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.
Not long after he returned as Disney’s CEO in late 2022, Bob Iger sat down with Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s head of parks and experiences, and Sean Shoptaw, the company’s head of games, to be briefed about the media habits of young consumers. “The first thing they showed me were the demographic trends,” Iger recalled, speaking to Wall Street analysts Feb. 7. “When I saw Gen Z and Gen Alpha and even millennials, and I saw the amount of time they were spending in terms of their total media screen time on video games, it was stunning to me, equal to what they spend on TV and movies.” The conclusion he reached: “We have to be there, and we have to be there as soon as we possibly can in a…
Ben Wang After a global casting call nets thousands of entries, the actor lands what could be a star-making role with Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio in Sony’s next Karate Kid movie. Bob Bakish As suitors wait in the wings for Paramount Global, its CEO mollifies Wall Street in unveiling cuts of 800 staffers as part of a broad effort of “streamlining costs” this year. Roger Goodell The NFL chief gets a feather in his crown as Super Bowl LVIII hits a record 123 million viewers — the biggest event in the history of total-viewer ratings. Adam Bold After selling off assets to Gersh, the A3 Artists Agency chairman shutters the rest of his agency amid a lawsuit from his partners alleging a “state of chaos” at the firm. Showbiz…
Disney is the latest streaming giant to jump into a password-sharing crackdown, with its efforts to make money from the move set to begin in earnest this summer. The media giant has updated its subscriber agreement for Disney+, as well as Hulu, to ban account sharing for new subscribers starting Jan. 25, 2024, and for existing subscribers starting March 14. On its Feb. 7 earnings call, Disney CFO Hugh Johnston said that starting in a few months, Disney+ account holders will be “presented with new capabilities” that allow account sharers to start their own subs. Later this year, account holders can allow individuals outside their household to access their account for an additional fee. This is one of several measures Disney plans to help it reach streaming profitability by its…
FX CEO John Landgraf, the executive who coined the term “Peak TV” in 2015 to reflect the proliferation of scripted originals, says Netflix’s shift toward profitability versus global subscribers ushered in the industry’s current era of contraction. With a 14 percent drop in U.S.-produced originals in 2023 (516 versus 600 in 2022), according to FX research, Landgraf tells THR that he believes Disney rival Netflix made the change “because they were ahead of everyone else and it was to their advantage to choose a metric in which they had the lead.” Netflix had more than a decade of insane spending that drove prices across the industry up as titans like Disney and Warners, among others, launched streamers and attempted to compete for scale. While Landgraf was wrong twice before about…
A highly amusing, albeit scathing New York Times restaurant review of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar that went viral in 2012 is being used by attorneys acting for the Times in their lawsuit against OpenAI to illustrate just how destructive the new technology could be to the future of journalism. When prompted about the opening paragraphs of critic Pete Wells’ review, entire passages are lifted verbatim by ChatGPT. “Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex?” Wells had written. Those sentences and several other paragraphs were copied directly from the pages of the paper and then regurgitated by the AI system, per the lawsuit. Local news has been decimated in America, owing…
It’s the 30-story elephant on the L.A. skyline — and seemingly no one, including Mayor Karen Bass, has decided what to do about it. The Oceanwide Plaza luxury development has stood next to Crypto.com Arena vacant and half-finished since 2019, when its Chinese developer, having already spent $1.1 billion on it, ran out of money. In December, three L.A. taggers — Akua, Sour and Castle — broke into the highest of Oceanwide’s three towers and spray-painted their names across its floor-to-ceiling windows. The daring stunt served as a bat signal to the rest of L.A.’s graffiti community, including prolific tagger Endem, who dreamed of seeing his own name in 13-foot-tall block letters adorning the building. “A lot of people were actually hitting me up on Instagram,” says Endem. “Like, ‘What’s…
