueness. The chalice is this very ornate thing built around it to honor the idea of Jesus. That’s kind of what happened at Soldier Field, and it’s kind of my point about box office.

When CG evolved in the early 2000s — really 2002, with Spider-Man as the kickoff, the first $100 million opening weekend — the world changed in terms of box office. Through the ’90s, exhibition had gone through bankruptcies and reconfigured into multiplexes that were not as big as they’d gotten during that period where they were doing 30-plus screens at some of these places. That doesn’t really happen anymore because it was just a bad choice. The standard now is in the teens: a few bigger theaters and some smaller ones, about 50-50 in a lot of these houses. The design is that you can expand the number of seats when you have a big opening like Mario Galaxy.

That’s why you don’t see sellouts the way you used to. I remember when The Grove here in Los Angeles first opened with a Star Wars movie — I think it was Attack of the Clones, not Phantom Menace — and people were lined up down the street. One show would be playing, the next one started in an hour, and they were still lined up. You don’t see that anymore because people pre-buy their tickets, they know their seats, they don’t have to show up hours ahead of time. All kinds of changes have happened in exhibition.

The point is that when these $100 million opening weekends arrived, which did not exist before the CG universe, it did on some level undermine the smaller business and the middle business. But it didn’t make it go away. People talk about it like it’s gone or it doesn’t exist or can’t exist. It’s just not true. I wrote a piece yesterday for Hot Button about how people keep saying “it’s all over for the business, everybody’s dying.” It’s not. The business is resettling after the industry went way too much on content spending for the creation of the legacy streaming companies. They’ve now come back to a much smaller number. And weirdly enough, my 30% prediction, which I’ve had for a long time, has turned out to be pretty much exactly right, according to at least one analysis released over the last week.

We’re now actually below the amount of work that was available going back a while. The peak was after COVID — after we came back, the amount of work peaked. But then they all realized, almost simultaneously and magically, that they needed to cut back on content. It was way too much content for anybody to make a living. These companies were losing billions and billions of dollars. And on television, by the way — not because of the movies, because of television. People get very distracted and don’t separate television and movies. They’re different models. They were built as different models. They continue to be different models. They should be different models.

There is no real economic logic to doing a $200 million movie for streaming. Netflix can do it all they want — it’s their money, not mine — and they have a massive budget, $18 to $22 billion a year. They can spend a billion on movies that are huge and terrible every year, make fewer of them than they were, and just continue on. Some of them have an audience, some don’t. How Netflix decides what they need to have versus what they must have is a creation of their own mindset that I can’t always rationalize, but it is what it is. It doesn’t work for anybody else. Financially, it does not work for any of the legacy companies.

The movie business offers the opportunity to get a return on revenues before you go to streaming. Direct-to-streaming, you don’t have that opportunity. There is no direct cash revenue if you make a movie directly for streaming. So if you’re spending $150 or $200 million on a direct-to-streaming movie, you’re asking for the limitations you have. It is a loss leader, essentially. There is no direct cause and effect that can be measured in any real way. These organizations have systems where they claim it means this and that — it’s all just made up math. It’s an Excel sheet. It is not anything real. The reality of paid streaming is that it’s about keeping your subscribers. Advertising is changing this a little bit, but we haven’t really seen it yet.

Congratulations to Universal on Mario Galaxy. They did a nice job. They took what is a more complicated sequel compared to the original and found most of the audience they got for the first movie, which leans heavily toward kids but includes nostalgic adults in their 40s and 50s who played Super Mario and still do. They’re working on spinoff shows and everything else, and those will have their degree of success. But none of this is a surprise.

A lot of this business is just doing the job. The highs are high and the lows are low, and that’s all true. But look at Warner Brothers — they had their great year last year. They’ve had a couple of flops to start this year. But a big part of that great year was movies that were expected to do the business they did. Movies like the last Conjuring, which some of us would consider junk. Not everybody would, but it did a lot of business, and that’s part of the mix.

Pam Abdi and Mike DeLuca — we can talk about them as geniuses and how smart they are and how much they love movies, all of which is true. But they’re also smart enough to mix in with their originals, which really drove things last year — Sinners, Weapons, ultimately One Battle After Another. Those movies drove a lot of business and a lot of excitement, but they mixed in the stuff that’s essentially assured to make a certain amount of money. Sometimes those movies flop. That’s part of the business too. But it is very important, at least in my mindset, that we keep this balance in our heads about reasonable expectations, unreasonable expectations, and disappointments. They are part of the flow of a very mature business.

That was the other theme of my piece yesterday: none of these are really surprises. This is the business. It is not a high-flying business. A $100 or $150 million weekend is exciting, but it’s also just a basic piece of the business model. If Mario Galaxy had opened to $100 million, it would have been a disappointment in terms of just doing business. Can you really be disappointed with a $100 million opening? Well, you can, but you shouldn’t be.

