☀️ NETFLIX TV Gets A Leadership Change
CA TV tax credits awarded / New film distrib launching / UNI reviving 80s TV show
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 Wednesday, August 27, 2025.
Where how about that pretty exciting personal news in the music business yesterday?
Congrats to Thomas Rhett and his wife, Lauren Atkins, on the uh, well-timed announcement that they are expecting their 5th baby — stay tuned to see if a baby boy joins their 4 daughters!
BTW: That other big celeb news yesterday apparently happened about 2 weeks ago, according to poppa Ed Kelce . . . whose advice about location was apparently not heeded. Ed would not do well on today’s social media:
"And I told him repeatedly, you know, you could do it on the side of the road, do it any place that makes it a special event ... when you get down on one knee and ask her to marry you."
THEN: Well, CRACKER BARREL logo — it’s been real. The company realized its half-hearted support letter yesterday just didn’t do the trick to win folks over about the logo they were all very excited about, but uh, well — hey, good news for Uncle Hershel! He’s back. 🛢️
And no, this god forsaken and now thankfully abandoned logo does not get an exception for The Ankler’s Dead Media Brand Logo Halloween party.
PLUS: A happy start of the Venice Film Festival to those making the jaunt over to Italy this year, and note the Gaza protest planned for Saturday.
OH: DISNEY is suing ECHOSTAR/DISH over the company’s move to offer $5 one-day passes to SLING streaming TV bundles . . . which kinda undercuts the whole $30-a-month-for-ESPN thing if you just wanna watch a couple of days of sports a month.
For the record — DISNEY is claiming SLING doesn’t have the right to sell the one-day subscriptions as part of their affiliate agreement, and is asking that DISNEY networks (including ESPN) be removed from that offering.
AH: What were the odds on Don Jr. placing bets on both sides of the gambling predictions market? #TakeTheOver
His VC fund, 1789 CAPITAL, made an investment in the offshore predictions app POLYMARKET (which Americans can’t legally use), and will also join the company’s advisory board. POLYMARKET is currently making a push to become legal to use in the U.S.
As you might recall, Don Jr. is also a strategic advisor to POLYMARKET’s primary competitor in the space, KALSHI (which Americans can use freely).
So, add questionably legal
gamblingpredictions market sites to the growing list of industries essentially making deals with the Trump regime (although this is technically just relegated to Don Jr.).
YEAH: Gotta love when Trump’s FCC head pokes into a private business negotiation not directly under its jurisdiction . . . urging “Get a deal done Google!” on X in regards to its FOX carriage deal standoff.
It’s also the first major carriage detente since DISNEY exec Justin Connolly joined YOUTUBE — an exec who was on the other side of the overall equation back in DISNEY/ESPN’s big standoff with CHARTER two years ago.
While FOX certainly has the highest rated cable TV network (and this summer, often the highest rated TV network period) in FOX NEWS — it’s certainly possible that the viewership of the network with a . . . 68-year-old median age is not as high on a digital-only cable TV bundle.
I.e., It’s possible FOX NEWS may be asking for the same rates as the other guys (COMCAST, CHARTER etc.), and YT may be like, “Yeah, it’s not worth as much to us.” Then again — obviously FOX’s sports is. Y’all have fun.
As for the FCC, it’s really just a shame that GOOGLE doesn’t, ya know, own any TV or radio stations where the FCC would have some real (potential) sway, although there have been calls to regulate digital/virtual bundles as “cable companies” in recent years.
But good ol’ COMCAST definitely owns several TV stations, and has an affiliate deal with the YES NETWORK (home of the YANKEES) that’s up later this year. Ahem.
AND: ANTHROPIC AI chose to settle the lawsuit it was facing from a group of authors over the use of their books to train its Claude AI bot.
A judge ruled that the use was legal under the fair use provision, allowing the company to use any books it purchased legally.
However . . . ANTHROPIC had illegally downloaded millions of books and fed them into the training system (i.e., uh, not purchased).
Even though they then went back and bought the books to
cover their assdo the right thing . . . yeah, the judge said that’s not quite how that works, bro, and the case was awaiting a trial later this year over that aspect. So, who do we make that check out to?
IN THIS EDITION
CA hands out its first round of pretty sweet TV tax incentives. See which notable production is coming to L.A. and which streamers had the top series.
The movie business is getting another independent movie distributor committed to "wide release, star-driven movies” with an assist from CAA.
UNI, HULU, BLEECKER, SPC, AMAZON and more keep active on the project pickup front.
NETFLIX gets an unexpected change in leadership . . . and a rather muted debut from the DALLAS COWBOYS on this week’s chart.
Dive into the numbers to know, plus the latest in sports TV audience numbers and much more (so much for a quiet last week of August).
FINALLY:
In response to my report on the summer movie spec sale market yesterday — a thanks goes out to the industry veteran who sent me a THR PDF from 1997 with this stat: there were 325 deals for movie specs, pitches, novels and magazine articles in 1997 🤯, according to THR’s year-end (print) edition.
This includes $2.75M for some project called The Sixth Sense at DISNEY . . . and a $3M check for a horror spec called Bad Dog at DREAMWORKS — proving the movie business has always been a win some & lose some business.
Keep in mind that is in 1997 dollars. Kids — that DVD money was pretty sweet.
🎥 THE SILVER SCREEN
Meet the next new addition to the growing indie 🎥 distributor landscape
For a business that is often described as either quite troubled, antiquated or terrible — you could really convince me otherwise given the activity around it in the past 9 months, between: