☀️WBD Activist Rattles NETFLIX BROS. Deal
DISNEY vault’s big week on NETFLIX / WB + King remake / T-MOBILE broadband heater extends
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 Wednesday, February 11, 2026.
Where, sure, Super Bowl ads are great — but the ad environment in AI sounds so much better for advertiser ROI!
While, as the WSJ points out, CHATGPT “itself” will be unaware of the ads that appear below its responses . . . according to OPENAI’s Head of Applications — if you point the ads out to CHATGPT and ask it if the products being pushed are better than what it’s recommending to you — it’ll tell you!
I’m sure the advertisers will ❤️ the bots telling you how inferior their product or pricing is to its competitors.
YEAH: The Super Bowl audience was -2% from last year to 124.9M on NBC & PEACOCK according to NIELSEN, the 2nd largest on record.
KEEP IN MIND: NIELSEN’s audience measurement methodology has expanded significantly since Covid (namely, counting out-of-home audiences that were not counted prior to 2020).
It then grew again this year with BIG DATA + PANEL, which adds a large multiple of additional viewership data sources and generally has been boosting audience sizes a bit as well for most sports programming.
SO: Take all past comps (especially pre-Covid) on a unique event like this with such large group viewership as ya like.
BASICALLY: Very similar to how, say, NFL player records that now occur in the 17th game of a season should really come with an * next to those from when there were 16-game seasons — the rules have changed, so comps to previous times are a bit moot.
SURE: The Oscars also falls into this to a degree as well, although I doubt Oscar parties are anywhere near as prevalent or prolific as Super Bowl parties in terms of out-of-home viewing, etc. The show’s viewership has also undergone far more significant swings than the NFL has.
NOTE: NIELSEN will be supplying additional Super Bowl viewership data next week with a new methodology it’s testing around measuring group/co-viewing.
Bad Bunny had 128M viewers at halftime, slightly more than the game average (125M) but less than the game’s peak (138M), which was toward the later part of the 2nd quarter in the . . . quite boring game.
TELEMUNDO had 3.3M viewers for its Spanish-language broadcast of the game, and Bad Bunny had 4.8M viewers.
OH: KALSHI saw nearly $1B of action put on the Super Bowl, with still-illegal POLYMARKET getting $1.2B according to PIPER analysts (I guess people don’t need that VPN training after all), although the app recently re-entered the U.S. market in ‘beta mode.’ 🥴
Nevada bets on the game in the state were -11.7% YoY, and the lowest in at least 10 years, according to Bloomberg. 👀
ALSO: The UFC will get its big CBS debut on Saturday, March 7, in primetime from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. with the UFC326 fight — it’ll be one hour of undercard fights and one hour of main card, with a toss to PAR+ to watch the biggest fights on the card after 10 p.m.
CBS is also airing a This is UFC special on Friday, Feb. 20, at 8 p.m.
THEN: Ah, I’m sure this will boost TV ratings for the NBA’s partners — some crappy NBA teams are already making moves to seemingly tank their games in hopes of getting a better draft pick. The season is only halfway done (you paid how much for this sport?).
YUP: The Trump administration is now removing Pride flags at the birthplace of the American LGBTQ rights movement at Stonewall National Monument in NYC’s West Village (it was made a national monument in 2016 under President Obama).
AND: E! booted Jill Zarin from the new RHONY-based reality show The Golden Life after her since-deleted video, uh, critique on X of the Super Bowl halftime show, complaining about the Spanish songs, “no white people,” and accusing it of being a political statement that was “an ICE thing.”
ECONOMIC SNAPSHOTS
Time for one of my check-ins on some new numbers emerging this week about the health of the U.S. consumer and worker.
FIRST: The economy added 130k jobs in January, vastly surpassing most ‘expert’ predictions.
Thus, the overall U.S. employment rate fell a tick to 4.3%.
2025 job growth was also revised downward significantly, from 584k jobs to 181k jobs. For the year.
In December, job openings also reached their lowest level since September 2020.
Note that the vast majority of the 130k January job gain was again in healthcare (82k), with construction accounting for most of the rest (30k). Sorry, Hollywood (although movies, TV and music jobs did net 9k new gigs across the country).
OH: Loan delinquencies rose again in Q4, especially among lower-income Americans and with mortgages in particular. While the overall 4.8% delinquency rate is around the number we had in 2017 — credit card loans that are at least 90+ days delinquent hit its highest percentage since 2011.
ALSO: Note the sizable increase in 120+ days late delinquencies (the yellow part) over the past year below.
PLUS: We’ll round out today’s economy section with some #funfacts from the WSJ. The shift in % of gross U.S. income going to 'wages and benefits’:
1980: 58%
2025 (Q3): 51.7%
The % of gross U.S. income going to corporate profits:
1980: 7.2%
2025 (Q3): 11.7%
If the American worker were to regain that share — every employed American would get $12k annual bump to their salary. Ok, sure, but what about CEO incentive pay? They’ll leave those jobs and go tend bar instead! And then what will we do, huh?
So, enjoy those benefits from annual multi-billion 💰 stock buybacks and C-suite stock grants, American workers! I’m sure AI will totally turn these trends around.
THANKS!
To the folks at AMAZON for the invite to check out the new ABA 🏀 docuseries Soul Power in NYC last night — an important part of American basketball & NBA history that really doesn’t get the light it deserves whenever the NBA looks back at the past. It premieres on PRIME VIDEO on Thursday.
FINALLY: Ok, this is an unintended AMAZON two-fer today (and I didn’t even get a free month of PRIME VIDEO!) — but if you’re not watching Good Sports on AMAZON PV, I highly recommend it! Kind of Weekend Update for sports, but even looser and just a fun hang with Kenan & Kev. Here’s the opening section from this week’s ep.
The WBD Auction