I saw Anthony just the other day, and I was happy to see him, and we gave each other a hug. He’s a smart guy. But it is his job in some ways to promote these things for these companies. Part of his gig doing box office for the trades is to promote these movies and how they’re marketed. That’s all very important. But this flippant idea of box office that we get from people like Bellini, who talk about it like it’s the over-under all the time — it’s ridiculous. It’s stupid. It is not a realistic mindset about how the business works or how it should work. It’s not realistic about the ambitions of the industry or what we should expect from it. It always flops between “this is a huge opening” and “this is a bad month” and “this was a big surprise.” There’s always an excuse for why a surprise did well, and the movies that flop, well, that’s the industry, kids want to go play their video games. The truth is kids do want to play video games, but they also want to go to the movies. And they do go to the movies.

Before the ’70s, there was the old studio model where people went to a movie theater with very limited television and no internet. People went to the movie theater to get cool — they remember the signs that said “air conditioning.” People would sit there for six or seven hours watching two movies and shorts and newscasts. That was a different business. There were still A and B movies, serials, all kinds of filler. And then you had your Jimmy Stewart movie or your Bette Davis movie or your Frank Sinatra movie. Completely different model. This model is this model. We need to be more realistic about it.

We have to be able to see the forest and the trees and the separation between television and film. Television is a much more complicated universe because it’s a much more daily part of people’s lives. People watch six to eight hours of television every day. That television is running in households for six to eight hours a day on average, some places more. Famously, part of Fox News’s thing is that they have viewers who can’t use the remote properly, so they watch Fox 24/7.

The point is that there’s a huge business with all these elements, and it does change all the time. It is not a consistently flat business, but the business is very mature. People who normally spend $100 a month on home entertainment — whether cable, cord-cutting with ad-free streamers, or some combination — are not going to suddenly jump to $200 a month. They’ve already been reconfigured to spend $40 to $100 a month just having internet in their house. That’s a change and should be taken into consideration, even if it doesn’t directly map to entertainment spending, except in the case of Comcast, which makes its money through selling internet services into the household, not really cable service anymore.

These are all separate businesses, and they’re all connected. We have to see the forest, we have to see the trees. In terms of how Wall Street sees it — it’s all bullshit. Listening to people from Wall Street talk about this industry continues to be aggravating and stupid almost every single time. There are very few serious Wall Street people who understand how this business works. I listen to Pivot, and Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher talk about the film industry, and they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. They just don’t. It’s not because they’re not very smart — they are very smart about a lot of things. But we’ve reached a point where we think they know about everything in the world. They don’t. They’re just people. Everybody has their boundaries. They have remarkable lives and remarkable careers, they’ve learned a lot of things and talked to a lot of people — all great. But they don’t really understand the film business, certainly, and they don’t even really understand the television business, even though they’re in it on some level. Wall Street does not understand this industry. You can see it in the valuations of these companies. But that is another conversation for another day.

Also at the box office this weekend, the total was nearly $200 million, which is really where you’d want it to be — usually that’s a May-level number, and May is probably not going to be that strong. Project Hail Mary held 57% of its audience and did another $30 million, but it’s not looking like it’ll get to $300 million domestic, and it’s probably not going to get to $300 million international either. International is catching up a little with domestic, but it’s still below. I’m not completely sure why. Hopper is just passing $150 million.

And the idea that Mario Galaxy is “the number one movie of the year so far” — well, duh. You could have guessed that months ago. There was no other movie released before this point in the year that anybody could have realistically expected to do this kind of business.

Zendaya Is a Movie Star. Period. So Is Timothée Chalamet.

Also at the box office: The Drama, starring Robert Pattinson but more importantly starring Zendaya. Somebody was having a conversation about whether Zendaya is really a movie star. She’s been a real movie star for quite a while now, coming off of Euphoria and Spider-Man and Dune. But what’s really interesting to me, and what actually kind of surprised me, is looking back at her filmography since Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019 — seven years of this. She co-starred in that obviously with Tom Holland, and it did huge business. She was in Space Jam as Lola Bunny, but I don’t really count voiceover as anything. Then Dune, another Spider-Man, back to Euphoria, Dune Part Two. The only real movie besides The Drama that she’s done outside of a giant franchise is Challengers.

And what did Challengers open to? $15 million. What did The Drama open to? Just about $15 million.

The difference between Challengers and The Drama is that Robert Pattinson is a strong B-plus movie star — and that’s not a reference to his acting, which I think is actually underrated, but to his status as being able to open a movie. He’s not really an opener. He’s kind of in that Robert Duvall category — a very strong addition, but not the guy who actually drives business. And again, not a judgment of anybody’s acting skills at all. Just business.

