☀️NEON Explores Stake Sale
SONY's big EFM 🎥 buy / NBC's 2012 TV stars pilot season / PSKY trims NYC office space
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 Thursday, February 19, 2026.
Where New York’s hottest club is . . . JP MORGAN. Really, Stefon?
Yes, apparently America’s favorite bank (poll results pending) has opened up a pub that no one can get into. Then again, when you include a pub that can only seat 55 people in your brand new $3B office tower that has 10k employees — yeah, that’ll do it.
So, enjoy the pint of GUINNESS with CEO Jamie Dimon’s face imprinted on the foam — just be sure to make your reservation 6 weeks in advance. #notajoke
THEN: IMAX will show 5 F1 races at approximately 50 of its screens this season in partnership with APPLE TV — Miami, Monaco, Silverstone (U.K.), Monza (Italy) and Austin.
#GOODNEWS: NY METS fans and RANGE MEDIA employees, your paychecks are good for the year ahead as POINT72’s Steve Cohen pulled in an estimated $3.4B in 2025. Or roughly 10x the entire METS player payroll. Too bad that couldn’t buy, ya know, making the playoffs last year.
MEANWHILE: MSG SPORTS is considering spinning off the KNICKS and RANGERS into their own separately traded companies.
YEAH: Gotta love total 🍑 FCC head Brendan Carr (what? he’s a peach!) invoking “Trump derangement syndrome” in his comments about CBS pulling the James Talarico Late Show interview from the broadcast this week (now up to 7.4M views on the YT page).
Carr also called the appearance “a hoax” and noted that if CBS had pulled it from the version of the show that aired in the local TX districts where he is running, that would be fine with the FCC. Because that’s exactly how American TV has existed for the last 60 years.
BUT: Thanks to FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who read through the transcript of Bad Bunny’s halftime show and certified that there was “no violation of our rules and no justification for harassing broadcasters over a standard live performance," all due apologies to Congressman Randy Fine’s knowledge of Spanish.
Now he can go back to adding to his bigoted statements directed at Muslims. Thanks to the citizens of Daytona Beach, FL for sending us this fine addition to America’s Congress.
OH: Add NETFLIX and SONY to the list of companies telling BYTEDANCE to cut the shit with SEEDANCE 2.0.
ALSO: If you’d rather have Zuck knowing your health secrets instead of Tim Cook — META has you covered as it plans to enter the smartwatch game this year. Just think of all the totally legit influencer health products you’ll be pitched on your INSTA feed as a result!
UH HUH: Yeah, this Bloomberg chart says a lot #ThatBlueCollarLife. Pretty interesting read on 2025 being a year of “jobless recovery,” with expectations of 2.7% GDP output in 2025 (final numbers in tomorrow) . . . with essentially no job growth to go with that increase in output.
The most recent time we’ve also seen this? After the 2001 tech 1.0 crash.
AND: Springsteen is on tour this spring — tix go on sale tomorrow morning, here’s the list of dates.
WAKEUP BOX OFFICE POLL
LGF’s I Can Only Imagine 2 is the weekend’s new film. Generally looking at $8M to $10M, although some think the faith-based audience will give it a boost above that.
🎥 THE SILVER SCREEN
