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Deals UTA’s Big Move The agency takes private equity cash to grow p. 12 ↑ TV Vote of Confidence HBO chief Casey Bloys gets a five-year deal p. 18 Steven Knight The Peaky Blinders creator’s BBC/Netflix show hits No. 2 on Nielsen’s streaming chart, up 40 percent week-to-week, as Apple TV+ gives a series order for his Ferrari project. Zack Snyder The Justice League director is hit with a Rolling Stone report citing a 2021 internal WarnerMedia memo raising concerns about bots fanning the flames for the Snyder Cut. Bad Bunny The rapper’s Un Verano Sin Ti nabs nearly 1.6 billion streams since May, competing with the Encanto soundtrack for most listened-to album in the first half of 2022, per Luminate. Garth Drabinsky Company members of Paradise Square rallied to…
It’s the economy, stupid. The phrase made famous in the 1992 presidential campaign could well be on Wall Street’s mind as entertainment giants report their second-quarter earnings in late July and August. After all, the upcoming quarterly results might not look so bad, as streaming hits like Stranger Things and Obi-Wan Kenobi respectively boost viewership at Netflix and Disney+ and box office smashes like Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick and Universal’s Jurassic World: Dominion roll through theaters. But these titles may be a mirage obscuring headwinds this fall, meaning investors will listen at least as closely to executive forecasts, expectations and commentary for hints of what’s happening in the current third quarter. Meanwhile, inflation and economic pressures could come to a head during the back half of 2022 amid talk of…
Amid upheaval in Hollywood, the major talent agencies are scaling up, betting that the demand for content — and top-shelf talent — will keep growing. And it’s all backed, at least in part, by private equity cash betting that “peak content” concerns are overblown. On July 18, UTA revealed an investment from the Swedish firm EQT. UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer said he and his leadership team chose EQT as an investor because they felt the firm “would really help us drive growth while protecting our culture.” UTA’s investment, meanwhile, arrived shortly after CAA, led by Bryan Lourd and Richard Lovett, completed its June 28 acquisition of ICM, which is topped by Chris Silbermann, forging a representation giant backed by its majority owner, TPG. And the Ari Emanuel-led Endeavor, owner of…
Mark Zuckerberg came with bad news. In a meeting with employees in July, the Meta CEO, who has turned his company’s focus, and investments, toward the metaverse, told staff to prepare for one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” as Reuters reported. Employees used to bountiful resources would need to work with less, and those unable to rise to the occasion and prove their worth at the company would be headed for the exit. It was a bleak reminder of the foreboding year ahead for the tech giants, which are heading into another earnings season with tumbling stock prices and downturn in advertising. Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, will be the first of the major social and tech platforms to report earnings, on July 21.…
236 episodes 1.29B minutes viewed HBO Max became a regular part of Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings at the end of May. In each of the three weeks since then, Friends — one of the streamer’s highest-profile (and most expensive) acquisitions — has been the most watched series on the platform. The beloved former NBC series has pulled in 1.29 billion minutes of viewing time over those three weeks, which projects to more than 22 billion minutes over a full year. Another big HBO Max acquisition, The Big Bang Theory, also has made the Nielsen top 10 acquired shows in each of those three weeks, racking up just over a billion minutes of viewing.…
After DC and Spotify’s Batman Unburied podcast topped charts in multiple countries, a Harley Quinn series, starring Christina Ricci and Billy Magnussen and written by Eli Horowitz, is up next. As Showtime confirms that Desus Nice and The Kid Mero will be “pursuing separate creative endeavors moving forward” in canceling Desus and Mero, the fate of the duo’s popular podcast is in limbo as well. Podcast company Acast, run by CEO Ross Adams, has acquired Podchaser, the “IMDb of podcasts” and discoverability database run by CEO Bradley Davis, in a deal worth $34 million.…