But Zendaya opens movies. She was able to open Challengers, which should not have opened by normal standards. We can give A24 a lot of credit for being brilliant — they are, and they do great marketing and publicity — but she opened the movie. The two guys in Challengers are neither one of them anything close to a movie star. Josh O’Connor is beloved by a lot of film critics and makes a lot of movies that seven people see. It doesn’t make them bad movies; it just means not a lot of people are going. Mike Faist was in West Side Story. They’re valuable talent, good actors, people who are attractive — they don’t open movies. Zendaya opens movies. And Zendaya opened The Drama.

By the way, the last A24 hit was Marty Supreme. And what’s the truth of Marty Supreme? For all the hype around what Timothée Chalamet was doing, Timothée Chalamet is a box office opener. Period. The idea that there’s any question about his ability to open at the box office is just stupid. The guy is one of the top five, certainly, and you can make an argument about where he stands in that group.

Go back to Beautiful Boy in 2018 — didn’t really open. So there was still a question mark. He’d done Call Me By Your Name, which did much more business than expected but didn’t kill it as a box office thing. But then look at the run he’s been on: Wonka, Dune again, A Complete Unknown, and now Marty Supreme. The guy opens movies, period. There’s an audience for him. There’s an appetite for him. Yes, he can certainly make a movie nobody ever wants to see, and I’m sure he will again sometime soon. But obviously Dune 3 is not going to be that movie. He’s a movie star. He is our modern version of the movie star.

The question now for people like me who think about box office all the time is: is $15 million the new $20 million? Maybe. It used to be that a $20 million opening was the standard for a star-driven film, and maybe $15 million is the new standard. That’s something we may just have to get used to. Part of that is that we’ve accepted a universe in which there are fewer movies released by companies that have the money to afford to release them. People who don’t really know what the hell they’re talking about continually confuse how many wide releases there are versus how many releases there are at a wide level that actually have the marketing money to support them. It is expensive. It requires marketing dollars.

God bless A24 — they do a great job, and so does Neon, and so do others trying to do this. There are surprises in that regard. But basically the top 10, 15, or 20 movies released worldwide are movies that do these huge numbers and they’re not smaller films from independent companies. Marty Supreme still hasn’t gotten to $100 million domestic. May never get there, maybe they’ll do a re-release. But Marty Supreme is the number one movie ever at A24, and it did not do $100 million domestic. Meanwhile, there will be at least 10 to 12 movies this year that do $100 million domestic, and none of them are going to be Marty Supreme. That is a different part of the business.

Marty Supreme is a hugely successful indie film. A24 is a hugely successful company, even though they’ve had a bunch of flops. Their current method seems to be releasing a lot of things that aren’t going to do big theatrical business, then making their money back on streaming value. That’s the business they’re in. They’re in an independent business. And Timothée Chalamet can open an independent movie, a studio movie — not any movie, as I say, he’ll find failure at some point — but not right now. These are all real movie stars.

The lesson with both Marty Supreme and The Drama is simple: it helps to have giant movie stars in your movies. That’s the lesson here, really.

And by the way, Variety ran a headline about how the Mario Galaxy movie “eliminates the box office but leaves room for Project Hail Mary.” No, it didn’t. The box office has room for everything. The box office has room for $250 million on a weekend. It’s the third week for Project Hail Mary, so it’s already down to $30 million — there was room for it to do $50 million if the business called for it. This idea that one movie “left room” for another is bullshit. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not a cup that’s filling and going to overflow. People want to go or they don’t want to go.

The Drama’s Backlash: Not Controversial Enough, Not Serious Enough

There’s now a backlash against The Drama because of the movie’s central hook. Spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the premise is that Zendaya’s character reveals, during a conversation about the worst thing each person ever did, that she was involved in potentially threatening the lives of children. I’ll leave it at that.

My feeling about the movie is that this hook is not strong enough tea to make up for the rest of the film. Over the weekend, I watched the earlier film from this filmmaker — his first feature that got him attention in the United States — and that film had the same kind of gimmick in a way, the idea that something is so shocking. But it actually is shocking in his first film. Here, it’s not.

The backlash story in the Hollywood Reporter references a supposed “film critic” who broke embargo and went early. In fact, it’s a guy who does socialite coverage for AOL named Michael Privé, who I’m sure is a very nice person, but he’s not a film critic. Maybe he plays one on Rotten Tomatoes. But he felt he had to go ahead early to compare the film to Columbine, accusing it of humanizing and normalizing school shooters. Bullshit. Just bullshit.

What I wrote in my review is that if Zendaya’s character had just killed a puppy when she was 10 years old, that would have been much more shocking and a more realistic and serious issue for people questioning who she is. The idea that she was thinking about doing something, didn’t actually do it, doesn’t actually do anything — and then, spoiler, she flips and becomes an activist for gun control — the whole thing doesn’t hold up. To me, it’s a failure in terms of what they’ve done to the movie. I really like everybody in the cast. They did a good job. It’s nicely shot. There’s nothing really wrong with the movie except for that premise.

