Production has declined. Entertainment has fled LA. Many jobs have disappeared. Studios are merging. AI hovers like a menacing cloud. At this point, it’s become almost passé to intone that “Hollywood is dead,” headed toward more misery and consolidation and job loss and, apparently, the trash bin of history. All last week, the Wall Street Journal went to the mattresses on a stark vision of Hollywood going to hell with these terrifying graphics: 

Then last month we had a strange counternarrative – what’s this? The box office woke up. “Project Hail Mary,” a sci-fi adventure film with no franchise history and released by Amazon Studios which has scant experience in blockbuster distribution – in fact, not much going for it besides a good-looking movie star and those nerdy guys from “The Lego Movie” — came careening into theaters and grabbed a massive $80 million weekend. “Hail Mary” has just completed its third weekend with a stunning $420.8 million total at the global box office and plans to go back to Imax theaters as soon as another juggernaut in the sequel of “Super Mario” — which raked in about $372 million globally in its opening weekend – gets out of the way. 

As TheWrap reported, the Q1 box office of 2026 has surpassed 2023 to give theaters the best start to the calendar year since the COVID pandemic. Four movies rocketed past $100 million at the box office, including “Hail Mary.”

So I’m not trying to harsh your doom and gloom – I, too, enjoy feeling sorry for myself — but I do want to point out that all may not be lost. 

It’s worth considering that the tone of “Hail Mary,” with its star character named “Grace” (Ryan Gosling), is a vision of the best of humanity, about a scientist sent light years from Earth to figure out how to save the planet from an organism that is dimming the sun’s energy and will ultimately cool and kill us all. The movie has charm, humor, inspiration and visual delights to lift the spirit. Gosling gives a nearly one-man performance in a two-hour and 36-minute adventure that is riveting and transporting, and a reminder of what large-scale entertainment can be at its best. 

Though sci-fi, the movie is not a smorgasbord of visual effects or computer graphics. The spaceship was built in real life and the production shot as much practically as possible. The alien Rocky was played by the delightful James Ortiz and a team of puppeteers, not a Siri cyber-concoction. 

And it shows. The movie has great heart, harkening back to the optimistic sci-fi adventures of decades past, with its “ET”-like moment of alien and human touching fingers, and with Grace and Rocky communicating with the five musical notes we all recognize from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

The music in the film likewise nods to a deeply humanist foundation, from Daniel Pemberton’s soulful score to Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times,” sung movingly by Sandra Huller, who plays the head of the “Hail Mary” project, to “Two of Us” by the Beatles. 

And the message, lest we overlook the most obvious, is that humanity is worth saving. That other species are also worth saving. And that self-sacrifice for a great cause is a worthy choice.  

We certainly need a reminder of that. Even as things shift, and even if the movie industry is hardly going back to its glory days, there is an audience waiting to be fed inspiration, humor and daring. 

There are other glimmers of optimism worth pointing out through the cracks in the doomsday narrative.  

The inflated idea that AI is coming for ALL the jobs is starting to lose some air. We’ve now gone through three and a half years of AI hype: it’s going to end the world. It’s going to save the world. It’s going to kill all the white-collar jobs. It’s going to replace human beings. 

Like many of you, I’ve been watching this narrative closely because – who the hell knows, it could it be true, right? 

But here we are three and a half years since the launch of ChatGPT, and predictions of radical change have not come to pass. Yes, AI is creating efficiencies, squeezing out certain lower level jobs, and we see tech companies like Meta, Oracle and Amazon shedding thousands of coding jobs. That is notable. 

But AI is not writing scripts. AI is not even successfully evaluating scripts, as our new test run of the Quilty tool showed last week. 

We are not seeing studios adopting AI at scale to replace any significant part of the creative process. Producers constantly tell me that AI is saving them time and money by helping create instant storyboards (I was recently told at a dinner party that Martin Scorsese, 83, used this technique for his current movie “What Happens at Night”), and saving on production costs.

But Disney’s $100 million internal AI investment didn’t pan out, and neither did its Sora video deal with OpenAI, which has been canceled. Other studios have been notably low-key about how and where they are using AI, if at all. 

I’m starting to think that the hype got ahead of itself, and so did our own panic response. 

Finally there is opportunity, the gleaming draw of what might replace the shrinking, century-old system that defined Hollywood. After all Netflix, the market-leading studio of the 21st century so far, happened because Reed Hastings was willing to take a leap that no one in legacy Hollywood could imagine three decades ago, to offer a monthly fee for unlimited TV and movies, and then to stream it on the Internet. His risk-taking, and the remarkable execution by Ted Sarandos, have changed the industry. 

But has streaming transformed things forever? I doubt it. Imagination is the life force of this industry. Opportunity, created by all this disruption, beckons.

“Project Hail Mary” is the first film directed by Lord and Miller since they were fired from “Solo: A Star Wars Story” in 2017, towards the tail end of production, over creative differences. That dispiriting moment could have defeated them, but instead they picked themselves up and channelled their creativity into two smash-hit “Spider-Verse” movies and, now, “Project Hail Mary.”

So in this moment of spring, I’ll choose to believe that some old problems may be resolving, and some good things may be around the bend.

The post The Optimism of ‘Project Hail Mary’ Is the Antidote to Hollywood’s Doom Loop  appeared first on TheWrap.

After six months of pursuing a rare and acrimonious hostile takeover, the billionaire family that owns Paramount Global conglomerate won Warner Bros. Discovery on Thursday, a legendary Hollywood studio and streaming service saddled with declining legacy cable networks. The board deemed Paramount’s 11th bid to be “superior,” and suddenly Netflix folded. 

It was over. 

It’s the kind of thing that rarely happens and even more rarely succeeds. Even the leadership at Paramount must be pinching themselves. 

For months, Hollywood has been transfixed and horrified by the prospect of either Netflix or Paramount winning the day. On one hand, the streaming service that has become the most dominant force in the entertainment industry was threatening to take over yet another major company, with a widespread belief that doing so would kill theatrical exhibition. 

It didn’t matter how many times Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos promised to maintain the same number of theatrical releases if he bought the Warner Bros. studio, or vowed to protect a 45-day window ahead of streaming (give or take some days) – he was not really believed. Sarandos had spent nearly 20 years arguing that consumers should be given maximum choice for their filmed entertainment: theaters, if you really want to leave your house, pay for parking and a babysitter and popcorn, or the very same content in the comfort of your living room for a fraction of the price. Your choice! 

On the other hand, Hollywood is equally concerned that Paramount would be a dangerous steward for the cherished Warner Bros. assets, notably the cable news network CNN. The Ellisons have already shown a distinct right-leaning bent in their statements and a close relationship to President Trump. 

They’ve already generated criticism and worry after appointing neo-conservative Bari Weiss to run CBS News, where she has been busy destroying a precious asset of democracy by imposing her politics on one of the most powerful news networks in the country. Many worry, justifiably, that she will be put in charge of CNN as well and angle it rightward. 

