☀️PSKY Q4: Half Billion 💰 Bleed, But Streaming Finds Profit
Apple gets Armstrong pic / Movie director hiring day / TV looks to books for new series
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 26, 2026.
Where Ted’s in D.C. today if you need him (he can not get enough of the Lincoln Memorial!) — and if you need me to bring a copy of the local Jersey Shore paper down to the White House for the big meetings with administration officials to help the cause, just let me know! #JobCreation
Could be good to have a hard copy on hand just in case there’s a hallway chat with a certain president who has people print out emails for him to read. Plus, I’m gonna guess he’ll want to know about that pizza, too . . .
ALTHOUGH: It sounds like maybe I should also send copies to the 11 Republican state attorneys general who sent a letter to the DOJ yesterday with concerns about the NETFLIX BROS. deal in regard to:
Movie Theaters, due to decreased/undetermined annual movie volume, potentially crimping the business and employment.
Stifling competition in Hollywood, which could lead to higher prices and less innovation in the business.
AND: NETFLIX stock was +6% yesterday, around the PSKY developments. PSKY stock was more or less flat, including around its . . . “eh” Q4 earnings report.
THEN: HBO MAX/CRAVE will shoot Heated Rivalry season 2 late summer, with plans for a spring 2027 return.
MEANWHILE: AMC THEATRES will now hold “the best seats” in theaters for its paying A-LIST and STUBS Premiere subscribers. That should help movie attendance.
No word on what point in time AMC will release any unbooked primo 👌 seats for screenings to the rest of the public — or at least the ones who didn’t just go see the movie at a REGAL or CINEMARK theater instead.
OH: KALSHI’s finally cracking down on you insider trading folks on the platform! It handed out its first two fines against 2 users . . . uh, $2,246 and $20,397 respectively (plus multi-year bans). That’ll show ’em!
Oh, and if they don’t pay, they’ll be
put in jail andgo through an arbitration process. 🫣
YAH: WAPO lost over $100M in 2025, according to reports in the WSJ. Yeah, that’ll do it.
Add that onto another $100M loss in 2024, and $77M in 2023. And you say they’re making changes?
AH: TIKTOK parent co. BYTEDANCE was valued at $550B in an equity stake sale by PE investor GENERAL ATLANTIC, according to Reuters; that’s up from $480B in November.
Granted, this is a private valuation and not a public one, but NETFLIX’s market cap is $350B (DISNEY is $186B).
BYTEDANCE was valued at $20B in 2017, when GENERAL ATLANTIC initially invested.
UH HUH: ANTHROPIC’s CLAUDE is being used to disrupt yet another business — hacking! Sorry, hackers — maybe try plumbing?
Yes, someone successfully stole 150GB of Mexican government taxpayer records, voter records, government employee credentials and other items by prompting CLAUDE to act — now, get this huge leap of expert thought — as an elite hacker! Don’t worry, the internal controls on AI are totally airtight. 🤝
GOOD NEWS: FCC head Brendan Carr is now acting on behalf of sports fans, too! Aren’t you lucky? The FCC is seeking public comment about essentially not being able to find your game anymore.
More specifically, about the increased movement of sports from broadcast TV to streaming . . . ya know, the kind of private business transaction that the FCC is totally authorized to intervene in.
YEAH: Interesting explainer video from the NYT here on the I.R.S. suing META for $15B in tax payments, due to the American company listing a lot of its revenue as . . . not in America, its largest market by far. Add this to the list of current lawsuits with much larger implications for other businesses.
AND: UFC leader Dana White is getting his 2nd big CBS NEWS profile in 4 months — 60 Minutes at the end of September and now CBS Sunday Morning this weekend. Folks, save something for the White House fight!
The This is UFC special got 1.2M viewers on CBS Friday night against the Olympics, about the same as the INDIANA vs. PURDUE college hoops game on FOX (1.1M).
ABC’s rerun of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune was the biggest show in the timeslot ex. Olympics at 2.9M viewers.
WAKEUP BOX OFFICE POLL
PAR’s Scream 7 definitely has a lot of optimism out there . . . the baseline seems to be $40M, but a lot of folks see it having potential to top the last movie’s $44M opening.
HOUSEKEEPING
I’ll be coming back to your inbox around NYC early afternoon time with a special lunch edition of The Wakeup, parsing out what’s afoot at WBD in Q4 and 2025 overall.
PSKY Q4 . . . We’re Under Construction
So, a mixed-to-negative Q4 here from everyone’s favorite movie studio on Melrose Ave.
There were some positive developments in Q4, the first one fully under “new management” . . . but also some pretty 🚨 ones — sadly related to its still-core TV business, a business that PSKY is only looking to double down on with a potential WBD deal.
A deal which . . . man, looking at these numbers — it’s kind of 🤯 to think that a company with numbers like PSKY is looking to do a deal valued at $108B (potentially soon to be more).
So, let’s dive in to lay out the key developments at the end of 2025 for Ellison & Co. and the outlook on what’s ahead.
To his credit on the call, Ellison (mostly) acknowledged that some businesses, like Films and PLUTO, are really not working right now and really need to be fixed (details below).
Unlike WBD this morning, PSKY management also wasn’t shining on about how great linear TV is.
Outside of pointing out that CBS still draws the big audiences for the NFL, which is very true, and CBS having the biggest number of hits in the U.S., also true.
Unfortunately, all of those above businesses are uh, ya know, most of PSKY’s revenue.
But hey, let’s start with the Q4 numbers that were positive!
And then #medianerd🤓 here will dive into some . . . uh, less positive #funfacts and more troubling stats within the numbers — especially when you look at what’s happened over the post-Covid years — and some key things to remember about a WARNAMOUNT company, should it come to be. 😳