Business Features
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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The Condé Nast Family’s Multibillion-Dollar Fortune: Where the Newhouses Stash Their Money
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 considers a sale. The Ochs Sulzbergers still dominate the board of The New York Times. […]
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The AI Perils Buried in the Fine Print
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 CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Feb. 1, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy predicting that the tech will […]
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Bob Iger’s Invincible Era Is Over
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 board members, Iger’s track record has been impeccable. Consider possibly the most important […]
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“It’s a Silent Fire”: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis
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 decay of feature and episodic files. Behind closed doors and NDAs, the fragility of archives is a perpetual Topic […]
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Europe Stakes Claim as the World’s Digital Cop
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 Digital Markets Act (DMA), which went into effect on March 7 and has the much broader […]
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Megamerger Dreams Are Dying — and Hollywood May Be Better Off
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 had been sharing concerns of a wave of mergers that it said left just a […]
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