Overall the Warner deal has driven massive anxiety within an already-careworn entertainment industry, struggling to compete in the age of streaming and AI. 

Rival studios feared the power imbalance of a Netflix acquisition, which would have made the streamer far and away the largest content creator and buyer in the universe, with less power for others to compete. Creatives and their agents and managers and lawyers understood that this also likely meant a permanent end to the residual model that sustains creatives during dry spells of work. Netflix had been the prime mover in ending the residual system that held sway for decades. 

No one was happy at the idea of more consolidation – more jobs lost, fewer buyers for projects, less competition and a shrinking iceberg for content. Everyone from left-wing and right-wing members of Congress, to union leaders to state attorneys general were concerned about feeding the dominance of Netflix. That combined with a residual resentment toward the streamer within the industry. 

It seems that Sarandos’ charm offensive among European regulators came too late; and his visit to the White House on Thursday may well have convinced him to end the bidding process just a few hours later. 

The win here is for David Zaslav himself and Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders, who only a year ago were holding stock worth only $11 a share. Zaslav has a winning bid at a stunning $31 per share. 

But what is the future of Warner, really? The company has been sold and resold three times in the last 25 years – in 2001 with the disastrous AOL acquisition of Time Warner; the unsuccessful acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T in 2018; and the spinoff of WarnerMedia and merger with Zaslav’s Discovery Network in 2022. 

But just because it works out for Zaslav does not mean it makes sense for Paramount or the future of Warner Bros. going forward. 

A Paramount acquisition will continue to saddle both companies with significant debt. It means, certainly, more job losses and shrinking of theatrical output. It means, likely, the arrival of oil-rich Gulf states into ownership of Hollywood assets. It means an uncertain future for the cable assets of Discovery. And it leaves a big question mark for the future of CNN. 

Let’s hope, at least, they don’t touch HBO.

The post What Paramount’s Winning Warner Bid Means: More Movies, More Debt and a CNN in Question appeared first on TheWrap.

But this weekend Carlson so dominated my social media feed with his smug, smirking and bad faith questions of Mike Huckabee, the conservative former governor of Arkansas and current U.S. ambassador to Israel, that it requires saying the words, however news-making this might be to him: Tucker Carlson has been swallowed up into the dark abyss of antisemitism. 

The peak of this 2.5 hour interrogation – because it didn’t really feel like a discussion –was Carlson sliding into bizarre conspiracies, like suggesting that Jews of today might not in fact be related, genetically, to the Jews of yore and we should test everybody to make sure they are. I’m not kidding. 

Carlson: Why don’t we do genetic testing on everybody in the land and find out who Abraham’s descendants are. It’s really simple. We’ve cracked the human genome. We can do that. Why don’t we do that? Would you be against doing that? 

Huckabee: I have no idea what that would prove. 

Carlson: It would prove who Abraham’s descendants are, and who has a right to live here and who doesn’t, according to the theology you just explained. 

Hmmm, a eugenics-like argument against the Jewish nature of Jews. It’s interesting, really. Don’t you think? 

No, I don’t think. Its antisemitic slop is what it is, predictably picked up and regurgitated by the reliably antisemitic Young Turks channel on YouTube, and fellow anti-Israel travelers like Mehdi Hasan, who usually despises Tucker Carlson, but suddenly found words of praise for this “brilliantly” done interview. 

I won’t dignify this absurd question with a reason-based response other than to say it’s not the purview of Carlson, Huckabee or anyone else to ask Jewish people to have their DNA pass a personal sniff test. (Huckabee logically brings up the fact that this would exclude converts to Judaism. I might point out that this would also include direct descendants of Ishmael, who are Muslims, and Jesus Christ, who was a Jew. But this would be way too logical and is definitely not the point.)   

Instead, on and on this nonsense went in a series of “when did you stop beating your wife” style questions, such as accusing Huckabee – a Southern Baptist minister – of wanting to see Palestinian teenaged children recruited to Hamas killed. Or the comment that seems to be making the most headlines, that Huckabee would be fine with Israel taking over the Biblical description of the land promised to Abraham, from the Nile in Egypt, to the Euphrates in Iraq. It isn’t what he said, but the whole interview was a set of traps designed to feed the poison machine.  

“Huckabee said Israel should conquer the Middle East.”

No, he didn’t. Instead of relying on the clipped version Tucker posted, watch the full exchange.

You may still disagree with the Ambassador, but he was offering his personal view — not speaking for the U.S. government pic.twitter.com/ZWIE7CiOsc

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) February 21, 2026

I realize that this is a fight within the conservative movement, among the rising anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, antisemitic strain most notably represented by neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and whacky conspiratarian Candace Owens, and those combating that strain which apparently includes President Trump, the assassinated activist Charlie Kirk and Sen. Ted Cruz who called Carlson out:

“This imbecile doesn’t believe that Jews are the descendants of Abraham. He’s proposing a mandatory DNA test for every Jew on earth. If they’re not Jews, what are they, Chinese?”

This is definitely not my area. But it is seeping into the mainstream and for that reason needs to be recognized as dangerous. 

I should also mention that it is extremely odd, not to say disturbing, to see an interview over Middle East policy devolve into dueling views of how the Christian faith dictates what is or is not moral. It sure would be nice if someone might embraced the once-fundamental separation between church and state, rather than allowing Christian faith to dictate US policy. When someone religion becomes the legal basis of deciding who is a Jew, whether Israel has a right to exist in your opinion, we are headed down the wrong path. The rule of law, the constitution and international agreements are and should remain the standard. 

Meanwhile, Carlson himself denies the charge of antisemitism, or even being against Israel, though it’s noteworthy that Carlson never left Ben Gurion airport.

Carlson: “I’m not against Israel”

Huckabee: “You hide it very well.” 

A long tweet by conservative activist Yarom Hazony confirmed this in recounting a private conversation with the podcaster: “Tucker wanted me to explain to him why anyone would think he was an antisemite. I answered that question for more than an hour, giving him a series of examples of statements he and his guests had made on his show that seemed completely unhinged and motivated by a desire to slander Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Zionist Christians in order to do as much harm as possible. He kept expressing amazement…

“Whatever his motives for turning his podcast into what seems to be a circus of anti-Jewish messaging, right now that project is clearly more important to him than helping the administration keep its coalition together so it can govern effectively and win elections in 2026 and 2028.”

None of this gets the Middle East any closer to peace, nor the Palestinian people any closer to relief and safety. And if history is any guide, it’s deadly dangerous for Jewish people. 

The post Tucker Carlson Slides Into Antisemitic Slop in Interview With Mike Huckabee  appeared first on TheWrap.

Not pedophilia. Not rape. Just emails about philandering between two private individuals, from 20 years ago. 

We’re going to unpack that, but first, the moving pieces on this fast-shifting narrative. Multiple sources on this story confirm that Wasserman intended to ride out the scandal after issuing an apology for his association with Maxwell and taking Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, once. 

He got the support of his hand-picked LA28 Olympic board. And he went so far as to step out in public on Friday at the NBA All-Star weekend’s tech conference, appearing on a panel with Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. 

But behind the scenes, Providence Equity Partners, the private equity firm that owns more than 60 percent of the sports and music agency, wasn’t having it. As clients like Chappell Roan and Abby Wambach fled the agency and his music department, led by the respected music agent Marty Diamond, who represents Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and other major acts, threatened to leave, the pressure on both Wasserman and Providence became intense. And by Friday, ultimately unbearable. 

Providence told Wasserman he needed to sell his 40ish percent of the agency, two insiders told me. They will then sell the agency, probably broken into pieces of sports, music and movie/television talent. President Mike Watts takes over immediately.

Casey Wasserman declined to comment for this story. An individual familiar with Providence’s thinking said the decision to sell was Wasserman’s and disputed that Providence was looking to sell or that the PE firm would break the agency into parts.

The background here is not only that Wasserman previously embarrassed his financial partner with the revelation a year ago that he had two scandalous affairs during his marriage, including with a former executive assistant who was placed in a high-paying job at LA28, and a flight attendant on his private plane who is now his partner. 

But in addition, WaxWord has learned that in the wake of that revelation, Providence had been shopping its stake and spoke to at least two institutional investors about their interest. This process is not unusual as private equity usually invests for 5 to 7 years before looking to sell.

But according to my sources, it’s still early for Providence to sell and Wasserman was seeking a CAA-like 14-15x valuation on the company which I am told has been touted as producing $200 million in profit per year. Update: I’m told the profit is about $100 million per year. Wasserman’s annual revenue is estimated at about $700 million. (I’m unable to confirm the accuracy of this as Wasserman is privately held.)

Now Wasserman is being forced into a fire sale price to sell his portion, with Providence planning to change the name of the company, as TheWrap reported exclusively on Sunday.

Why it seems unlikely that Providence keeps Wasserman intact is that doing so would disqualify any number of likely buyers. Ari Emanuel is interested in the music division but Endeavor was required to divest itself of sports assets in its recent consolidation and thus could not buy that piece. United Talent Agency is interested in both the sports and music businesses but by law cannot own the Brillstein tv and film management business. Range may want to buy Brillstein, the movie and television management business.

A lot of pins will fall from this quick-moving bowling ball, and it is a stunningly fast outcome that is worth recapping: 

On Super Bowl Sunday, TheWrap broke the story that a group of music agents at Wasserman were demanding that Wasserman step down from the company after his connection to Jeffrey Epstein and racy emails with convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell surfaced earlier this month.

In the wake of that, over several days, about two dozen artists left the agency or spoke out against Wasserman.

The reckoning may not make sense to many. No one is accusing Wasserman of being a pedophile or a sex trafficker himself. He is not alleged to have used Epstein as a pimp for teenaged sex, as appears to be the case for others like sports team owner Steve Tisch or Apollo founder Leon Black or British royal Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Nonetheless, there was no goodwill extended to Wasserman in this case. And while Puck’s Matt Belloni wrote on Friday that no one deserves to lose their company over sexy emails, that’s exactly what happened just a few hours later. 

From what I’m told, Wasserman has made some powerful enemies in Hollywood, Emanuel and his former father-in-law uber lawyer Ken Ziffren among them. He left unnecessary bruised feelings and the impression of being a jerk when he insisted that his ex-wife Laura exit the country club to which they belonged when married, Hillcrest, despite the club’s longstanding policy to accommodate both divorced partners. 

And while Wasserman may have given the outward impression of having rescued the music department by buying it from Sam Gores’ Paradigm in 2021, many of the agents would rather strike out on their own, feeling burned from both experiences. 

“This was the dam bursting,” said one individual who knows the agency business well. “These [music] agents pride themselves on being decent family people…. So this is against everything they stand for, on top of last year’s trash.” 

I think it’s also true that Hollywood wants to move on from the grimy stain of the Harvey Weinstein years. Wasserman brings back all the nightmares of that time, and perhaps zero tolerance is the new normal. 

Another shoe remains to drop here, which is LA28. Social media (as well as my text inbox) is full of commenters who find it odd that Wasserman has had to step down from his agency, but remains the public face of Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics. For the moment, Wasserman says he is excited to focus on that role. We will see if that is sustainable. 

The post Inside the Lightning-Fast Fall of Casey Wasserman and What Happens Next | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

“No artist, agent or employee should be expected to defend or overlook actions that conflict so deeply with our own moral values.” She added: “This decision reflects my belief that meaningful change in our industry requires accountability and leadership that earns trust. ”

Previously: A group of music agents at Wasserman are demanding that founder and CEO Casey Wasserman step down from the company after his connection to Jeffrey Epstein and racy emails with convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell surfaced last week.

Additionally, Grammy-winning superstar Chappell Roan, who is represented by the agency, is expected to leave Wasserman imminently over the matter, a knowledgeable individual told TheWrap. Billie Eilish left the agency a year ago over revelations of the CEO’s alleged extramarital affairs.

According to two individuals who spoke to TheWrap, the music agents include Duffy McSwiggin, SVP of Music at Wasserman, senior agent Marty Diamond and several others.

McSwiggin represents Joni Mitchell, OK Go and Lake Street Dive. Diamond represents Coldplay and other acts.

The agents have presented Wasserman with an ultimatum to sell them the music business and leave or they will leave the agency, according to the individuals. Wasserman, originally a sports-focused agency, acquired the music business from Paradigm in 2021.  

A spokesperson for Wasserman had no comment when reached by TheWrap. McSwiggin could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for Roan did not get back to TheWrap before publication.

Wasserman has been under fire for the past week after his appearance in the latest release of Epstein emails, including a set of racy emails with Maxwell, who was found guilty of child sex trafficking in 2021 and is now incarcerated. In one 2003 email, he wrote her: “I think of you all the time. So, what do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?” Wasserman was married at the time.

Wasserman admitted in a statement last week that he flew on Epstein’s private jet as part of a 2002 humanitarian trip with a Clinton Foundation delegation. He apologized, saying he was “terribly sorry for having any association with either of them.”

There is no indication from the public excerpts that Wasserman was involved in Epstein’s or Maxwell’s criminal activities. Asked about this on Fox 11, Los Angeles district attorney Nathan Hochman said: “I see no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Wasserman has committed any type of criminal violation.” 

However, pressure against Wasserman has been mounting. Two LA Council members demanded that Wasserman resign from the chairmanship of the LA28, the city’s Olympic committee. Mayor Karen Bass declined to endorse it when asked last week. 

Also last week, the frontwoman for the band Best Coast, Bethany Cosentino, called on Wasserman to step down over his emails. It is unknown if other Wasserman clients have pressured their agents over the revelations. 

