☀️A Movie Theater Biz 💰 Health Check
NETFLIX sets next 🥊 fight / MIRAMAX adds to spec market 🔥 / TNT gets ⚽️ this summer
Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect with me on LINKEDIN here if ya like), and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on THURSDAY, March 6, 2025.
Where some say you just can’t put a price on the value of a PhD. Shockingly, #BigTech has other thoughts on the topic.
OPENAI is looking to put a $20k a month price tag on that value, or at least that’s what it’s exploring to charge for its “PhD-level” AI chatbot.
See? All of those doctoral theses were totally worth doing . . . so they could then be ingested into an AI database to replace you.
AI can’t pick good GIFs yet, right? 😬 Asking for a friend.
OH: PhDs aren’t the only position being “helped” — it seems the ad buyer community is feeling 🥴 about its new AI “co-workers” too. Gotta love this WSJ headline 👇 this morning . . . that subhed alone is just 🤌 (and P.S. yes, this is a big reason why PE money is increasingly interested in the ad agency biz and why more agency consolidation is getting a lot of activity these days #efficiency! 🤑).
AND: As rumored, YOUTUBE announced a PREMIUM LITE tier for $8 a month, which gives you an ad-free experience . . . except for music and Shorts, which will both still have ads. 😏 Regular PREMIUM is $14 a month.
YT PREMIUM and YT MUSIC now have 125M global subscribers combined. No details on revenue, where they are, or the split between the two.
PLUS: Michael Sheen is using $129k of his own money to erase $1.29M of regular folk debt in Wales, particularly in a former steel town where a lot of folks were put out of work.
Essentially he worked with a company to buy up the debt on the market at a cheaper price from debt holders, thus eliminating it.
It’ll be documented in a new CHANNEL 4 doc, Michael Sheen’s Secret Million Pound Giveaway, premiering next week.
THEN: Steve Carell is covering the costs for the prom tickets this spring for all students at Altadena’s 6 high schools, via his work with VA non-profit ALICE’S KIDS. 👏
ALSO: Trump’s Congressional address got 36.6M viewers across 15 outlets, +13% from Biden’s SOTU last year (although Biden’s 2022 SOTU beat this).
It’s also below all Trump SOTU’s in his 1.0 era. It beat all of Obama’s in his 2nd term, but none from his 1st.
FOX NEWS was 10.7M of the total.
MSNBC and CNN had about 10% of that (1.9M each).
Keep in mind — 71% of viewers were over 55.
6% were under 35.
TO NOTE: Just a follow up to the item I included yesterday about that new doc about U.S. veterans — Trump & Elon are exploring a cut of roughly 80k positions from the Department of Veterans Affairs (with a goal of returning it to the 400k employee size it was in 2019 according to Bloomberg), a division where more than 25% of employees are veterans themselves.
WAKEUP BOX OFFICE POLL
Mickey 17 has finally arrived in theaters! Tracking for the WB film seems to range from $18M-ish to $20M, so whaddaya got?
Will Mickey make more than 17?
FINALLY: Just a greeting from my new Ankler subscriber outreach program in the DR this week — What? Like you don’t get motivated to dive into movie theater business financials when sitting poolside?
Note for Richard: I’m handing out hats as fast as I can, RR! (He kept insisting to me that this was an untapped market for new subscribers.)
2024 Movie Theater business health snapshot
Now that we’re through all of the Q4 earnings reports, thought it’d be helpful to take a step back and see where the movie theater biz financials stand for the post-strike-addled year in 2024 — because as I still understand it, movie stars still prefer to be paid in 💰 and not likes & views.
While the Q4 numbers across the board thankfully came in strong YoY — in looking at the 2024 numbers on the whole . . . this is still a business that’s as fragile as it ever was in aggregate — with a lot of important variables across the players, so let’s dive in.