☀️ PSKY Passes DOJ Hurdle As Senate Perks Up
HBO sees audience bounce / Hader sets directorial debut / WB adds exec for movie boost
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 Friday, February 20, 2026.
Where we have yet another moment to add to HBO’s Silicon Valley reboot that it refuses to do.
Ya gotta love absolutely bitter AI rivals Sam Altman and Dario Amodei (the 2 guys to the right of India Prime Minister Narendra Modi below) refusing to grab hands together at an India AI summit this week . . . as every other person did on stage.
Watching the mutual brief hint of “No f’in way I’m doing that! But be cool, man,” come over their faces at the same time is rather hilarious.
OH: Remember to commit your WBD shares to PSKY today before you leave for the weekend, as today is the final day of its revised offer to WBD shareholders.
AND: ESPN is filling its Sunday Night Baseball schedule gap this summer with Women’s Sports Sundays — it’ll feature a rotating mix of WNBA and NWSL games on Sunday nights.
Women have won 7 of the 9 gold medals that the U.S. has won so far in Italy.
This women’s hockey winning goal in OT was pretty awesome.
ALSO: WASSERMAN enlisted investment bank MOELIS to spearhead its sale process.
YAH: Gotta love some members of the META courtroom team in the big addiction trial in L.A. being yelled at for wearing META Glasses into the courtroom 🤦♂️ (the use of recording devices is um, not allowed — much less, say, using facial recognition capabilities on jurors).
HUH: U.S. mortgage rates hit their lowest point since Sept. 2022 this week and also finally hit the 6% mark for a 30-year fixed mortgage.
SO: Naturally, Trump doubled down on calling inflation a fixed issue for Amercians . . . saying in a speech yesterday that “I’ve won affordability.” Ya know, in case anyone needs some pull quotes for their campaign ads in about 6 months.
And yes, he plans on continuing to tout this reassurance in front of the nation on Tuesday in the SOTU speech.
I’m sure the Supreme Court calling #TrumpTariffs illegal this morning may also come up too.
AH: NVIDIA confirmed that it’s previously announced $100B investment in OPENAI is now more like . . . $30B. Wow, that AI really is lowering costs!
AND: WALMART reported its ads business was +46% in 2025, hitting $6.4B. Here’s how that stacks up with Hollywood and #BigTech ad revenue in 2025.
GOOGLE: $295B
YOUTUBE: $40.4B (about 14% of the total)
META: $196B
AMAZON: $68B
PARAMOUNT: $9.4B (estimate, pending final Q4 #s)
NBCU: $8.4B (plus $3.7B in the COMCAST cable TV ads division, but that’s run separately — and there’s likely also some in the int’l/SKY business lines, but it’s not broken out)
WBD: $7.4B (estimate, pending final Q4 #s)
FOX CORP: $6.9B (FY25 ending June ’25)
WALMART: $6.4B
NETFLIX: $1.5B
DISNEY: N/A (the company does not break out how much revenue it gets from advertising, sadly)
REMEMBER: The WBD 💰 above is going to DISCO GLOBAL in a NETFLIX BROS. deal . . . but a WARNAMOUNT deal creates a rather significant concentration of linear TV buying in one place.
Granted, it’s (mostly) linear TV — but $17B is a pretty impressive amount of ad sales dominated by one main platform under one roof.
Roughly $3B, or 18% is from streaming.
SO: Time to get moving, OPENAI. Adweek did a test using about 500 CHATGPT prompt entries and found that ads appeared on just 0.8% of them.
REST IN PEACE: Goes out to Eric Dane, who died at the age of 53, one year after revealing an ALS diagnosis.
He also participated in NETFLIX’s Famous Last Words doc series, doing an interview back in November only to be released after his death.
WAKEUP BOX OFFICE POLL
I’m going back in with the optimists on LGF’s I Can Only Imagine 2, even though it didn’t work out too well last weekend. This had to be well promoted in front of the Solo Mio crowd the past 2 weeks, right?
NEW POD
🧐 THE WBD AUCTION
A few key new developments to dive into in the past 24 hours . . . as PSKY top management prepares for the weekend kegger at the Ellisons to really bring this deal home on Monday’s deadline.