The numerous mention of Wasserman in the Epstein emails have been embarrassing, and come a year after another set of scandalous reports tied to his sexual affairs. In January of last year, TheWrap reported that Patricia Feau, his former secretary and chief of staff, who was later appointed to a high-paying job as vice president at the LA28 Olympic organizing committee, resigned from LA28 amid allegations of an affair and the implication of a payoff with the position. She denied any affair at the time.

Additionally, in 2024 multiple media reports described Wasserman as having had numerous alleged affairs with women who worked for him or were close to his professional circle while he was married to his then-wife, Laura Ziffren Wasserman, from whom he divorced in 2021. The reports referenced alleged relationships with Feau, a flight attendant on his private jet (now his partner) and other women.

Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Brandi Carlile is represented by Wasserman. She left the agency in 2024 for CAA. TheWrap regrets the error.

The post Music Agents Give Casey Wasserman Ultimatum: Leave Over Epstein Ties or They Will | Exclusive  appeared first on TheWrap.

There are soaring phrases about “seeking the truth, serving the public and ferociously guarding our independence.” There are earnest calls to “widen the aperture,” and “to be the home for the hardest conversations and boldest debates.” Exciting. Daring. Brave. 

And BIG. Weiss doesn’t shrink from stating her grander vision, a desire to do no less than “fix this country we all love” in creating a “shared source of trust.” 

The words are nice, the sentiments ambitious and the goal indisputably noble. We all want a source of shared trust in this time of political division, when competing sets of realities are playing out every night on opposing cable news stations. At a time when social media feeds amplify crackpots like Candace Owens, malevolent liars like Tucker Carlson and I’m-no-expert-but-I-have-opinions podcaster Joe Rogan. 

But how do you rebuild that? 

Weiss’s ideas about how to do that are very unclear. Much of it sounds an awful lot like the principles of basic journalism – truth-telling, information-gathering, equipping viewers with the facts, “even if it offends their sensibilities.” 

But let’s be honest – this is coded language. It’s a lot of fancy-stepping words for what we know Weiss really believes, which is bringing in a right-leaning point of view as a counterweight to what she sees as a left-woke-progressive drive to traditional news institutions, in this case CBS News.  

That’s what she means when she talks about equipping viewers “with ALL the facts” – even offensive ones. (Wink, wink.) And anybody who isn’t OK with that, she hints strongly, should leave. 

I’ve read the speech a couple of times, seeking to grab hold of a central theme, a clear plan. Weiss is right about framing the problem she needs to solve: CBS News has been busy hanging on to its shrinking, older audience, and failing. Instead, she argues, CBS News needs to be about the business of embracing the 21st century by expanding its core, by finding potential new, young viewers where they are – on YouTube, streaming apps, social media and podcasts. 

To which I can only enthusiastically nod, Yes. Many of the things she points out are obvious to any of us professionals in media who have been toiling for two decades or so to figure out how news survives in the age of the Internet and social media. 

It’s hardly a revelation to point out that your news products need to touch every facet of modern communication – YouTube, TikTok, X, vertical video. It’s a little, um, 1970s to point out that CBS News does not merely compete with the other news broadcasters. And speaking of retro, she does herself no favors by bringing the antiquated print “masthead” to CBS News. 

Hello, 21st century. Every one of us news entrepreneurs – including me in starting TheWrap in 2009, including Weiss in starting the Free Press in 2021 – knows that news moves in real time, and has to be offered in a 360-degree set of platforms. We all know that journalists need to build personal brands and post on their social media, and have podcasts and write books and have speaking engagements. (Doesn’t “60 Minutes” correspondent Anderson Cooper do exactly that?)

And even some of the proposed methods sound great. After all, who can argue with the goal of having your “stories reach the largest number of people possible”? 

Another thing: I like many of the 19 new contributors very much. Futurist tech thinker Derek Thompson, Iranian-American champion of women’s rights Masih Alinejad, health advocate Mark Hyman, libertarian Niall Ferguson. 

But that’s the op-ed page. That’s not the news gathering operation. Once again, Weiss seems to be falling into the trap of her own predilection for expert opinion rather than hardcore news gathering, which is the bedrock of CBS News.    

Because here’s where she’s dead wrong in stating that because of social media and AI, basic information is a commodity. How strongly can I say this? NO. Basic facts on which we all agree are at great risk. And institutions like CBS News are crucial in our democracy by presenting fact-based reality.

In addition to driving deep stories, or offering expert opinions, CBS News – and all legacy news institutions – have to provide a baseline of news reporting.

We now live in a world where Americans need sources they can trust on basic facts: who won the primary? What is the unemployment number? What does the latest research say about vaccines? 

That is where trust is key. 

Weiss talked in her speech about setting a news agenda. The aspiration of having an investigative piece on CBSNews.com and YouTube. Featuring it on the evening news that night. Then again on CBS’s morning show. Then a sit down on “60 Minutes,” “and on and on and on. We create the wave and then we ride it,” she said.  

Well, sure, sometimes. But sometimes you just have to help readers know what is happening in the war in Ukraine. Or that President Trump lied from some podium. Or that there’s a dispute in NATO. Sometimes you need to set a standard that viewers can trust with basic news reporting: What’s the rate of inflation and is it up or down? 

Weiss paints a world of big ideas and massive change: “CRISPR babies and killer drones and at-home robots and things we can’t yet imagine.” We want to know about that. But here on the ground, we live day to day and need a reliable, relatable source of information. Not, as she says, “Scoops… scoops of ideas. Scoops of explanation.” 

That sounds like an awful lot like telling me what to think. Or maybe just — school. 

Weiss made a lot of mistakes in her first four months on the job. She clearly did not listen to my advice back in November to “Find your allies on the inside… Take your time. Let people get to know you. Embrace them so they feel you will have their back. You will build support from within, not by imposing your will but by listening.”

She did none of that, rushing to remake the evening broadcast on the fly with an inexperienced anchor; multi-tasking way too many big jobs; grabbing the spotlight with her town hall interviews while not stopping to listen and learn how to manage work flow on edits, which led to her debacle on the “60 Minutes” CECOT story. She’s been way over her skis, and everyone knows it.

Now, she says, she’s ready to listen. “I want to take the time to get to know all of you and I want to hear your best ideas,” she said in conclusion. It’s late in the day to do that, but better late than never.

Bari’s definitely right about one thing: the stakes are very high, as she said. And the hour is late. Let’s hope she gets it more right than wrong. 

The post Letter to Bari Weiss: Soaring Words for CBS, but Your Solutions Are Fuzzy appeared first on TheWrap.

A quiet story of a two Korean-Americans who start out as antagonists and gradually, tentatively and with great hesitation became friends, “Bedford Park” is a quintessentially indie experience that packs huge emotional power in its subtle, deliberate pace. Audrey, played by the well-known Korean actress Moon Choi and Eli, played by Korean superstar Son Sukku, are two broken people who each wrestle with trying to assert their independence while navigating complicated family relationships.