Now, of course, there has to be backlash. Parkland survivor Jackie Coren is talking about her concerns about the casting. Please just calm the fuck down. There is nothing okay about what happened at Parkland. There is no level of respect one can pay to people who’ve lost family and gone through the tragedy and horror of that event. But the movie does not make fun of Parkland. The movie does not make fun of school shooting at all. In fact, as I’ve been saying, it makes too much of it given the context in which they present it. Everybody’s got to calm the hell down.

What’s actually interesting about the idea of school shootings as an issue in this film is the idea that a young person — maybe 12 or 13 years old — was driven by the public nature of school shootings to consider this as an option when she’s depressed and being abused by other kids. That’s actually a real issue. That’s something of substance. The idea that kids think about this now, because they keep seeing it on TV, is a real issue. But it’s not in this movie. It’s not what this movie does.

So for me, the backlash should be: why didn’t they take this issue more seriously? Because the way they present it, it’s not serious enough to cause what happens in the movie, and it’s not serious enough as a conversation. But the movie is a romantic comedy in some ways, and it’s Zendaya, so you can only take it so far — you’re not going to make her a full villain. This hook that’s now so controversial is actually not remotely controversial enough for the quality of the film, and not remotely controversial enough in terms of really addressing the issue. It does take school shooting too lightly on some level, but not in a way that’s disrespectful. Not everything needs to be maximum outrage all the time.

The headline on the Hollywood Reporter piece asks: “Was the wedding-focused promo misleading or a marketing masterclass?” Neither. Both. It wasn’t misleading, because that is what the movie is about. And it’s not a marketing masterclass — it was a good piece of marketing. Marty Supreme was also a good piece of marketing, really more great publicity than marketing. But Zendaya. But Timothée Chalamet. Movie stars matter.

CBS Gives Up on Late Night — And What It Means for the Affiliate System

Moving from box office to the television business: CBS has decided to give up on late night completely. They will replace the Stephen Colbert slot with Comics Unleashed, Byron Allen’s syndicated show, which is junk TV at best. Byron Allen has made a fortune doing these syndicated shows — he’s got several of them, including one based on junkets — and has built an empire out of it. God bless him, good luck to him. It is junk, and it’s really, really cheap.

I read about it in the Late Nighter, a newsletter I subscribe to and am a big fan of — it just covers late night television, but it’s got good people involved who really know what they’re talking about. They pointed out that a typical joke on Comics Unleashed featured the late Louie Anderson, because that’s how old most of these episodes are. They’ve ramped up to have more episodes since they took over the 12:30 slot about a year ago, starting sometime in August or September. Now Comics Unleashed is moving up to the 11:35 slot, and they’re talking about another syndicated Byron Allen show pushing into the 12:30 slot.

What this basically means is that we’re going to start seeing affiliates bail. None of the stories on this choice tell us anything about how Comics Unleashed has performed in terms of numbers compared to the show that was there before — After Midnight, which I’ve already forgotten about even though it’s been gone less than a year. That show was modestly successful but not enough to pay its host enough money to make it worth her not being a stand-up comic most of the time, where there’s a lot of money these days if you can play stadiums and big theaters over 5,000 people. And she can.

Is it the end of late night as we know it? Maybe. I’ve talked before about how Saturday Night Live almost went away about 40 years ago, almost giving way to wrestling on Saturday night on NBC. There have been many years of the now 51-year-long SNL franchise that lost money for NBC. It’s never been a hugely profitable show. There have been profitable years, but the majority, I would estimate, have not been moneymakers. It’s been a loss leader. But they made money early on, stuck with it, and when the 11th season came along, the decision was being made whether to switch to wrestling on Saturday nights. They tested it out in that slot when SNL wasn’t on. They’d already gone through a few people who’d failed at running the show, like Jean Doumanian, rest her soul. It was a slot they considered dangerous, and they were losing money. Wrestling was very cost-effective and more live and fresh than Comics Unleashed, which is basically four or five comics sitting around telling jokes they told on stage five or ten years ago.

But NBC did not want to give up that time slot. They’d gotten Saturday Night Live, and they created 11:30 on Saturday nights. Since then, Saturday night has become a bad TV night. There was a time when Saturday night was a great TV spot — Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett, maybe The Love Boat for a period. Huge successes on Saturday nights. Now people don’t watch TV on Saturday, so SNL does an East Coast/West Coast simulcast — here in Los Angeles it’s on at 8:30, then plays again at 11:30. They fill prime time with sports rolling over from the day or SNL rolling back. It is not a cash cow day. There’s been talk about completely giving up Saturdays, Friday nights, even the 10 o’clock slot across the board — though that last idea has had a resurgence lately and isn’t in favor at the moment.

