☀️2025 Movie Slate: New Realities for Movie Biz
3 new ideas to boost movie biz / NFLX, PAR+ hit highs in NIELSEN chart / #NewJobsTuesday!
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 TUESDAY, February 18, 2025.
Where the NYT is the latest newsroom to begin introducing AI tools for its editorial staff to use according to Semafor, to do things like write headlines and social media copy.
So hey, as the NYT and The Wakeup of course are often mentioned as having very similar editorial style guidelines — I figured I’d give it a whirl on a headline today!
However, in the end I decided against the AI recommended hed of “Give Up Hollywood, It’s Over!” — thanks AI, very subtle.
AH: HBO is putting John Oliver back on YT after the show airs/Monday instead of holding it ’til Thursdays.
OH: Add REDDIT to the list of companies asking you to “Pay Up!” these days — it’ll be introducing paywalled sections later this year.
SO: The SNL50 event on Sunday got 14.8M viewers on NBC & PEACOCK, up against The White Lotus premiere on HBO and NBA All-Star game(s) on TNT (no ratings info available yet). Some comps:
Down from 23.1M viewers for SNL40 in 2015 #DifferentTimes
Grammys did 15.4M on CBS earlier this month (that show also did 24.8M in 2015 so . . . yeah, welcome to 2025 linear TV).
The Globes did 9.3M viewers (VIDEOAMP’s data had 10.1M).
Linear TV’s biggest scripted hit, Yellowstone, got 12M for its season 5A premiere (the last one, 5B, was VIDEOAMP data so I’m leaving that out).
It’s about 1.5M above the average AMAZON TNF🏈 audience.
BUT: The NHL is on 🔥 with its 4 Nations tournament (in lieu of an All-Star game) — ABC got 4.4M viewers for Saturday night’s U.S. vs. CANADA fight night game:
The biggest non-playoff NHL game audience since the Winter Classic in 2011
Bigger than every Stanley Cup Finals game last year except for game 7
The final will feature a U.S. vs. CANADA rematch on ESPN on Thursday night, so we’ll see what being back on cable TV does here (and on a Thursday vs. a weekend).
NOTE: The NHL is currently slated to go back to a regular All-Star game next year — we’ll see if that holds.
NBA All-Star numbers aren’t available yet.
AND: Next year, women’s 3-on-3 league Unrivaled may want to avoid NBA/NHL All-Star weekend as the time to hold its big 1-on-1 mid-season tournament, where Napheesa Collier beat Aaliyah Edwards to take a $200k prize (i.e. about the same as her entire WNBA season salary), to try and make this a bigger thing.
THEN: SONY PICTURES CLASSICS picked up North America and LATAM rights to the Jodie Foster French-language pic Vie Privée, where she stars as a psychiatrist investigating the suspicious death of a patient.
AND: Here is your latest NIELSEN Gauge for January 2025, of note:
The Streaming share growth rate YoY is +21%, adding 6.6 share points since January 2024 (when there was also an exclusive-to-streaming NFL playoff game — there was not a Squid Game in Jan. 2024 though).
That Squid Game gave NETFLIX its highest monthly share yet at 8.6%.
The DISNEY share is now DIS+, HULU and ESPN+ combined.
PAR+ tied its highest-ever share at 1.4% thanks to Landman, which was the 3rd most-popular streaming series for January in the U.S.
FINALLY: As yesterday was a day off for the business, I decided to do one of my occasional deeper-dive analysis pieces today as, well, let’s face it — it’s mid-February in NYC, it’s not like I was going to the beach.
Yes, the usual Tuesday ‘New Jobs’ board list is still on the other side of it as usual.
IT’S TIME TO MEET “THE NEW MOVIE BUSINESS”
The movie business is re-emerging this year after the 5-year, back-to-back-to-back wallop of Covid, the great Hollywood spending slash and the strikes to indeed “Survive ’til ’25.”
But as I took a dive into the 2025 release slate the past couple of days and the tiers of box office returns from 2023-24 — the business has dramatically changes, and I don’t mean simply by looking at overall box office grosses as has been done many times over already.
While we know the 💰 is different — it’s very important to also take a step back to recognize that the movie biz has just gone through its biggest business changes in more than 40 years since the emergence of the blockbuster era in the 1980s (yes, there was the ’90s DVD era as well, which I’ll address down below), in that both of them were hit by double whammies at the same time:
In the early/mid-’80s, it was a dual front of:
The rise of the wide-release blockbuster
The introduction of VHS
In the early 2020s, it’s been the dual front of:
Movie volume sharply decreasing
Theatrical windows cut in half
So it’s time to take a hard look at the material change that the movie business is just now on the other side of here in 2025, and the resulting consequences that are already out there in the marketplace — and how these fundamental shifts are not quite yet being reflected in slow-to-change, long-held norms around movie biz communications.
I’ll dive into:
What the 2025 studio theatrical release data looks like vs. historical comps and some key insights to take away when you look at the changes in box office revenue.
Which aspects of the movie business box office 💰 have really just disappeared vs. pre-Covid?
Why it’s time for the movie business to embrace the reality and enormity of these business model changes that the industry itself put in place after Covid, particularly in evolving how it communicates its business fundamentals to the rest of the industry, media and even the public at large.
The opportunities present for the movie industry to show some hustle and fight for not only its existence but also growth as the 2020s progress into the 2030s.