“Ahn… takes the wrestlings of the soul, the unexpressed longings, the turmoil we feel between love and obligation, and crafts them into great art,” wrote TheWrap’s critic Zachary Lee.

But Ahn, a diminutive Korean-American who showed up to TheWrap’s studio in jeans and a baseball cap, has not read that review or any other. She’s refused to expose herself to anything other than the screenings. Luckily, she was willing to be interviewed about the eight-year journey to make this very personal film.

Before setting out to make “Bedford Park,” Ahn said, she was working as an editor after having waited tables while trying to get a film made on the side. But she finally decided that if she was ever to get a film made, she’d have to set aside her work as an editor and write a deeply personal story.

It couldn’t be good, she knew. It had to be great. And it had to be rooted in her real life experience as a Korean-American who came to the United States as a two-year-old.

“I dug deep into the areas of my own experience that I just didn’t see being represented in films,” she said. “There are Asian American stories out there that I’ve thought were cliche and didn’t tap into the details of the experience, and just none of them resonated with me.”

She continued: “I wanted to tell a story about a woman who had to deal with the cognitive dissonance of having to balance two cultures and what that meant for her in terms of her own relationship with herself, her relationship with others and how to deal with trauma.

“And so my first drafts were very autobiographical, and I knew from being an editor and having worked in development and having written many other scripts, in order for the film to really resonate, you had to be willing to expand it beyond just your own story.”

In the film, the two characters meet over a car accident, but instead of fighting, they begin to develop a slow friendship. While Audrey is over at Eli’s place trying to settle for the damages, she has a miscarriage. Eli drives her to the hospital, and as a gesture of thanks, Audrey offers to drive Eli to his community college classes. The slow pace of the friendship-turned-romance, as each reveals their private trauma in bits and pieces, is much of the pleasure of the film.

“This is a film about two people looking to be held, jagged edges and all, without cutting the people who are doing the embracing,” wrote Lee in his review.

Ahn had never heard of either actor when she set out to cast the film. After searching Korean-American actors, she turned to Korea where six years ago she found Choi, a well known local actress, and they began rehearsing via Zoom over months.

“I wanted a killer actress,” said Ahn. “She absolutely embodied certain characteristics of me… a fighter spirit, a rawness inside that’s not always apparent on the outside.”  

But she couldn’t find her Eli, who had been written as a Caucasian character. In fact, Ahn was insistent Eli had to be white.

“I wanted it to be an American film, and that was a big part of it. Like, we need a lead who is a white actor who could help bring us money.”

But the money wasn’t coming. And it was Choi, who was friends with Sukku, who convinced Ahn to consider auditioning him.

“I didn’t want to do it,” said Ahn, who agreed to meet Sukku as a courtesy. “I’ll admit I went in with a closed mind. I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll do it, just meet him on Zoom.’ I knew he was a big star, but I wasn’t interested.”

But from the moment she met Sukku, she changed her mind. “He just exuded the thing that I knew I needed in Eli… a man who was a loner and was somewhat lost, and I saw facets of past pains and guardedness, protectiveness, self protection.”

The result is two stunning performances from actors who will likely be completely unknown to U.S. audiences and all the more affecting for it. Ironically, casting Sukku led to the first financing that came into the film from Hyundai, after traditional U.S. sources would not commit.

Ahn has poured eight years of her life into “Bedford Park,” which is up for acquisition. But for the moment, she is satisfied, knowing she made the indelible film she set out to do.

“I always wanted to make a film that made people feel something,” she said. “I so miss those movies that make me feel something and move me to tears and make me feel humanity. I don’t think you can set out to do that, because I think that’s dangerous. I think you’ve got to just focus on great characters and a great story and hope that will be the result.

“So if that’s what came out of this, then – amazing. But that wasn’t the focus. I just wanted to tell a great story.”

Catch up on all of our Sundance coverage here.

The post Why Stephanie Ahn, Director of Sundance Gem ‘Bedford Park,’ First Wanted a White Actor for Her Korean Love Story appeared first on TheWrap.

The unrest in Minnesota was impossible to avoid this weekend and it threw the historic events of Rushdie’s life into sharp relief, from his continuing to write in the face of a 1989 religious death edict to his insistence on chronicling the gruesome violence of the 2022 attack to bear witness to the current risks to artistic freedom. 

We spoke on the day that ICE agents had shot a man dead in Minnesota who had been trying to protect a female protester, the second such shooting death in two weeks. The conversation necessarily turned to Trump’s assault on free expression. 

“For the authoritarian mind, culture is the enemy,” Rushdie told me. “Culture in its broadest sense: universities, journalism, artists, poets, musicians. Culture itself is the enemy because culture encourages freedom. It encourages discussing things and disagreeing and arguing about things and doing new things, discarding old things. Culture encourages freedom.”

Now he watches the renewed rise of jihadism, the extreme views of the progressive left and the brutality of the Trump administration with something like bewilderment and alarm.

“Everybody’s gone crazy right now,” he stated baldly. “It’s very hard to have a serious conversation.” 

At this point we were talking about the “horseshoe” theory, how the extremes of the right and the left loop around in their radicalism and end in agreement. As an intellectual whose ideas made him public enemy no. 1 to many Muslims for decades, the newfound alliance between jihadist ideology and anti-colonial, progressive ideas is disturbing, but not new.

“I remember back in the day when the attack on me was beginning, reading a piece in The Nation, a hardcore left-wing paper, in which the argument was made that the left should be on the side of the Ayatollah because he was the only force in the world that was fighting against American hegemony,” he said. “I was very shocked by that at the time. I’m less shocked by its recurrences, because I see how it comes about.”

I mention that this is why the left has not strongly come out to support the popular Iranian uprising, or has trouble condemning Hamas.  

“There is this problem that Hamas exists,” he said. “It is a terrorist organization that needs to be spoken of, as well as the atrocities committed by the Netanyahu government, and maybe it isn’t spoken of enough.”  

Let’s back up. In 2022 Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly – in his cheek, chest, eye, neck and thigh – as he began a public lecture in Chappaqua, New York. The attacker was  24-year-old Hadi Matar, an American with no previous criminal record who had become radicalized in the Middle East and was convinced that Rushdie should die. 

The savage attack took Rushdie’s right eye and required multiple surgeries, stitches and rehab to crawl his way back a semblance of health. 

But it had been years, decades actually, since the writer lived under the shadow of violence due to the fatwa issued in 1989 by Iran’s then-leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni. The imam demanded Rushdie’s death for the book “Satanic Verses,” which Khomeini deemed blasphemous to Islam and worthy of a death sentence. Rushdie lived in hiding for a decade. 

Through the years, the writer neither apologized nor retracted his work, and went on to write 23 more novels. He eventually moved to the United States where he lived a rather normal life, or so he thought.

