☀️ ESPN Challenge 2025: Branding D2C
Nolan UNI pic details land / New jobs Tuesday! / Rupert’s big TV sale — reading the tea leaves
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 TUESDAY, December 24, 2024.
Where silly us, thinking this would be a slow week. Thanks Kim.
AH: Justin Baldoni’s rep clarified in a post to a private PR & Marketing Facebook group that the PR team was only prepared to do an (alleged) smear campaign protect their client — but didn’t actually have to do it.
ALTHOUGH: There didn’t seem to be any specific comments about that list of assertions around Baldoni’s on-set behavior that precipitated the specific agreement having to be put in place around his on-set behavior, and the hiring of a full-time intimacy coordinator before It Ends With Us resumed shooting post-strikes.
AND: Liz Plank, co-host of Justin’s Man Enough podcast about “modern masculinity,” announced that she’s leaving the pod after 4 years.
#FUNFACT: DISNEY spent $645M shooting 2 seasons of the STAR WARS series Andor, according to documents filed in the U.K. — ya know, the country where all that money was spent paying folks, most of whom who don’t live in L.A.
The math seems to work out where one season of a DIS+ STAR WARS series costs roughly the same as a STAR WARS movie (or comparable to at least the last batch of SW films).
BUT UH: Doesn’t sound like incoming FCC Chair nominee Brendan Carr is a big DISNEY fan — even before ascending from FCC committee member to chairperson next month, he’s already written a letter to Bob Iger essentially to say, “Watch your back, pal.”
Carr asserts that Americans no longer trust the national news media (gee, I wonder where that idea was popularized?), citing DISNEY’s $15M future payment to Trump as somehow involved there.
Carr then says essentially, “But ya know, local news outlets are totally cool . . .” seeming to think that most people distinguish between the national ABC NEWS organization and the ABC logos splattered all over their local affiliate newscasts. Yeah, that’s a take.
There’s also a lotta saber rattling about getting involved should DISNEY/ABC get into a blackout/standoff with local TV affiliate station owners over charging them too much (in their opinion) for retransmission rights, etc.
It’s certainly an interesting game of chicken — this isn’t 1998. “Government revokes ABC broadcast TV license” may not go over as well as he thinks it would, should this go too far.
AND: Once ESPN D2C launches this fall — America has other ways outside of the public airwaves to watch all DISNEY/ABC content.
Oh, and local TV stations — good luck with those local ad sales when you lose ABC programming because the FCC revoked its license.
BTW: Brendan posts this same tweet every day to his X account:
THEN: Christopher Nolan’s next film is The Odyssey, an adaptation of the Homer poem . . . if Homer had access to IMAX cameras.
Ralph Fiennes just starred in a movie via BLEECKER STREET called The Return that centered on the later parts of the poem.
OH RIGHT: This was literally the only piece of industry news yesterday so I’m just gonna put it here: MAX renewed the DC animated series Creature Commandos for a season 2.