The affiliate system, in my opinion, is even more broken than cable as an issue. However, all the cash right now in television — there’s more cash in cable (which includes satellites, includes virtual cable like YouTube TV) than there is in streaming. It’s a more profitable business. They make billions a year on it, and they’ve taken losses of billions on streaming in the past. Streaming is catching up, but cable is still above, which is why cable still exists in mass and is apparently still in over 50% of the country. That’s where they make their money. So they’re finding ways to eat from both troughs at the same time. That is the television business right now.

CBS has owned-and-operated stations, so they’re guaranteed to keep whatever it is, eight or nine or ten spots. But the hundreds of affiliates at 11:30 at night — I think we’re going to start losing them. The question is whether affiliates can make money on local programming or just syndicating a show like Comics Unleashed themselves. They’re paying the network to have that slot. What’s the financial arrangement? I don’t really know, and I won’t know for a while. It’ll take a few months or a year before television stations start deciding if they really need the show.

Then the question becomes: what about Jimmy Kimmel? He’s been on a track to retire pretty soon regardless of Trump. I think in some ways Trump has actually extended his lifetime — certainly increased his numbers — and increased his interest in staying and fighting till the end. I think we’ll see him at least through the end of the Trump administration, so another three years. But he may well retire the year after or even during; he’s been talking about it. If you lose Kimmel, who do you put in that slot? Are you starting from scratch or acquiescing to the nature of the thing? Do you move Nightline back up to 11:30? I don’t know if anybody watches Nightline anymore. I was a Nightline watcher for 20-something years — Ted Koppel and Nightline, that was it, that was a thing you had to watch, very important television. It is not anymore.

NBC still has a 12:30 show, though they’ve cut back the budget. They still have an 11:30 show, which isn’t the number one show but may become the number one show as everybody else goes away. Late night is an issue, but CBS is giving up on it, and that may just be the nature of the beast. A lot of the talk about “oh, they just watch it on YouTube” — that’s part of it, but it’s also about what a broadcast network is and what its parameters need to be. In some ways, it becomes like cable: diminishing returns, but still extremely valuable.

The Future of Cable, Streaming, and Why Nobody Wants to Talk About the Real Reason Cable Won’t Die

There’s still all this conversation about where the football rights are going — deals being made a few years earlier than expected because of out clauses. The NFL lives under an exemption, as do the NBA and Major League Baseball, that allows them to be more manipulative as a group about how their television rights work. They’re basically monopolies, given freedom by Congress to be monopolies, but that freedom can be taken away.

I’ve been saying this for a long time: for streaming to become fully what streaming is going to become, cable has to go, because it’s a chunk of money coming out of people’s wallets that they’re not spending on streaming. If somebody’s spending $50 or $80 or $120 a month on cable, they’re not spending that on streaming. Some people don’t care about money — they’ll spend $200 or $250 a month on whatever they want. But the vast majority of our country, it does affect their lives. We already pay more than anybody else for streaming. We pay more than anybody else for cable. We pay more than everybody else for television, us and Canada.

The future of cable doesn’t really make sense. The model where everybody’s getting paid to be on cable does not make sense going forward. Streaming makes sense as a delivery system. Nobody really cares how it gets into your house — a wire, a stream, a satellite. As long as it’s consistent and doesn’t break down, that’s what people care about. That, and the price point: what does it cost me to have stuff in my house and feel like I’m seeing everything I want to see?

The more we get rid of cable and that chunk of money, the more that money goes to streaming. Disney, which has ABC and ESPN and makes a lot of money on cable, will theoretically just move that money to streaming. But Disney makes more on the cable bundle than on the streaming bundle. It’s more profitable. So they want that cable bundle to last as long as possible.

I just signed up for MLB TV and YES Network, as I do every year because I’m a Yankees fan on the West Coast. They made me initially sign up for a month of ESPN’s streaming service, but I already have almost everything ESPN does through YouTube TV. For whatever reason, YouTube TV did not make a deal where ESPN’s streaming service was included — even though almost every other major cable outlet has a deal where if you’re paying for ESPN on cable, you don’t have to pay for the online version. As a YouTube TV subscriber, I had to pay separately, and I’ve now canceled it because I get everything they do already. ESPN’s streaming service is expensive unless you don’t have cable. This is all the constant fighting and figuring out how it’s all going to siphon through.

My guess continues to be that in five to ten years, we will see the end of cable as we know it, at least for 90% of the country. All these people have had opinions about the end of cable — linear doesn’t mean anything, the world’s coming to an end. They’ve all been surprised, and they won’t admit it, because they’ve just been wrong. They’ve been surprised about how slowly cable has gone away. The reason it’s gone away slowly is because these companies have a vested interest in keeping it, because it is more profitable than streaming has been. Period. It has nothing to do with what you’re getting in your television set. It’s not about the consumer. It’s about them and how much money they’re squeezing out of each format of delivery. Delivery doesn’t matter to anybody at this point. It’s cheaper to do streaming than cable. There’s no upkeep in terms of delivering over the internet — the internet is the upkeep. Yes, there are costs of keeping your app ready and fresh, but cable is a fairly limited delivery system. Streaming is much less limited. We will get there in time. But in the meantime, there are financial reasons why we’re not getting there, and nobody wants to talk about it very much.

