The all-new Hollywood Reporter offers unprecedented access to the people, studios, networks and agencies that create the magic in Hollywood. Published weekly, the oversized format includes exceptional photography and rich features.
Pharrell Williams The music star is joining Louis Vuitton as the men’s creative director, taking the role last held by late designer Virgil Abloh and debuting his first collection in June in Paris. Chris McCarthy The rubber meets the road as the Paramount Global exec overseeing Showtime’s integration into Paramount+ lays off 120 staffers in a cost-cutting reorganization. SZA The artist rings in an eighth nonconsecutive week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 135.4 million streams of the album SOS, according to Luminate data. Mark Zuckerberg After shedding 11,000 staffers, the Meta mogul is prepping for a new round of layoffs, per a Financial Times report, throwing the Facebook owner into more uncertainty. Showbiz Stocks $126.13 (+1.4%) SPOTIFY (SPOT) An activist investor, ValueAct Capital, takes a stake in…
In his first earnings report back as Disney CEO, Bob Iger unveiled a structure that returns power to the creatives but also raises questions about succession and the fate of two key company assets. Under Iger’s Feb. 8 plan, the empire is divided up three ways: Disney Entertainment, including the company’s streaming business, and all its non-ESPN media and content offerings under the leadership of Alan Bergman and Dana Walden; ESPN, led by Jimmy Pitaro; and Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, with Josh D’Amaro still in charge. All of this, as well as a plan to cut costs to the tune of $5.5 billion, is in pursuit of achieving streaming profitability by fiscal year 2024, Iger emphasized. Of course, in segmenting out the company in this way, the new plan…
Call it a franchise recession. After years of Marvel and Star Wars movies and shows inundating screens big and small, Disney is putting the brakes on the output of some of its biggest franchises and brands following Bob Iger’s Feb. 8 comments that the company needs to be “better at curating” franchise content that’s “extraordinarily expensive.” The directive to rein in costs and output arrives as Disney prepares to release Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania on Feb. 17 and as The Mandalorian season three awaits its March 1 Disney+ debut. Marvel is Disney’s most important supplier of product, the subsidiary with the highest output — and under Iger’s directive, it could feel cuts the soonest. “There is going to be a level of rigor on Marvel and across the…
The past five years saw every major Hollywood giant lean into streaming entertainment, pulling programming budgets from broadcast and cable channels and funneling them into wholly owned streaming services. But there also have been exceptions: sports and news, which TV executives have long argued hold the legacy pay TV bundle together. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, for example, told Wall Street analysts this past summer that linear TV is “a cash generator and a great business for us for many years to come.” So while such cable channels as TNT, Syfy and Comedy Central have dialed down their original entertainment output and reduced budgets for everything from staffing to marketing, with efforts focused on streaming, channels like ESPN and Fox News have stayed the course, benefiting from their ability…
In Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, journalists James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams of The New York Times chart the corporate maneuvering and personal embroilments that brought disgrace to billionaire Viacom owner Sumner Redstone, who died in August 2020. The book, published Feb. 14, zeros in on the doomed dynamic in the relationships between a very wealthy, very old man and two very clever younger women, Sydney Holland and Manuela Herzer. By the time Sumner rid himself of them, the authors report, citing a lawsuit, the pair had taken him for more than $150 million. THR spoke with Stewart and Abrams about their book and its cast of characters. Are the workplace failures you reveal at CBS and what was then Viacom…
In the pandemic era, it wasn’t uncommon to see a major Hollywood studio abandon a traditional release and send a movie straight to streaming. Now the opposite is happening with increasing frequency, whereby a film made for a streamer instead ends up at the multiplex. There have been notable success stories — Smile, which grossed $216 million globally, and PAW Patrol: The Movie ($144 million) among them. But Magic Mike’s Last Dance, originally made for HBO Max, is harder to judge after launching to a franchise-low $8.3 million domestically from 1,496 theaters during Super Bowl weekend. The first Magic Mike, released in 2012, couldn’t stop dancing after opening to $39.1 million from nearly 4,000 locations on its way to grossing a sexy $167.3 million globally, thanks in large part to…
