☀️ DISNEY Makes Leadership Change in Live-Action Film
NETFLIX, AMAZON active in TV orders / TIKTOK cuts more UNI music / SONY adds to video-game biz woes
Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect with me on LinkedIn here if ya like), and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on TUESDAY, Feb. 27, 2024.
Where I’m sure the Walton family of WALMART fame has nothing but good societal intentions with the $1.5 Billion worth of stock they sold this week after a stock split (gonna be one hell of a Florabama summer house rental this year 🤘 — then again, when you already have a net worth of $267 Billion . . .), let’s start the day with a shout out to Dr. Ruth Gottesman.
She is giving $1 Billion to the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx, where she was a professor for decades, to make the school tuition-free. Her husband was an early investor in BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY, and had a net worth of $3 Billion when he died in 2022 according to Forbes, leaving a large sum to Ruth to “do whatever you think is right with it.”
Oddly, she didn’t buy a compound on an island in South Florida (I know, right?), but maybe this choice will do a bit more societal good.
PLUS: Latin America gets to have the ‘removing HBO from the name’ debate, as MAX launches in LATAM. Please hide your jealousy.
AND: Whomever had “Gaming is the solve for entertainment business woes” is definitely losing the office pool in 2024: SONY is joining the layoff chorus in the industry, letting 900 people go in its video-game division (about 8% of staff).
OH: How’s your 2024 TIKTOK’ing going? It’s about to lose a lot more music today — remember that whole standoff with the world’s largest music label UMG?
Yeah nothing’s changed in about a month, so now they’re dropping songs whose publishing belongs to UNIVERSAL MUSIC, too, which could mean a loss of up to 80 percent of “relevant popular music” on the platform (UMG has a publishing stake in over 4M songs), although TIKTOK asserts the number is much lower. Either way, good luck with the whole dancing to APPLE alarm sounds thing everybody 💃📱.
IN TODAY’S EDITION:
NETFLIX and AMAZON show series buying is alive and well in tech streamer land.
FIFTH SEASON selling APPLE TV+ shows onto linear TV platforms.
PAR+ sets Africa plan.
CHARTER kicking tires on ALTICE, and more.
AND: Today in Jon Stewart . . . can’t say he’s not going big (plus this 60 Minutes piece from CBS Sunday with plenty of all-too-rare video from inside Gaza was quite a watch as a compliment to this).
ALSO: Curious timing that HBO stopped YT posting of LWT/John Oliver on Mondays not just in an election year, but also at the exact time Stewart returned🤔. Of course, how PAR is, ya know, monetizing💰the TDS views on YT is 🤷♂️ (I only watched five seconds of one ad during this whole thing).
📽 THE SILVER SCREEN
