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.
Tracy Chapman An acclaimed Grammy Awards performance with Luke Combs powers her “Fast Car” to the top of the iTunes chart three decades after the song first bowed in 1988. Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg The Cobra Kai hitmakers’ series Obliterated fails to launch at Netflix, which canceled the action comedy after one season. Neal Mohan The YouTube CEO is now the chief of a pay TV giant as he discloses 8 million-plus subscribers to the premium offering of the user-generated video site. Phil Mattingly and Poppy Harlow The CNN This Morning anchors get shuffled out of their a.m. roles as the Chris Licht-era show is swept away for a news-focused pivot from chief Mark Thompson. Showbiz Stocks $17.46 (+8.7%) SNAP (SNAP) The Snapchat owner slashed 10 percent of…
In the basement of a car dealership in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District last spring, The Messenger chairman and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein addressed a throng of New York’s media elite. Finkelstein was there to unveil his grand plans for a new website that he claimed would revolutionize the news, talking a big game in the process. “When I was at The Hill, we did 125 million visits a month,” he told the gathering that featured media heavyweights Barry Diller, Kara Swisher, Chris Licht and Jen Psaki. “It was the second highest political site next to CNN. That’s with 70ish journalists and maybe 90 people in editorial. Here, we are going to have hundreds of journalists. We are not just covering politics, we are covering sports, we are covering business, we are covering…
TIM COOK Apple CEO + ADAM SILVER NBA commissioner On Feb. 2, Apple released its Vision Pro headset into the world (priced at $3,500). CEO Tim Cook was on hand to open the doors at Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship to welcome customers. A few hours later, THR tagged along as Cook toured the NBA league office with commissioner Adam Silver, and spoke with both about the device’s Hollywood potential. Spatial computing seems like it opens new doors to sports and entertainment. How do you get fans invested? Tim Cook I think it’s more immersive than ever before. I think the fan wants to be a part of the game and a part of the action, and there’s nothing like being in Vision Pro and feeling like you’re on the court.…
In the last week of January, Spotify made new deals with The Joe Rogan Experience, which had been the top podcast of the year globally at the audio giant for the past four years, and with Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, which had also been among the top-ranking titles. The Daniel Ek-led firm will retain exclusivity of the video form of Cooper’s podcast and sell ads for both, in a strategy that appears likely to keep both podcast creators and Wall Street happy. Spotify had already ended many high-profile exclusive distribution deals, including its pacts with the Obamas and Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. While all these deals, and those of Joe Rogan and Cooper, were meant to bring in big audiences and ad dollars to the platform at a…
When Vince McMahon stepped into the New York Stock Exchange on Jan. 23, he was on hand to celebrate what was supposed to be a triumph for TKO Group Holdings, the company for which he was executive chairman and the owner of the WWE, the wrestling promotion that McMahon turned into a multibillion-dollar business. Earlier that morning, the WWE announced a blockbuster 10-year, $5 billion deal with Netflix to stream Raw in the U.S. and almost all of its other live programming in other markets around the world. And Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the WWE’s biggest stars turned global movie star, was set to ring the opening bell, in connection with an agreement to join TKO’s board of directors. Speaking to attendees in the NYSE’s ornate sixth-floor boardroom…
Cinema operators might be wishing for their own atmospheric river storms right about now, at least figuratively speaking. Heading into the new year, long-range forecasts showed the box office facing a bad drought during the first two months of 2024, and they were unfortunately spot-on. The culprit? A sparse crop of new Hollywood studio titles as a result of production delays caused by last year’s strikes and a less-than-memorable class of year-end holiday holdovers to goose January’s bottom line. Domestic box office revenue year-to-date of $581.2 million is running 43 percent behind the average haul during the same time period in 2016-19, when movie ticket sales clocked in as high as $1.08 billion, according to data provided by Comscore for Jan. 1-Feb. 4. Of that, January clocked in at $513.6…
