Warners’ Sale Scaries; Sports Docs Under Siege; Layoff Panic
Plus: Richard & Kristen Stewart tackle the female director problem
It’s been one scary week for Hollywood as layoffs pounded Paramount and Amazon and more prospective buyers circled Warner Bros. Discovery. With Paramount Skydance in hot pursuit and Comcast and even Netflix exploring the opportunity, Lesley Goldberg tapped into the dark mood inside WBD — and what David Ellison’s moves at PSky so far signal about the future of Warners (including who’d survive and who’d be most at risk) should he prevail.
For a deeper look at the this week’s jobs fallout, plus all the other financial indicators rattling the entertainment economy, tune into our newly revamped podcast, Ankler Agenda with Elaine Low, where Sean McNulty and Like & Subscribe’s Natalie Jarvey join to chew over the most urgent and incisive conversations about the industry, now on YouTube as well as Apple and Spotify.
If you enjoy it, remember to give the podcast a starred rating and subscribe.
A new can’t-miss feature on the Ankler Agenda pod? Richard Rushfield’s “Rushfield Rant” segment — this week dedicated to the shocking (yet sadly not shocking) lack of female directors among this year’s major feature releases, a topic he also tackled with Kristen Stewart, whose own directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, bowed at Cannes, on The Rushfield Lunch. “We feel good about these brownie points that we’ve earned, that we’ve moved the needle forward a little bit,” KStew said of progress by female helmers over the past decade. “But at the same time, it’s just a crock of shit.”
Team Ankler is leading even more great conversations this fall: Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen hit the Denver Film Festival on Nov. 4 to talk with Gus van Sant about his new film, Dead Man’s Wire (tickets here!), and Janice Min and Natalie take the stage at Web Summit Lisbon (we hope you score an invitation to Janice’s private dinner there). You can also hear from Janice this Friday at The WICT Network: SoCal’s 30th annual LEA Awards, where she’ll be honored alongside Disney’s Simran Sethi, Apple TV’s Shannon Willett and women leading in music, entertainment and tech. Join us!
Now, ICYMI, here’s more of our best of the week:
Series Business: Sports Doc Fight: a Comeback
Amid “way too much” sports-adjacent programming, nonfiction producers, agents & execs tell Elaine how they’re rewriting the playbook, from the cost per episode to make a follow-doc like Netflix’s Quarterback or Drive to Survive, to why casual fans — and even non-fans — now hold the most power in the unscripted market:
Dealmakers: Horror = Best Brand Value
Ashley Cullins goes inside the lucrative world of horror brand deals, ranging from $50,000 indie integrations to multimillion-dollar partnerships on major IPs that play to horror’s strong 18–40 demo:
Rushfield: Female 911; Layoff Memo Mess
Of this year’s top 100 movies at the North American box office, just four were directed by women. Richard analyzes the under-the-radar crisis and calls on the 10 highest-paid stars of 2024 (six of whom haven’t starred in a female-directed film since 2020) to use their leverage. Plus: As media layoffs grow. so do the tortured memos:
Entertainment Strategy Guy: Horror P&L
Everyone’s hot on horror — but the economics behind the genre are scarier than they appear. Entertainment Strategy Guy goes deep on the ROI for horror vs. other genres; why scary original films struggle on streaming; and how blood and gore will rank in the top 25 movies of 2025:
Notable: A Match Made in A24 Heaven
Oscar nominee Celine Song and Japanese Breakfast musician Michelle Zauner tell Rob LeDonne how they made a moving, modern-day love song for A24’s Materialists. And don’t miss the exclusive video of an unplugged performance of the ballad, “My Baby (Got Nothing At All)”:
Prestige Junkie: Oscar Predictions
In the second part of her Oscars predictions roundup (read part one here), Katey reveals what the Prestige Junkie pundits make of the supporting actor/actress and best screenplay categories. Plus: Tracy Letts talks A House of Dynamite:
The Wakeup
During a jam-packed week in the industry, there’s nobody better at synthesizing and analyzing all you need to know than Sean. He lays out the job cuts at Paramount and Amazon, Peacock’s lingering growth problem and the nuances of Taylor Sheridan’s NBCU pact:
Our Shows
Monday Morning QBs: Our box office buds break down why Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere flopped in its opening weekend — and why Richard appreciates Disney’s unique take on the biopic nonetheless:
📱 LIKE & SUBSCRIBE BY NATALIE JARVEY
👓 THE OPTIONIST BY ANDY LEWIS
FINAL HOUSEKEEPING!
As an Ankler subscriber, you are automatically subscribed to all of our newsletters and podcasts by default. Not interested in all of them? Customize which ones would like to receive notifications for. It’s easy to do.
Log into your Substack account from a desktop or laptop, select “Settings” from the drop-down menu.
Under Subscriptions, click on The Ankler to review the sections you’d like to subscribe to/unsubscribe from.
On the next page, click on the toggles next to each newsletter and podcast you want to receive emails for. A gray toggle indicates notifications are off.
Alternatively, when you get an email newsletter, select “Unsubscribe” in the footer of the email and click on “Turn off emails” next to each section you’d like to unsubscribe from.
You want scary?
All the unions allow retirement as young as 52 or 55 at the oldest for early retirement.
The folks who were employed for 30 years are going to absolutely bankrupt SAG, the DGA, the WGA and IATSE in a few years or less.
The layoffs will only make the pensions even harder to fund.