☀️ DISNEY TV Among MORE Big Layoffs, Cuts Coming

Mornin! This is Sean McNulty and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026.

Where Trump 2.0 midterms Election Day has finally arrived — so, go vote! Well, that is if you’re an old-school person like me who still likes to go fill out a ballot IRL.

Time to see how the relentless Trump October campaign ~~incoherent rants~~ speech appearances pay off — gotta love a closing speech/pitch in front of the new & improved D.C. reflecting pool yesterday, a subject which took up the bulk of the first 20 minutes of his “speech” before he mentioned the midterm elections.

But no matter the outcome today, America’s local TV station owners thank Elon for his well-spent $474M in donations this cycle.

AND: The sports-owner crowd is shockingly lining up behind Republicans in the Michigan U.S. Senate race. At least 10 pro team owners have given money to support Republican candidate Mike Rogers. Former ~~WASSERMAN~~ THE TEAM owner Casey Wasserman also donated $25k to the Rogers cause, according to public records cited by FOS.

No team owners have donated to Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
Related but not related — embattled former LAKERS owner Mark Walter is now exploring a sale of his CADILLAC F1 team for a cool $3B. Always nice to have liquidity, ya know, just in case things pop up.

YEAH: Add Jessica Alba to the list of boldfaced names with regrettable Halloween choices (who knew costumes were so hard!?). She deleted all of her IG posts of herself in a bloody Nancy Kerrigan costume, next to a friend dressed as Tonya Harding, holding a bat.

This comes after Martha Stewart learned that dressing up as a hungry, homeless person may not be received in the hilarious way she envisioned.

THEN: The WWE and DISNEY are finding more ways to work together outside of the WWE’s PLE deal with ESPN — 2 WWE events will take place at DISNEY WORLD in December, and one has a NETFLIX assist.

Monday, Dec. 14: NETFLIX will stream The John Cena Classic, with stars from Raw, SmackDown and NXT competing for a special belt.
Tuesday, Dec. 15: A special Avengers: Doomsday-themed edition Worlds Collide, featuring wrestlers from WWE, NXT and AAA . . . although this currently has no streaming/TV home. 🧐 Place your bets on the Avengers cameos and RDJ’s suplex abilities.
- Both events will take place at the ESPN Wide World of Sports venue at DISNEY WORLD.

OH: Speaking of campaigning, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to bump the California production tax credit pool from $750M to $1B+. The proposal also includes:

Adding in above-the-line costs.
Increasing the indie film fund to $100M (similar to the one in NY).
A 5% bump in credits for anyone committing to at least 2 California productions

It’s obviously just a proposal — and Newsom is out of office come January . . . but if you want to beat out New York and New Jersey (and Georgia) these days domestically, seemingly more firepower is needed on the West Coast (aka the JT school of negotiating).

AH: Well, this is actually convenient placement — Justin Timberlake is doing a 4-part docuseries on APPLE TV next month.

YUP: SNAP ended up also settling with the 2 teens suing the company for social media addiction before the trial was to begin this week.

META settled last week, and GOOGLE / YT and TIKTOK settled previously. See you all at the next trial.

SO: Good news for any folks who didn’t get some ORACLE debt in their trick-or-treating stashes this weekend 👻 — ORACLE is issuing another $10B in bonds, and putting $10B in new stock on the market to, yes, pay for further AI data center spending.

ORCL stock was, uh, -8% on the good news yesterday, dropping to $119 a share and approaching its 52-week low of $114.

WELL: With all the college sports legislative reform in the works — it’s nice to see awful, overpaid college football coaches are still protected. Gotta love FLORIDA STATE having to pay its now-fired coach Mike Norvell about $50M for going 41-39 in 7 seasons.

That $50M is basically equal to the football program’s entire FY25 budget.
The FSU athletic program already has $437M in debt (the 2nd highest in college sports, according to Sportico), mainly due to stadium renovations and new facilities built for players.
Place your bets on whether Norvell’s payday at least somewhat affects FSU’s roughly $41k in annual student tuition / housing costs (out-of-state).
- CONVERSELY: A $50M payout would equate to roughly $1,600 per FSU full-time undergrad student.

PLUS: WME filed an amicus brief in the NY TIMES vs. OPENAI lawsuit advocating on behalf of the TIMES, saying that creative materials should be licensed by AI firms . . . and not used without payment (aka stolen).

Trump’s DOJ has taken a . . . different stance on the matter, previously issuing its own filing in September, recommending that the court reject “any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law.”
The Cate Blanchett-backed HUMAN CONSENT FOUNDATION also issued its own amicus brief in support of the NY TIMES, which was also signed by several boldfaced Hollywood names.
ALSO: The NY TIMES and other publishers are also now suing private web browser company BRAVE, alleging it’s scraping NYT content and providing it to AI companies like xAI, ANTHROPIC and PERPLEXITY.

FINALLY: Here on a huge earnings report day — the key insights below into FOX, VERSANT and PEOPLE INC. are doing, plus red-hot ROKU — here’s what our collective future looked like in Q3 with ANTHROPIC’s numbers:

Revenue: $17B, +47% from Q2 (and yes, that rate is slowing a bit)
Net Loss: -$23B, which is 2x vs. a year ago
Operating Loss was -$567M, vs. an Operating Profit of $974M in Q2. Hey, you win some, you lose some, amirite?

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