The attack in 2022 was a great shock, he said. And almost immediately, he and his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths agreed that they needed to tell the story of its violence. The result was Rushdie’s book, “Knife,” and now the film by renowned documentarian Alex Gibney. 

The film leans in hard to the gory details of what the attacker wrought, the eye bulging out of its socket, the raw, bloody remnants of skin stitched together by surgeons along his chin and neck, and on his torso. Griffiths took most of that footage herself. 

“The reason for doing it is that I felt it wasn’t just about me, that there were principles at stake, and that actually maybe people should see what a terrorist attack looks like up close,” Rushdie said. 

That, like his decision to go on writing all these years, took focus and courage.  

“I told myself to go on being the writer I’d always been,” he said, of his refusal to stop. “Not to write frightened books, and not to write revenge books. Just go on writing the books I had begun to write. To go on down the road I was on, and that was very much an act of will. I really thought, ‘I’m not going to be diverted in either direction, either the direction of cowardice or anger.’” 

The price Rushdie has paid is immense. And the threat of violence from an intolerant strain of Islam has grown and now become a presence within the West. His life story is a cautionary tale, as is his unflinching look at not just his injuries, but at why anyone – from Donald Trump to Ayatollah Khomeini – would choose to do violence to a writer.  

“I’ve always thought that it’s weird that dictators and tyrants are so frightened by writers and poets,” he reflected. “Why was (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco frightened of (Federico Garcia) Lorca? Why was Caesar Augustus frightened of Ovid? We’ve got no guns. We have no armies. But what we do is we argue with their ability to control the narrative. That’s what dictators want to do. They want to control the narrative. And writers and artists and journalists contest that, and that makes them dangerous.” 

“Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie” is for sale.

Catch up on all of our Sundance coverage here.

The post Salman Rushdie on Jihadism, Fascism and the Fight for Free Expression: ‘Everybody’s Gone Crazy’ appeared first on TheWrap.

In 2025, Abdy and De Luca, co-chairs and CEOs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, pulled off an astonishing hat trick that made them the envy of all their movie business peers: not only did they survive rumors early in the year that they could lose their jobs over the poor showing of big-budget movies like “Joker: Folie a Deux,” they came back from that stumble to crush one expectation after another with the nearly $1 billion grosser “A Minecraft Movie,” then critical and commercial smash “Sinners,” then successful DC reset “Superman” and surprise horror sensation “Weapons.” All the studios’ divisions — including DC Studios and New Line — overperformed.

In total, the studio will clear a stunning $4 billion of the industry’s domestic box office total of $8.8 billion, which includes setting a record with seven consecutive films opening with over $40 million at the domestic box office.

But that’s not all. In the fall, the studio’s original slate of movies led by Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” also became the front-runner in awards season, followed closely by Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” with surprise attention for Amy Madigan from Zach Cregger’s original horror movie, “Weapons.” PTA’s movie is widely expected to take Best Picture at the Academy Awards. 

All this, while their corporate parent Warner Bros. Discovery, led by CEO David Zaslav, was put up for sale, and a wild and woolly bidding war between Netflix and Paramount, who are both vying to own the studio, raged in the headlines. 

So it’s no surprise to see the two executives cheery — if tired — on a quiet Friday in their building on the historic Warner lot. De Luca, still boyish at 60, wears a tan suit that sets off his graying salt and pepper hair and bushy eyebrows, while Abdy, 52, has scurried to change into a new Gucci green dress for a WrapBook portrait out in front of the famed “WB” water tower as the sun begins to set. 

Settled in their shared office back in their executive building, full of warm colors and cozy furnishings, the two shared their candid thoughts about the uniquely successful year they’ve had, their perspective on the future of the theatrical business and the challenges of the year ahead as their company teeters on the selling block.

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

It’s so much fun to sit down with you guys – how are you feeling about this year that you just had?

Mike De Luca: We’re overjoyed. It’s validating on so many levels, but mostly validating for how we felt when we read those scripts, and how we felt about our people, like Jesse Ehrman at Warner Bros., Richard Brener at New Line. New Line, of course, had a billion-dollar year on its own. Jesse, champion of “Minecraft,” our highest-grossing movie of the year. WB Animation Studios president Bill Damaschke, his first movie is in November restarting animation, and then putting James (Gunn) and Peter (Safran) in charge of DC, and coming out with “Superman.” Everything that seemed to be theory a couple of years ago came to fruition in practice in 2025, and I think that’s why we’re so happy. It validated the slate strategy. It validated the personnel choices. So we’re just overjoyed. And you know what it says about our filmmakers, Ryan, Paul, Zach and Zach (Lipovsky) and Adam (Stein), who did “Final Destination.” Michael Chaves did “Conjuring.” Everybody just knocked it out of the park. Jared Hess with “Minecraft.” No notes.

Pam Abdy: We’re also so grateful to the audiences too — the audience has really showed up for these movies. We were betting on filmmakers all day, every day. You cannot go wrong betting on the best storytellers.

Well, that’s not true. You can go wrong. 

Abdy: We’ve seen things go wrong, but I do still believe in my heart you have to bet on filmmakers.

De Luca: Yeah, because we’re long-term thinkers. You can’t judge your strategy based on a quarter or movie. You can’t clutch your pearls over a bad quarter or a bad movie. You really have to think about: how’s it going to look at the end of the year? Are you going to be in the black or the red? What was your net revenue? 

You get extra points for living through a year in which everybody said you were on the brink of losing your jobs. When you bet on the filmmaker, sometimes it doesn’t work. With “Joker: Folie à Deux,” did you know that it was going to go that way?

Abdy: I really liked the movie. I still do …

De Luca: It was really revisionist. And it may be that it was too revisionist for a global mainstream audience, but I thought that Todd (Phillips, the director) and his screenwriting partner Scott (Silver) did the thing that most people making sequels don’t do, which is they decided to not repeat themselves. I do give them immense props for not repeating themselves, but it just turned out to not connect with the audience.

Because we’re veterans, you get a veteran’s thick skin. I’ve certainly had flops in my history. I have been lucky enough to have hits in my history. But I try to remember something someone told me once: Everyone has flops, but not everyone has hits. You just try not to torture the ones that don’t work.

So what was the big flop you had before this job?

De Luca: The one that got me fired from New Line in the first place, “Town and Country,” and that’s not even a hard question to answer (laughs). What I learned as a young executive on that movie is it’s better to pull the plug when it looks like it’s not working and have no movie than a bad movie.

Abdy: The one in particular that tortures me is when I was a producer on “47 Ronin,” that was a really tough one where I learned a valuable lesson, which is that just because I’m a producer and I think I can fix everything, some things aren’t necessarily fixable. I was trying to jerry-rig a template in a weird way — take this ancient Japanese story and try to make it in a Western setting, and it just didn’t work. 