Jonathan Majors and the Daily Wire

There’s a Deadline story — three days old at this point — about details emerging on why a crew walked off the set of Jonathan Majors’ Daily Wire movie. Apparently Majors and another actor fell through a window during a scene on a movie that was already in trouble and having problems with crews and unions and everybody else. It’s a problem movie. I hope Jonathan Majors is feeling well. I hope his brain is feeling well. He is such a talented actor. He is really potentially one of the greatest film actors of a generation, and yet his ego certainly got away from him, and everything got away from him. And of course he hit his girlfriend, apparently, which also got away from him. It’s just a sad story, and I hope he makes a comeback eventually. He’s going to find whatever it is he needs to find. You can’t be Brando before you’re actually Brando. You have to walk before you run.

Inside the WGA Deal: The Tone Has Changed, But Nobody Was Going on Strike

The must-read story of the day is Deadline’s piece on the inside of the WGA deal — how the writers made nice with the AMPTP. I’ve read it. It’s mostly the same old story, but the one thing that’s clear and interesting is that the Writers Guild took a different tack than they have in the past, and the AMPTP has as well. There’s a new negotiator there after Carol Lombardi left — finally — after everybody hated her so much. I mean truly hated this woman. I remember having conversations during the strikes with very smart writers, and I’d say, “Come on, Carol Lombardi is not the devil.” Nope. “I don’t think the AMPTP is really completely evil.” Carol Lombardi is the devil. They just hated this woman.

The AMPTP now has Greg Hessinger as their negotiator, and there seems to be less inherent animosity. But the odds of a strike this time were about zero. Nobody needs another strike at this point. One of the funny things in the piece, by the way, is a sentence reading “the AMPTP were ready to offer this infusion.” The AMPTP was ready, because it’s a singular organization — but apparently Deadline sees them as a they/them. The AMPTP is now a they/them in Deadline, which I found funny.

The point is that things are moving forward. DGA and SAG are still waiting to get their deals done, but I don’t expect anybody to be shut down. We’re in the healing process, which goes back to the piece I wrote. The AMPTP companies, I believe, wanted the last strike to last as long as it did. They used it as cover for cutting back on the industry, which they have. They cut back the amount of content they’re making massively — 30% is a massive cut in content and spending. And they had to do it because they went way, way out of their depth. There was this industry where people were working endlessly, and even though there were irritations about eight-episode seasons and nine-episode seasons instead of 22, and the loss of residuals from network television — all these things had changed the math to make it worse for actors, worse for directors, worse for writers.

We’re now at the point where I think we’ve hit bottom. I think we’ve found the bottom, and now they’re beginning to build back up. You’re not going to see as much of a build as five or seven years ago. What I think you’ll see is a build back to just above where we were when all the legacy streaming companies started business in 2019, right before COVID. I think they’ll get to a spending level on content and talent just above where it was previously. Part of the question then becomes how much of it will be in the United States and Los Angeles versus overseas, and other ways they can save money. California has created a new subsidy program that seems to be working a bit and increasing the amount of production being done here.

This is Los Angeles. This has been the home of the movies forever. People live here because of that. Back when Canada was the big threat 15 or 20 years ago, you knew how many crews there were in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal — crews built up over time. In Atlanta, with Marvel being there for a long time, top crews developed. People from Los Angeles and other places moved to Atlanta because that’s where the business was, they could work consistently, and there was good money. There are crews now in New Orleans, Louisiana in general, less so in Florida but a couple there. These are people at the highest professional level — they’re not hacks, they’re not immature. You build these crews in different cities, and if you’re going to shoot in Vancouver and can’t get one of the two crews there that are considered really good, you just don’t go, or you reschedule.

England is very hot — new studios have been built, Star Wars lives there, Marvel lives there now, Harry Potter lives there. That’s a hot spot in its way, much like Atlanta was. Does it matter that money is being spent in England versus Atlanta or L.A.? Yes, if you’re in Atlanta or L.A. Does it matter to the industry overall? Not really. It matters a lot if you don’t have a job and you want one and you’re really good at what you do. Forest, trees. Forest, trees.

