Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect with me on LINKEDIN here if ya like or email me at seanmcnultynyc@gmail.com), and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on Wednesday, June 25, 2025.

Where I gotta say . . . my concern for the next generation is starting to get a little dire. No, not in Hollywood (you’ll always have A24, kids) — more just uh, in life.

First we had Gen Z getting anxiety at opening bar tabs in the city that never sleeps, while also not grasping that using cash in bars is a really great way to keep you on budget — and across the pond, not quite understanding that you can just walk up to anywhere at the bar to order a pint in the U.K.

Now, needlepoint and scrapbooking are apparently the hot new Gen Z hobbies, the cruise business is booming and The CW is doing movies based on Harlequin novels. Folks — Freaky Friday is just a movie, not a lifestyle recommendation.

Keep me posted when early bird specials become the latest thing you start waiting on lines for . . . which, given that online and in-store spending for 18-to-24’s was -13% between January and April this year according to new CIRCANA data — may not be a bad promotion for the restaurant industry to look into.

BUT: Maybe Gen Z is too busy spending money on offshore POLYMARKET bets — the gambling “predictions market” platform has been banned in the U.S. since 2022 — as the company is looking to raise $200M at a $1B valuation, according to The Information, which ironically is the same amount I am looking to raise. How weird.

• Existing POLYMARKET investor Peter Thiel is leading this fundraising round as well.

ALSO: Ya gotta love OPENAI’s ambitions — it’s also been designing a product/tools to challenge GOOGLE’s Workplace (Sheets, Docs, etc) and MICROSOFT Office, according to The Information, offering the ability to co-create/edit documents and communicate with others using the CHATGPT interface. 🍿

• MEANWHILE: MICROSOFT is learning the meaning behind “first-mover advantage,” as it’s having trouble selling its Copilot AI to businesses, as many employees want to use CHATGPT instead, according to Bloomberg. I’m sure the MICROSOFT Teams group has some words of consolation.

UH: A federal judge took a pretty open view of “fair use,” handing a defeat to 3 authors suing ANTHROPIC for buying copies of their books and feeding them into its chat bot to “learn.”

• Granted, it was only because the company actually paid for the books . . . and the ruling doesn’t quite cover the 7 million books that ANTHROPIC didn’t bother to pay for when dumping them onto the servers — so there is more still to come here.

AND: The proposed $750M a year CA tax credit funding has been approved by lawmakers, and a formal vote should be held on Friday. 🙏

• A companion bill pending also proposes lifting the available credit from 20% to 35% on costs incurred/paid in L.A. County.

HMM: Anyone else occasionally getting sent directly to advertiser sites when you click on some Deadline story links these days? 🧐 And no, I didn’t miss-click on an ad accidentally on the screen like 7 times in the past 10 days or so. DOORDASH seems to be the one that’s coming up most for me.

THANKS!: To the folks at UNIVERSAL for the invite to check out M3GAN 2.0 last night in NYC — while I still have a few questions about the tech in the movie 🤔 . . . it’s a fun summer pic to enjoy with friends (AI or otherwise) — and any film that has a plot point around Steven Seagal movies is a 👍 from me.

PLUS: A special thanks to Allison Williams for introducing me to Central Jersey royalty after the movie, in the form of her dad, Brian Williams.

🎥 THE SILVER SCREEN