☀️ What's Next for Endeavor? Follow the Exec 💰 Incentives
FOX sets new college hoops tourney / NETFLIX loves the Matt Rife business / DIAMOND sets CHARTER deal
Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect with me on LinkedIn here if ya like), and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on THURSDAY, April 4, 2024.
Where DISNEY’s national nightmare is over . . . again, as Iger’s board was voted in by a “substantial margin,” and Peltz & Rasulo were sent packing (Nelson reportedly only secured about 30%-ish of the vote for his seat; Jay was around 15%).
Well worth the more than $65 Million that DIS and Nelson spent on this charade. How many films could SEARCHLIGHT have made with that? The irony of course being that financial discipline was one of the key tenets under focus here on both sides 🙄.
I’m sure that’s also a very comforting number to see for anyone laid off from DISNEY, or who had a show greenlight removed over the past year.
But, in the DISNEY CEO succession game — whom do you trust most to be able to handle and properly message a situation like that? Comes with the job requirements (Nelson Peltz won’t be the last DISNEY activist investor).
Either way, see ya next spring Nelson (and Ike) . . . although Lucy — keep that football handy for all of the sure-to-resurface hot takes leading up.
AND: Look! WB found another property to reboot in the vault! 5th Matrix anyone? Should be any day now until Richard and I finally get our Any Which Way But Loose reboot, with Clint naturally.
OH: SPOTIFY is likely raising prices again in the U.S. later this year if you want to keep access to audiobooks as part of your $11 subscription, according to my favorite people (those “familiar with the matter” according to Bloomberg). Price hikes are also coming this month to the U.K. and Australia.
WELL: It had to happen eventually . . . someone is finally utilizing AI for something helpful! Kudos to the UC Berkeley grad students who built/are building an AI that detects potential Congressional insider trading activity. Oddly they still need to attract more funding to keep going. Huh.
WAKEUP BOX-OFFICE POLL
So it looks like we have an old fashioned horse race between UNI’s Monkey Man and DISNEYFOX’s The First Omen — both of which are tracking circa $12M to $13M, so let’s just call it straight up: Who comes out on top? (err, below Godzilla, naturally)
IN TODAY’S EDITION:
I’m not saying SILVER LAKE is looking to do a fire sale of ENDEAVOR assets (while holding onto WME and 51% of TKO), but they sure are putting in some big executive incentives in this deal to encourage it.
Take a look at some curious financial incentive language buried in the 8-K for the deal (yes, including the private jets), as to what may be afoot come 2025 / once the deal closes.
AND HEY: Ya gotta love hockey . . . the DEVILS vs. RANGERS game last night opened with a fight at the, uh, two-second mark of the game, which according to the MSG Network, was somehow only the second fastest fight in MSG hockey history 🤔 — 8 players were ejected.
The likely impending asset sale at ENDEAVOR
So, I suppose let’s start with some deal #funfacts here, or I guess #MoneyFacts🤑 may be a more apt hashtag.
The following would all happen once the deal is official, which has a target closing timeline of Q1 ‘25 (i.e. a little under a year from now), yes, including the private jets.