Last year was proof of concept that if you operate in the job fearlessly and respect the audience and bring an eclectic slate of movies that have something for everyone, the audience, post-pandemic, is there. They want to come. – Michael De Luca 

Did your relationship fray at all in that moment? Did you look at each other like, “It’s your fault?”

De Luca: We’re close anyway, but it drew us closer. Obviously, Pam and I work very closely together, but we’re really a collective here. So when there was that punditry going on, Pam and I are respective heads of our divisions, Jesse at Warners, Richard (Brener) at New Line, Bill (Damaschke) at animation, John (Stanford), Christian (Davin) and Dana (Nussbaum) in marketing, Jeff Goldstein in distribution, they all formed a protective circle around us. We really try to operate the company like a family. And you have to remember when all that was going on in the press, the press wasn’t privy to what we were privy to, the test screenings, the marketing campaigns, the testing and materials. We knew we were going to make out OK. We didn’t know that the slate would overperform to the level it did, but we were reasonably assured, company-wide, that once these movies started to roll out, people would eat their words. 

Abdy: During that time, we’re also running a studio, so Mike and I had to show up as leaders, and it’s really important that he and I come in and show up for our teams and help lift them up and keep their energy up, because we have an entire slate of movies to release. So you can’t sit down and just worry about one moment.

De Luca: It’s almost like there are two realities. There’s the outside clickbait industry reality, and they’re only going off of anonymous sources and rumors. And then there’s our lived experience within the studio, which is an entirely different reality based on actual test screenings, marketing material, testing, working with the filmmaker. When Pam and I took the jobs, we talked to David Zaslav, who completely agreed that pivoting the studio back to theatrical and not making streaming originals was the way to go. That there was an audience out there post-pandemic that was starved for new movies. Legacy sequels, IP adaptations, tentpoles, when you find the appropriate ones, absolutely make them, they’re the order of the day, but there’s also an up-and-coming theatrical audience of Gen Alpha and Gen Z that wants to see originals. We talked about having a mix of all those things, and so it all just kind of …

Abdy: … came to fruition this year. 

What was the movie coming into last year that you thought was going to be the one that surprises people?

Abdy and De Luca: “Sinners.”

De Luca: It was such a wonderful genre mashup and something so fresh and original from Ryan (Coogler) that we just thought nobody had read the script or knew exactly what it was going to be. But since we had read it and seen it, we thought that it would really surprise people, and how deep and profound and emotional it was would touch people.

Abdy: The minute you read that script, including that surreal montage where Miles is singing and the ancestors come …  It’s so incredible. It hits you in your heart and your soul in a way like nothing I’ve ever seen before. 

De Luca: And then “Weapons,” there was no amount of preparing the audience that was going to take away from the surprise, because we kept the twist out of the campaign, which I thought was genius, but we knew that was going to surprise people. 

We discussed this a lot internally. We think marketing has evolved to be about the more you can hold back and tease and create a puzzle box out of campaigns. I think especially younger moviegoers really appreciate not being force-fed the entire plot of a movie. And movies like Paul’s movie and “Weapons” to a certain degree and “Sinners” let us bring back the idea of presenting an enigma, and letting you solve the puzzle when you show up and you buy a ticket. 

Abdy: When there’s discovery, when the audience leaves that theater, they’re like, “Holy shit, you have to see this,” it excites them. And I think it creates that cultural moment where you feel it. We see it in reactions online, like when we watch a movie open, and you see how people are talking and engaging about it.

De Luca: Especially for Gen Z and Gen Alpha moviegoers, that means something to them, that authenticity and signature and authorship. We’re finding more and more, especially in the PLFs (Premium Large Formats) and the IMAX theaters, it really means something to people when a filmmaker communicates with them directly and says, “I made this for you.” Chris Nolan obviously does that, but it’s never been more important.

So how do you think about the work that you’re doing when the conversation in Hollywood and beyond is about the death of theatrical, and it’s because of the sale of this company? The theater owners themselves have been categorical: If Warner goes away, we’re not going to be able to sustain this business. How do you think about that, in terms of your conversations with your team, your conversations with filmmakers? 

Abdy: We’re following the same path we’ve always followed, which is: bet on filmmakers, have an eclectic slate of movies that are going to be released in movie theaters. That’s our plan. Our strategy hasn’t changed. And we just come in and have those same conversations. I mean, 2026 obviously is baked. 2027 is almost full, and now we’re looking towards 2028, so we have to plan two years ahead.

De Luca: We’re tripling down on theatrical. We’re adding to our slate. We just announced our new label to be run by Christian Parkes. We want to be anywhere someone is buying a ticket to go into a movie theater, regardless of budget and genre. There are things that are outside our control, but we feel very solid in the slate strategy that we have, and we’re just looking to increase the number of movies a year out of this studio. 

We’d like to get to 18, obviously based on available release dates. But we’re aggressively looking to increase the number of movies and tripling down on theatrical releases. That’s the order of the day.

You have a comedy coming this year written, directed by and starring Jonah Hill opposite Kristen Wiig. Don’t you know that comedies don’t work?

Abdy: They don’t work until they do. 

De Luca: We don’t subscribe to blanket statements. And personally, I love when a movie is uncomp-able. I think there’s a real appetite, especially with the younger moviegoers, to not be fed the same old thing. I just read an article about box office being up by 8% and especially younger boys being more likely to go. They need to be fed more movies.

When the doom and gloom contingent reports box office is down by 20% they forget to write the next sentence, which is, the number of movies being released is down 20% so that’s why we subscribe to: If you build it, they will come. When I was a baby executive, the R-rated comedy was pronounced dead. Then the spec for “American Pie” came out.

And then everybody had to have an R rating right? 

De Luca: Yeah, then you couldn’t get a PG-13 comedy made, because everybody thought you had to make an R, right? Hollywood is such a pack animal. The minute there’s a success, everybody runs in one direction. That’s why I don’t subscribe to blanket statements. One good movie will overturn any blanket statement.

What about love stories? What happened to those? My theory is that Hollywood studio executives are afraid of showing love and sex on screen. It’s safer to show brutality and violence and horror.

De Luca: It’s just a higher bar for love stories because you don’t want to be cliche. 

What are you excited about for 2026?

De Luca: “Wuthering Heights,” we love. “The Bride” is a punk rock assault on the senses. It’s Maggie Gyllenhaal. We thought Maggie was a filmmaker of note and she pitched this genre mashup almost more in line with “True Romance” and “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Natural Born Killers” than a traditional monster movie. It’s a very unique role for Christian Bale as Frankenstein’s monster. And it’s all about seeking love and being othered and finding your place. 

I feel so lucky that we got Bill Damaschke. He was an animation executive with Jeffrey (Katzenberg) at DreamWorks and presided over “Kung Fu Panda” and “Madagascar,” so we were interviewing for animation heads, and I didn’t think we were going to get him. Bill feels the legacy here at Warner Bros. with Looney Tunes and also “Iron Giant” and “Happy Feet,” “The LEGO Movie.” He was really excited to step into Warner Bros. and reinvent the Warner Animation label. So we pitched him to come start an animation label, and he’s just crushed it. He’s got a slate and a pipeline of new animated movies, the first of which is “Cat in the Hat” with Bill Hader this November.

