☀️SUPER MARIO smashes records, as Hollywood falls WAY behind on Family film output
The latest Specialty films snapshot / Brad Pitt gets F1 co-star at APPLE / NETFLIX axes Top 10 series after 2 seasons
Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect with me on LinkedIn here if ya like), and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on MONDAY April 10, 2023.
Where congrats to Jon Rahm on winning his first Masters tournament, becoming the fourth Spanish golfer to put on the green jacket, and the first European player to win both The Masters & US Open.
Jon beat out 2 players from the Saudi-backed LIV Tour, golfers Phil Mickelson & Brooks Koepka, whom you can both see next in about 2 weeks in the LIV Nobody Gives a Sh*t Invitational.
PLUS: A shout out to the QUINNIPIAC U Bobcats who won their first College Hockey Championship, beating the U OF MINN Golden Gophers in overtime to win the NCAA Frozen Four (that name > Final Four).
I’d show you the tweet with the clip… but Elon is being a dick savvy businessman and removed the ability for TWITTER and SUBSTACK tech to work together over the weekend. Oh right - there are… five other platforms to work with. Have fun Elon.
AND: SNL did a nice roasting of DeSantis and his DISNEY crusade/obsession… also reminding folks that Ron Desantis had a DISNEY wedding in 2009.
ALSO: TSWIFT and Joe Alyyn are no more. Err well they’re both still alive, but they’re no longer a couple after 6 years.
THEN: As we near the first anniversary of the WBD deal closing, Senator Elizabeth Warren and 3 Democratic House members issued a letter to the DOJ, asking it to investigate WBD on concerns it is “harming workers” and limiting consumer choice.
While clearly diversity issues/data are very much a concern that should be followed up on a year later - citing the cancellation of The Time Traveler’s Wife in one’s DOJ letter as evidence of limiting consumer choice - a show that the consumers they mention were actually very welcome to watch… but showed little interest in choosing, well - let’s see what kind of traction this gets.
HALF A KUDOS: Goes out to the Wakeup Box Office crew… Super Mario Bros blew tracking out of the water, and 57% of you did take the over, but that still leaves a 🤭 going out to 43%.
As for AIR, yeah you missed that one… as only 23% of you took the $19+ Million for the 5-day total. We’ll see if we can redeem ourselves with Renfield this week.
IN TODAY’S EDITION:
The Monday Box Office breakdown - from the Mario records to a cloudy week 2 for Dungeons & Dragons, and the latest snapshot of the Specialty market.
Family pics keep working at the Box Office, why isn’t Hollywood making many of them anymore? A look at the numbers and the trends as to if Hollywood is leaving money on the table here, post-covid.
OH 🎧: I joined Sonny Bunch for a new episode of his Bulwark Goes To Hollywood podcast (which you can also now access at theankler.com too) to talk about the undercurrents & strengths of the ENDEAVOR biz that are behind the UFC-WWE deal (and why launching their own DtoC service doesn’t make a lot of sense right now), what’s up at AMAZON, the huge experiment going on in the US Sports biz right now… and yes, cricket! (just for a couple mins).
📽 THE SILVER SCREEN