The WGA deal story is a decent piece about the fact that the tone has changed. But this was not a year anybody was going on strike. There’s been so much blood in the water that nobody was going to kill each other again. The AMPTP wanted the strikes last time as cover for cutbacks, and they covered for a lot of cutbacks during that period. There was a brief peak right after the strikes ended where everybody went back to work, but it didn’t last long. This idea that we’re in a free fall — we’re not. We’re getting back to a stable number. They’ve gone a little further down than they probably should have, but each company is micro-focused on their own budgets and divisions. The pendulum swings, and it went a little too far. We’re probably a little too light right now. But you can see the industry rebuilding some of its base. I think next year at this time, we’ll be having different conversations about where the industry is — maybe not literally where, as in London or Atlanta or New Mexico or New Jersey with Netflix, but the conversation will be different.

Quick Hits from the Trades

Patton Oswalt is doing another comedy special. Jessica Lange is returning for another American Horror Story. There’s an Animal Farm trailer out there.

Netflix has a Lord of the Flies adaptation coming, and the trailer is weirdly focused on killing Piggy — except they never say the word “Piggy” in the trailer, which I found very strange. As someone who’s happily read Lord of the Flies a few times — it’s a very good book — not calling Piggy by his name probably means they’re worried about offending somebody, which is kind of the point. You kind of miss the point of Lord of the Flies if you’re not offending anybody. I guess they don’t want to go too Trumpy.

Savannah Guthrie is returning to the Today Show, which every outlet is treating as their top story. Sure.

Guy Lodge has been elevated to chief film critic at Variety, partnered with Owen Gleiberman. I’m not entirely sure what that arrangement means — the story isn’t very clear about it. He replaces Peter DeBruge, who left to run South by Southwest, which is a Penske company. I assume Peter’s happy with the move, and my guess is there’s more money in it. It’s a great gig, actually — I hope it works out for him for more than a couple years. Lodge has worked his way up since freelancing at Variety in 2011, though I think he was with Chris Tapley before that. Tapley really brought him in and made him a thing there, first using him for Cannes coverage and expanding from there. Congratulations to everybody involved.

The Glenn Powell/Judd Apatow comedy now has a name: The Comeback King. It features Powell as a country western star in free fall, and it’s being released by Universal. The poster has a big showy belt buckle and Glenn Powell’s crotch, which seems like the way to sell anything. It reminds me of one of my fondest memories of Universal releasing a comedy — The 40-Year-Old Virgin, with that poster of Steve Carell’s big dumb face. Universal loved that movie and showed it and showed it for months going into its August release, then had a huge hit because it was just that funny and word of mouth was their advantage.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg say that Catherine O’Hara’s death sent shockwaves through their production, and apparently they’re going to honor her exit in season two. I now know a few secrets about season two that I’m not supposed to divulge, so I won’t.

Hugh Jackman is delivering the commencement at Ball State, David Letterman’s alma mater. SmartLess is doing a live show at the Hollywood Bowl, which seems completely antithetical to the idea of a podcast. I also recently saw an early cut of a Hulu show I’m not supposed to talk about yet — no official date — that I think is going to make some stars. The talent is incredibly interesting. However, there’s a podcasting star appearance on the show, and surprisingly, the podcast people cannot act. Shocking. They talk about themselves all day, every day, and they can’t act. Even playing themselves, they can’t act.

Dune Part 3 IMAX tickets are going on sale months ahead, just as they did for The Odyssey, whose IMAX opening day tickets sold out almost instantly. I assume they’ll try to replicate that.

HBO Max has dropped the assembly cut of Alien 3, the David Fincher third Alien film that got pilloried. I’ve talked about this film for years because of what I still consider the only logical reading of it — Manohla Dargis’s review from the Village Voice, where she said it was an allegory for AIDS. A woman being introduced onto this island — really a planet — of men who were all shaved-headed, and this deadly virus was going to kill everything, and it was back when AIDS was the issue. I thought it was brilliant. David Fincher has denied it, but I still think it makes sense. Fox did what they call the assembly cut at some point — the longer version, about 30 to 40 minutes more — without Fincher’s involvement. That’s now on HBO Max, and I will absolutely go watch it.

Spaceballs sequel is coming out next spring; we talked about that last week. Zendaya teases the end of Euphoria after season three, which we kind of knew. Joseph Collins, formerly of HBO and Time Warner Cable, passed away at 81 — rest in peace. Melissa Gilbert feels her husband Tim Busfield will be exonerated of child sex abuse charges. Let’s hope so. For all our sakes, we have our fingers crossed that he didn’t do this.

There’s another animated Star Wars show coming to Disney+ — the Maul: Shadow Lord show. How in the galaxy has Darth Maul survived this long?

New trailer for Devil Wears Prada 2 is out there. The Boys is ending with a blood-soaked season five, apparently right on time.

