☀️AMAZON Keeps Buying, DIS+ Undercuts Ad Market
A peek at VENU (#SportsHULU) / APPLE FIFA Deal Hits Headwinds / COMCAST enters MoviePass biz
Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect here on LINKED-IN if ya like) and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on FRIDAY, June 21, 2024.
Where it’s all downhill into darkness from here, folks. Uh, I mean in regards to sunlight of course — what did you think I was talking about? 🥴 Hope you enjoyed your sunlight at bedtime last night on the “longest” day of the year.
But it’s not all ☀️ for AMC THEATERS — oh sorry, uh #spoileralert — as I’m afraid NETFLIX is coming for yet one more movie theater revenue source with a NETFLIX Now Popping popcorn partnership with INDIANA POPCORN at WALMART’s across the U.S. Can’t NETFLIX let the movie business have just one thing to itself? 🙄
Ooh — 2 for $9! And no ads!
TODAY IN HOLLYWOOD IS OUT OF IDEAS: Welcome to what’s apparently become a bi-weekly Wakeup feature — so, a new St. Elmo’s Fire movie anyone? The idea would be to do another pic with the original cast . . . but this one is in the early stages of things, even for Deadline:
None of the cast are signed on, and there’s no writer or script. So basically, someone watched Brats on HULU last weekend and said something in the weekly SONY “80s IP ideas” meeting that’s clearly taking place at every Hollywood studio in 2024.
PLUS: Today in “INSTA is a 💩🔥” — the latest in the WSJ’s excellent series looking at what actually happens on the platform vs. whatever META says it tries to do:
Accounts created as a 13-year-old user were quickly fed racier content when the account initially liked some pics of women in sexy poses that were offered (and skipped past other content) . . . and the 13-year-old’s account was then being sent videos by adult sexual-content creators within 3 minutes, in addition to other disturbing findings.
Similar tests on TIKTOK and SNAP did not yield similar results.
A META spokesperson said “This was an artificial experiment that doesn’t match the reality of how teens use Instagram.” Yes, because the above definitely doesn’t sound like the behavior of a 13-year-old boy.
SEPARATE BUT RELATED: NY Governor Kathy Hochul signed 2 bills into law around social media around the use of “addictive” algo’s to determine what content kids under 18 see (they’ll have to display content chronologically by default for those under 18), and put further curbs on collecting or sharing data of users under 18 (furthering federal protections, which stop at 13).
THEN: X is getting two high-profile video series 👇
Kim Kardashian will do a 26-episode
TV showvideo podcast on the platform starting this fall (format TBA).X gets a 24-hour exclusivity window on it, and Kim/the series producers maintain ownership.
VERZUZ is finally coming back in an exclusive distro deal at X after its disastrous tenure at TRILLER.
No premiere date or matchups were indicated for the music battle series born in the pandemic, with 40+ previous editions.
AND: Add BYTEDANCE to the AI gold rush — it’s investing $2.1B in Malaysia to set up an AI hub, and another $200M-ish to expand its data capacity in the country.
Sounds like Malaysia is quite the global AI hotspot, with GOOGLE and MICROSOFT each announcing plans to invest over $2B in the country in new AI hubs / data & cloud services.
A REST IN PEACE: Goes out to legendary actor Donald Sutherland, who died at the age of 88. Not many actors have a range of Ordinary People and Klute to . . . Beerfest and Heaven Help Us. Quite a talent.
IN THIS EDITION
#SportsHULUVENU’s work-in-progress UI leaks out (well, technically it was somehow publicly available) — this is not your father’s mini-cable TV bundle. Some important things to note.AMAZON continues to be the busiest outpost in Hollywood — another movie, another series, another overall deal in one day.
A new report indicates DISNEY is undercutting the competition in the Upfronts to get more overall money in the door — a look at what’s going on, why and what it means.
Plus a huge day of casting, UNI is building a M3GAN universe #ofcourse and more.
AND: Eddie Murphy’s press tours are the best, if only because he has the best 1980s Hollywood stories, hands down. Gotta say — never thought I’d ever hear a “Threeway with Yul Brenner” story in my life, and yet, here we are:
🎥 THE SILVER SCREEN
