☀️Disney-Charter WAR GAMES, Nun II 💰
NFL teams $ > PREMIER LEAGUE teams $ / New INDIA pic sets record / NETFLIX sets Matt Rife comedy special
Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect with me on LinkedIn here if ya like), and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on MONDAY Sept 11, 2023.
Where a cheers goes out to #CocoVic! I’m not gonna say they both won the US Open 🎾 because they were the two players I saw on my trip to the Open about a week ago… but I’m not saying it’s unrelated ☘️.
AND: It was nice to see Jesus back to spending multi-millions a year 💰 advertising on NFL football 🤷♂️. The $1 Billion marketing campaign co-financed by the HOBBY LOBBY co-founder continued in full effect.
ALSO: Nice to see the NY GIANTS take a moment of silence to remember 9/11 and honor the first responders last night before the a powerful national anthem from Queen Latifah, & kickoff of NBC Sunday Night Football. Important reminder as we all begin our week today… 22 years later.
PLUS: Certainly was interesting to see an $800k+ check from WBD for an ad in the SNF game to promote Aquaman 2's trailer… which won’t be here for another 4 days. Well that’s new 🤔. Is it possible WBD has too much Barbie money lying around? I look forward to the next trailer ad in Thursday Night Football this week on AMAZON.
Thankfully WB chose to air the ad in the first quarter of that god-awful GIANTS “game” last night. My December Sundays may have a lot more free time in them than I was intending. And apologies to UNI’s new Trolls movie ad, which aired in the late 3rd quarter ☹️, when even more than half of the in-stadium crowd had left… and it wasn’t really because of the rain.
WIN/LOSE: While last night’s NBC NIELSENs will likely be bad… its Thursday Night Football opener numbers made up for it - 27 million viewers for the LIONS-CHIEFS opener, +24% from last year.
ALSO: The town can exhale a sigh of relief - SAG granted the Taylor Swift concert movie an interim agreement.
AND: Here are your VENICE winners, with Poor Things taking the Golden Lion, Cailee Spaeny taking Best Actress for Priscilla, and Peter Sarsgaard winning Best Actor for Memory.
PLUS: Showrunner Greg Berlanti has set up a $500k fund to give grants of $500 to $1500 each to below the line and support staff who have worked on his series, plus he gave another $300k to the MPTF and ENTERTAINMENT COMMUNITY fund.
Showrunner Ryan Murphy is setting up a similar $500k fund to help people from his productions as well.
Writer/Director Paul Feig gave $100k to the MPTF Community Care fund to help out of work IATSE members.
SLÁINTE: The Avengers convened on Boston for Chris Evans’ wedding this weekend. Evans, 42, married actress Alba Baptista, 26, at Chris’s Boston-area home with RDJ, Hemsworth and Renner in attendance.
WAKEUP BOX OFFICE RESULTS:
Congrats to the majority of you this week! Just by a smidge…
#NeverForget
This was a nice read to start an always tough day here in NYC, about an Irish nurse who started a 9/11 memorial in a Kinsale park on the south shore of IRELAND, after caring for firefighters at Lenox Hill hospital after the attacks.
🪧 STRIKE FORCE
Fran Drescher was re-elected as head of SAG for another two-year term, getting 23,080 votes to Maya Gilbert-Dunbar’s 5,276 votes.
The new Friday late afternoon strike development (what’s up with the WGA and Friday afternoons? 🤷♂️) was a new letter from WGA leadership… essentially publicly reaching out to any studios thinking of making a deal separate from the AMPTP - know that the WGA is open to talking.
The WGA said some studio execs “…have said they are willing to negotiate on proposals that the AMPTP has presented to the public as deal breakers. On every single issue we are asking for we have had at least one legacy studio executive tell us they could accommodate us.”
So, I wouldn’t exactly categorize this as progress in negotiations - but certainly a lot more 👀 on any studios that may be feeling a particular amount of financial pain on the near horizon… vs. streamers who are a rounding error on their parent company’s financial statements.
The AMPTP put out a statement afterward confirming its members are aligned, and its own account of where negotiations stand.
As Elaine and I dove into on this weekend’s Ankler podcast 👇 - when the two sides can’t even agree on “whose turn it is” to respond here in mid-September… not to mention the AMPTP and SAG haven’t even officially talked for 60 days - doing the calendar math on the situation and what it means especially for the TV business, is daunting.
📽 THE SILVER SCREEN