There was apparently an SNL cast member in a Vanity Fair video talking about pantsing a six-year-old boy at summer camp — she was a counselor, the kid kept pulling up her shirt, she pulled down his pants, he wasn’t wearing underwear, other kids saw, and now it’s a controversy because we have to have controversy about everything. I was actually just telling a group of people a horrible story about summer camp from my own childhood — a kid got stripped and tied to a tetherball pole while the girls were walking by for a dance. The kid was humiliated. He ended up losing his mind at camp and trying to attack everybody with his tennis racket, which I actually got in the middle of trying to stop. It was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever been party to. Pantsing a six-year-old at summer camp is horrible. I don’t really think we need a national controversy about it. It happens at every summer camp all the time. It’s Lord of the Flies. If your kid is sensitive, be careful where you send them.

Gulf States Funding the Paramount-WBD Merger Is Not New News

The last thing: everybody’s acting like it’s breaking news that the Gulf States are funding the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery to the tune of about $24 billion. I don’t know why this is news. It came up in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, so that was somehow news. But this information was available months and months ago. The only question mark was that Paramount wouldn’t admit it during the period they were still in the fight with Netflix’s competing bid.

There was never really any indication the money had gone away. A couple smaller investors had pulled out, maybe put some back in, maybe haven’t. But the Gulf States money — $24 billion including commitments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar Investment Authority, and Abu Dhabi’s investment arm — this raises serious question marks in terms of foreign ownership of CBS Network, where 20% is supposed to be the maximum allowed for a non-American company to own a piece of a broadcast network. But with this FCC chairman, who the hell knows? There are no rules, and they love Saudi Arabia because they just keep feeding them money. Saudi Arabia is trying to buy everything and the Trump administration is for sale. This is not a political podcast, but you can’t really argue that the Trump administration is not for sale.

This is all news we knew months ago. I don’t understand why everybody’s treating it as brand new. It’s not. It’s the same old news, and it’s terrible. If we had an administration interested in actually managing these things properly and dealing with the many problems of Paramount acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery, this wouldn’t be as much an issue. But this is the same attitude that led to Disney acquiring Fox’s assets without any real regulatory pushback, which led to the end of Fox as a studio. It’s now 20th within Disney, but 20th Century Fox is long gone.

Disney didn’t make promises about Fox as a movie studio. Paramount has made promises about Warner Brothers as a movie studio. But they’re promises. Unless the government says you have to do X, Y, and Z, there are no rules. And even if there were rules, you can’t really enforce commitments for more than five years. The merger doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s not a healthy merger. It’s extremely horizontal. The government should be looking at this and saying: what’s good for the health of the industry, what’s good for the American people, what’s the best possible outcome, and here’s where we’re limiting you.

You cannot have CNN and CBS News as one entity. That should never be allowed in this country. There are only about six major television news outlets in the country. The idea that two of them are going to be under one company is not acceptable, regardless of the politics. Selling CNN off would be the right thing to do. It’s probably not going to happen. Brendan Carr has already said he’s looking forward to the ownership of CNN changing, and that is all the subtext of a lot of this.

The Wall Street Journal was apparently reporting that they’ve now secured these agreements, but we already knew the agreements were in place. They just wouldn’t answer the question while the Netflix fight was still on, because it’s horrifying — the idea that the Gulf States are going to own basically a quarter of Paramount Skydance Warner Brothers Discovery. It’s a terrible thing that’s happening, and they won’t do a goddamn thing about it. It’s bad. But it is what it is.

I’ve said before that I root for David Ellison. I want him to be the genius he thinks he is. I truly do. I’m not just making fun of him when I say that — it sounds kind of funny, but I really do hope he’s got something figured out. This is not a good thing, period. Under any circumstance, it should not be allowed. If they somehow disallowed the Gulf States funding, which they won’t, it would maybe break down the entire merger — which would require another $24 billion of commitment from Daddy Ellison, and that’s unlikely. So the Ankler and others who are still trying to figure out how to destroy the thing from within would have their opening. But we’ll see. It’s bad. It’s all bad for America.

The Stock Market Doesn’t Know What It’s Doing Either

A quick market check: the Dow was up about 100 points, the NASDAQ up about 100, the S&P 500 up 22. Entertainment stocks were a mixed bag. Netflix was up over $100 a share for the first time in a long time this morning but settled back to essentially flat. Disney’s down at $96.50, which is too low but is what it is — they were touching $100 sometime last week. Penske is up a little but still under $10 a share, which is not sensational. Warner Brothers Discovery is floating around $27, up nine cents — doesn’t matter. Comcast down a quarter, who cares. Sony down 40 cents, irrelevant. Versant, the spinoff of the legacy companies from NBC Universal, is up 66 cents — 666 the day after Easter. None of it matters. Netflix has its quarterly coming up, so there’ll be some fluctuation. Disney doesn’t report until May.

Forest and Trees

The theme of today, and I didn’t even realize I had this much to say: forest and trees. You’ve got to be able to have both in your head. Understand both. There’s nothing wrong with understanding the trees. There’s nothing wrong with understanding the forest. But if you only know one of them, you’re fucking up.