☀️VERSANT v. DISCO: Whose Spinco Wins
Dude Perfect’s box office results / NBCU, YOUTUBE 🤝 / NETFLIX’s One Direction road trip
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, October 3, 2025.
Where ever since Dirt.com went RIP 😢, our Friday morning coffees together have been far and few between . . . but for the readers with $110M handy (to be clear — my favorite readers), let’s have a ☕️ here by the pool at Johnny Carson’s old Malibu shack — I’ll even let you pick which Showgirl song to play on the HiFi system!
(Just me, or does the melody on “The Life of a Showgirl” — the Sabrina Carpenter collab — sound, uh . . . very much like the Jonas Brothers song “Cool” from 2019?)
Johnny’s former pad has 4 acres, including a baller tennis court (yes, a good morning to you too, Elaine Low), 5 BRs, 11 bathrooms, so you never have to take a whiz in the same place twice in a given day like a commoner. I’m sure that hot tub has some great stories that would make for an excellent Kimmel segment.
Just don’t forget to water all of the trees in the uh, indoor arboretum. Housework never ends, amirite?
THEN: VENU’s day of vindication is finally here! Enjoy your ESPN D2C + FOX ONE $40-a-month debut day.
WELL: It looks like David Ellison is going to put someone who has never worked in network TV news . . . in charge of all editorial for his network TV news division. Eh, that kinda stuff always works out fine — just look at how well the Department of Defense War thing is doing! See you for the spin on this The Free Press / PSKY deal announcement (likely) early next week.
D’OH: HBO MAX is pulling the CNN feed from the product on Nov. 17 as CNN preps to go live on its D2C offering.
Pair this with the likely loss of most sports on HBO MAX once the
WARNAMOUNT saleDISCO GLOBAL spinoff happens, and . . . yeah, we’re getting closer to being back to HBO!
PLUS: The Tribeca Festival is heading back to Portugal for a 2nd year on the international stage with Tribeca Festival Lisboa from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1.
ALSO: Here are the match lineups for NETFLIX’s trip to Riyadh for the Six Kings Slam tennis tournament this month. All action will begin at 9:30 a.m. PT, so Elaine — clear the schedule on Oct. 15, 16 and 18.
KUDOS: To the TIGERS, CUBS and YANKEES (thanks for ruining the animal motif here, New York 🙄) on moving on from the MLB Wild Card round to the Divisional Series — American League starts tomorrow on FOX/FS1 and National League starts tomorrow on TBS/HBO MAX (ad-free tier).
BTW: Game 1 of the YANKEES / SOX series got 6.5M viewers on ESPN, its largest baseball game in 4 years (keep in mind, this is using NIELSEN’s BIG DATA + PANEL methodology, which is incorporating more data sources).
AND: Industry tracking firm ISPOT put #BigPharma’s linear TV ad spend at a 13% 💰 share in Q3, as the Trump administration continues to look to impose increasing restrictions around the ad category.
YUP: Here is your latest profile of Hollywood production folk needing to enter new lines of work or leave town as the work dries up in L.A., this time from Ben Fritz at the WSJ.
Some pretty stark employment charts in there on the before/after of the double whammy 2023 strikes and massive streaming spend contraction. Place your bets on how they come in for 2025.
OH: If JOE COFFEE is your go-to in NYC — you’re now paying an extra 1.5% tariff surcharge, which added $66k to a recent shipment of beans from Brazil, with the prices of roasted coffee at the grocery store now +22% YoY.
WAIT: CRACKER BARREL just ended its relationship with the ad agency behind its big logo and store redesign fiasco? It took this long?
YAH: Now that new SORA has been out in the wild from OPENAI for a few days, it’s totally outputting videos with copyrighted characters like Super Mario, Family Guy and South Park characters, Lara Croft, SpongeBob and, of course . . . Pikachu from Pokémon directly being featured in several movies (there are more clips in the X post).
WAKEUP BOX OFFICE POLL
Love that Taylor Swift optimism out there! I joined the upper mid folks — the $12 ticket price thing kinda gives me reservations.
And I’m also going mid-optimism on The Smashing Machine — let’s see how the combat sports and WWE crowd shows up!
NEW POD
🤓 FUN WITH NUMBERS
Since the day after Yom Kippur naturally dampens the deal news cycle a bit each year, I have some more numbers intel to dive into:
How big the primetime linear cable TV audience reach would be on a given night here at the turn of October for a combined WARNAMOUNT company vs. the other biggies. It’s actually pretty impressive — at least comparatively speaking.
AND: How does the audience reach compare between the 2 big pending cable TV SPINCOs at WBD and NBCU?
I also got some 💰 data for the movie that YT creators Dude Perfect put in theaters over the past week to see if “movie theaters” are an untapped revenue source for creator culture.
And see just how many people watched that NETFLIX animated series that has Elon and his social warrior brigade all riled up.
Here’s what we got.