☀️ ’25 Streaming Movie Leaders: Which Studio Won
NETFLIX enlists ‘The Boys’ star / APPLE gets fantasy series / Sports RSN explosion hits desperation
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 Thursday, January 29, 2026.
Where who says your incessant INSTA scrolling is doing no good? Well, besides almost every mental health professional we seem to hear from.
META’s revenue was +22% in Q4 YoY to $59.9B! So I guess you people really are using THREADS after all.
The company also cleared a net profit of $22.8B in Q4 alone, +9% YoY. META made $60B in profit for the year in 2025, which is only about $8B-ish less than the likely entire combined revenues of WBD and PARAMOUNT in 2025.
And no, that’s not from META glasses. Its Reality Labs division still lost $6B in Q4. Always healthy to stay humble. Enjoy the 7% stock bump so far this morning — although in the spirit of staying humble, it’s only +6% over the past year.
THEN: The L.A. City Council is exploring the creation of a $5M subsidy fund for microdrama production in the city.
PLUS: AMC THEATRES refinanced some bond debt with its lenders to give it greater flexibility in paying it off. AMC stock is flat this morning on the development.
YAH: CBS NEWS’ next Town Hall will be Sunday, Feb. 15, at 8 p.m. with Maryland Governor Wes Moore, but Norah O’Donnell will be handling the hosting duties this time out. Still to come — JD Vance and Sam Altman.
OH: Barry Diller made an inquiry to buy CNN late last year, according to the WSJ. No real actions resulted (WBD had a bit of a busy Q4, as you may recall), and CNN maintains that it “was not and is not for sale” . . . despite its parent company specifically putting its financials out there in a recent SEC filing, separate from all other WBD cable businesses. 🧐
Again, under the DISCO GLOBAL spinoff deal set to happen in Q2 as part of the overall NETFLIX deal — CNN would no longer be a part of WBD once that split is street legal, and any decision to sell it would fall to DISCO GLOBAL CEO Gunnar Wiedenfels.
AH: Ari’s memoir, written with J.R. Moehringer, will be on shelves Sept. 22 — just in time for back to school. As previously leaked, it’ll be called Roll the Calls. As for the themes, well, Ari has you covered:
“If there’s one major theme, it’s that every time someone tells you to pack it in, you’re not good enough, you should tell that person to fuck off.”
AND: Just some NBC Super Bowl ad fun facts from Alex Sherman at CNBC:
30-second spots went for $8M, but a handful went for $10M (between 5 and 10 . . . so let’s call it 7).
For all of its regular season NFL buying — there are only 2 car company ads in the whole game.
Alex also goes into the predictions market action on the ads despite . . . a lot of folks already knowing the answers.
SO: Here is the FIFA men’s World Cup TV schedule for the summer on FOX, FS1 and TUBI.
HUH: The Kennedy Center’s Head of Programming, Kevin Couch, has resigned after uh, 2 weeks on the job. So much for the expansion of “our common-sense programming” touted in his appointement on Jan. 16 from the organization’s Prez, and Trump loyalist, Richard Grenell.
WELL: ANTHROPIC, the AI company that’s talking the most about the need for safety, care and caution around the technology’s development, is now being sued for $3B by many of the world’s largest music publishers, including UNIVERSAL MUSIC, alleging “brazen” copyright theft of over 20k songs. Claude, how could you!? 😱
This is an expansion of a 2023 lawsuit alleging theft of 500 songs and seeking $75M.
AH: Another LIV golfer is leaving — 2018 Masters champ Patrick Reed won’t be renewing his contract, and is applying to rejoin the PGA as of late August this year. It seems Patrick realized no one’s watched him play golf in 4 years that he’s “a traditionalist at heart.”
Hopefully, the $41M from the Saudis helps with the transition this year, as he won’t be able to begin playing on the PGA until late August.
OH: As some of the big names LIV — the organization is offering you the opportunity to invest!
YEAH: PAR+ is planning to join the fray of including short-form video into its offering as part of the overall app revamp, according to internal presentations viewed by Business Insider. No real details on the creative or positioning for consumers.
YAH: HOME DEPOT is losing the irony of its name and joining the 5-days-a-week 2026 RTO chorus in the corporate world. It’s also laying off 800 folks, although most are remote employees.
ALSO: Gonna be a banner year in Trump/RFK Jr. year 2! And kudos to South Carolina for now having the largest measles outbreak since the disease was eradicated in America.
WAKEUP BOX OFFICE POLL
Despite all of the huge Melania buzz (although the First Lady and Jason Statham are tracking not very far apart from each other if you wanna wrap your head around that one) — DISNEYFOX’s Send Help is still topping the tracking charts, looking at about $15M.
CREATOR BONUS: We also have the Iron Lung pic from YOUTUBER Markiplier — which has built up about $6M in pre-sales, and some folks think it may get up to $10M. What do you think?
PROGRAMMING NOTE
I’ll be coming to you again at the NYC lunch hour with a full breakdown of the numbers and trends to know at COMCAST / NBCU in Q4 — from NBA checks and #pricehike effects to how they heck they’re going to dig out of the growing broadband hole (yes, it got worse in Q4), the state of the movie business and much more.
🎥 THE SILVER SCREEN
2025 U.S. Streaming Movie Champ
The NIELSEN folks released their year-end report of the top movies streamed in the U.S. on TVs in 2025 — and here’s how they line up by view counts using my NETFLIX Films chart metric.
Namely — this is total minutes viewed divided by the duration of the movie. Longer movies shouldn’t get bonus points for being long, which is what happens when you just look at minutes viewed.
And yes, we’re looking at you, Wicked.
AND: I’ve cross-referenced the NETFLIX movies with the 2025 NETFLIX data dump, uh, data to give you a gist of how much NETFLIX movie viewership comes from the U.S. #IncludedWithYourSubscription!
TOP 20 MOVIES ON U.S. STREAMING IN 2025
Usual caveats: This is back of the napkin math, assumes everyone finished the movie (including the credits), is a view count — not a viewer count.
It also assumes that a bunch of folks didn’t rewind certain parts, etc. So consider these minimum numbers if you’re looking at them as how many people watched a given movie. The way kids re-watch things — especially keep that in mind with those pics.