I’m really excited about this “Twilight Zone” kind of J.J. Abrams-produced movie that David Robert Mitchell, who’s usually an indie director, did.

Abdy: We’re changing the title on it. We’re really excited about Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s movie “Digger.” He’s next-level.

De Luca: He reinvents the wheel every time. That movie is stunning.

You’ve seen a cut?

De Luca: Twice!

Abdy: Tom (Cruise) is extraordinary.

What is it like?

Abdy: Nothing you’ve ever seen. That’s what’s so brilliant. This is the fourth time I’ve worked with him. He never repeats himself, and he’s constantly taking you into his mind and his vision and surprising you. And this movie does exactly that.

De Luca: We’re going to play mystery box with that too.

Abdy: And we have “Mortal Kombat II,” wait until you see that play with an audience. It’s like a rock concert.

And you have “Dune 3.”

De Luca: Denis Villeneuve’s dailies, you want to put them on your wall as artwork. They’re unbelievable. It’s the epic conclusion of the Paul Atreides saga.

Abdy: It’s so beautiful looking.

De Luca: When audiences find out what (Denis) went through to make this movie, like traipsing into 106-degree weather in Abu Dhabi and building these giant sets so you feel like you’re on another planet.

So can you project yourselves forward and imagine a world in which you’d be making movies like this at Netflix? Warner Bros. inside Netflix, which is the plan?

De Luca: You know, it calls for speculation. But I’ll just be honest — we hope that we get to continue to do what we’re doing in perpetuity. This is the last job I want to have. I’m working at Warner Bros., especially the way we revered the studio as producers. The dream was always to pitch and set something up at Warner Bros. because of the legacy. It’s the best job I’ve ever had. 

Abdy: Me too. I hope I get to do it until they drag me out. It’s a dream. I mean, you get to work with all these filmmakers, the fact that we get to work together the way we do, as best colleagues. 

De Luca: We were hoping last year was proof of concept that if you operate in the job fearlessly and respect the audience and bring an eclectic slate of movies that have something for everyone, that it’s proof that the audience, post-pandemic, is there. They want to come. Young moviegoers want to come even more than their older counterparts. And if you just bring them quality offerings by the best filmmakers available, it’s a very viable business with opportunity for growth.

The post Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy on Their Excellent Year: ‘Operate Fearlessly and Respect the Audience’ | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

The answer is – well, yes, it probably will because we are watching the entertainment industry transform in real time. With another 17,000 jobs vaporized last year, with a barely-rescued box office result and with December closing on the looming merger of market-leading Netflix with legacy brand Warner Bros., we can hardly avoid the obvious: Hollywood has changed. 

I’m not the first to point out that a century-old business model has been disrupted, permanently, by the rise of streaming and tech’s takeover of what was once known as Hollywood. And I’m not even talking about Oracle’s Larry Ellison buying Paramount from the Redstone family. Tech companies Netflix, Apple and Amazon now outweigh Disney, NBCU, Paramount and whatever Warner Bros. will be when the sale of that studio shakes out. Google doesn’t even make content, but its YouTube division is still bigger – in revenue and audience – than any competing TV platform. 

Is the consumer better off? That’s up for debate. 

But the vibrant system that created prosperity for a 360-degree ecosystem of movie studios, TV networks, producers, actors, writers, directors, their agents and managers and lawyers, plus an entire web of below-the-line craftspeople and various production experts has receded over the horizon of history. 

It does not mean Hollywood is disappearing. The business of making stories for television and movies continues. But the opportunity for financial success is vastly limited to the studios themselves and a rarified layer of talent, whether that’s the super-writer-producer Taylor Sheridan or a tiny number of stars like Tom Cruise or the “Frozen 3” cast Kristen Bell, Josh Gad and Idina Menzel.

The Hollywood business model has faced shifts wrought by new technologies before. That included adding sound to the movies, the invention of television, the rise of cable and then premium cable, or the advent of DVDs. For those willing to widen the aperture of entertainment, “change” has not always been a harbinger of “worse.” 

As a trend, technological change has generally meant a broadening of entertainment to include new formats and functions, usually with the result of expanded opportunity, revenue and profits. After all, DVDs did not kill theatrical moviegoing, despite the worries at the time. In fact it brought a flood of new consumer spending that floated movie profits for more than two decades. 

But the latest wave of technological change has resulted in something different. Since 2010 or so, the advent of streaming has sparked a disruption not seen before, driving viewers to the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of online entertainment. With the additional disruption of the COVID lockdown in 2020, the public has grown less willing to go to a movie theater to see a film that will be streaming on their TV just a few weeks later. 

This shift is skewing the entire entertainment industry further toward television, even as “television” has come to exclude broadcast and cable channels. (And by the way “Broadcasting and Cable” has ceased to exist as a publication, I recently learned.)  

I’ve been having this argument with Hollywood corporate executives, both current and retired, as we all survey the wreckage of 2025 and wonder what will come next. My friend Jeff Sagansky – currently a media investor who has run Sony television, CBS Entertainment and NBC – has warned repeatedly that abandoning the cash-rich cable networks, for which programmers stopped providing new content a few years ago, would hasten their extinction. Old contacts reach out from their retirement havens in Hawaii or Portugal and confess how glad they are to have gotten out of Hollywood when they did. Lovers of independent film look around for a saviour and find none. 

Peak TV has unpeaked. Bidding wars at Sundance are mostly distant memories. Who will make the dreams for the dream machine? 

“You can trace the disintegration of Hollywood to Netflix making original series,” one of these executives said to me recently, echoing the complaints of myriad others over the lack of back-end profits. “Look at where we are. It’s all coalescing around three or three-and-a-half companies, that’s it. They’ve all taken their cue from Netflix. They’ve cut back. They own all that’s on the air. No one gets any other participation… They [Netflix] only have 8% of viewing time, but they dictate the roadmap for how the whole industry is functioning.”

What’s worse, he said, “they’ve consistently ratcheted prices to consumer, every year, way above inflation.”

Another executive, recently retired, wondered what happens to TV production if Netflix gets Warner, with its trophies of HBO, Warner Bros. Television and Turner. “A big part of Hollywood companies is TV series production. It hasn’t been movies. So what the f–k will happen with the center of the visual entertainment business – that’s TV shows? What will happen to that?”

All of this doom-telling and I haven’t even mentioned the arrival of AI. That’s because that particular disruption has not yet landed on Hollywood’s shores with two feet. But it certainly will. 

I’ll end on one hopeful note: disruption always means opportunity. So if the entertainment industry has contracted, that in itself has left space for new ideas, fresh products, alternate platforms. I’m looking at you, Creators. 

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