☀️ NETFLIX Films Animation Stumbles Again
Another A24 Cannes purchase / 'Godzilla' needs a new director / New TV sports ratings snapshot
Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect with me on LinkedIn here if ya like), and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on WEDNESDAY, May 22, 2024.
Where a congratulations and hearty handshake 🤝 goes out to the student-athletes of the SEC and BIG TEN conferences, for bringing home a 4% bump in total revenues in FY23 for their parent companies alma maters.
The SEC brought in $853M last year (about $51M per school), and the BIG TEN did $880M of revenue (about $60M per school). Ya know, it’s important to teach the kids important economic lessons early in life, like the earning power that unpaid labor provides.
It’s also important to learn the importance of being the boss — former BIG TEN commissioner Jim Delaney was still paid a $3.1M bonus in FY23, as his 2020 exit deal entitled him to bonus payments through . . . 2027.
AND: Michael Kassan’s defamation lawsuit against attorney Bryan Freedman was thrown out. UTA’s lawsuit against Kassan was officially moved to arbitration last week.
PLUS: TIKTOK is joining the layoffs fray, described by The Information as “significant,” across user operations, content and marketing groups.
HUH: That was fast — GOOGLE is already selling ads against its new “AI Overview” search feature that will . . . destroy the business model of, y’know, the underlying source of most of those answers. Who had 2024 as the year new information became obsolete? Enjoy NVIDIA Q1 earnings report day! Can’t wait for AI’s analysis.
THEN: For someone who came up in the industry at a time when the 18-49 demo was king — this new WSJ read on how TV ad execs are now trying to sell advertisers on “Old people are the ones who have money these days!” was quite entertaining. Then again, when this 👇 is what your median ages look like . . . I’m not sure there’s another option:
BUT: When the median age of an ABC Abbott Elementary viewer is 61, and 36 on streaming services according to NIELSEN . . . well, the ad sales model could use a tweak.
A REST IN PEACE: Goes out to director and legendary casting director Fred Roos, who died at the age of 89 this weekend.
A THANK YOU: Goes out to HBO for the invite to check out the new MoviePass, MovieCrash doc last night, which is a high recommend! It premieres next Wednesday on HBO at 9 p.m., or add it to your MAX list here.
There was so much to the MOVIEPASS story that I had no idea about . . . and it’s a great testament to the power that leadership has to make or break the success of entertainment companies — plus a reminder of the importance of calling out things that don’t make sense on paper, despite popular sentiment elsewhere.
ALSO: It was a good reminder of the real renewed enthusiasm for moviegoing that MOVIEPASS generated in the mid-to-late 2010s — something that the business could use right now (granted, with a better business model than the one devised by the gentlemen who fired the cofounders and then ran the company into the ground), but there’s another chapter here for MOVIE PASS still to come thanks to co-founder Stacy Spikes.
🎥 THE SILVER SCREEN
