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.
Neve Campbell After a salary dispute kept the Scream star out of the sixth installment, the actress is returning for the next film as producer Spyglass aims to get the project into production. Don Lemon The ex-CNN host says that an interview with Elon Musk, with whom he’d inked a deal for a new show on X, caused the mercurial tech mogul to ax said show. Bill Maher HBO picks up two more seasons of Real Time, which will take the weekly talk show through its 24th season in 2026 — extending the cabler’s longest-running current series. Neil Young His Spotify boycott, begun in 2022, ends with him back on the service. To be fair, Young said he returned because Joe Rogan’s show, the subject of his ire, is now…
In July 2023, near the peak of animosity between scribes and studios during the writers strike, a picket outside ABC’s The View in New York welcomed an ally: Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. Behind closed doors, the writers union had been sharing concerns of a wave of mergers that it said left just a handful of studios like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon as the lone arbiters of which movies and TV shows are made, what consumers watch and how they can watch it. Flanked by protest signs name-checking WBD boss David Zaslav to “just give up one yacht” and chants embracing themes of “exploitation,” “concentrated power” and “corporate giants,” Khan delivered a fiery speech that also effectively served as a signal to moguls seeking more mergers…
The advertising business has bifurcated, with tech companies seeing booming growth year-over-year, and video (like at YouTube and Amazon) among the strongest drivers. That comes even as the traditional media and entertainment companies see their ad revenue decline from last year. The only green shoots? Sports and streaming, suggesting that those might be a path back to growth. Media Ad Revenue % Change Year-Over-Year Tech Ad Revenue % Change Year-Over-Year The big tech companies already dominate the ad market, and they just keep getting bigger. But with YouTube growing and Amazon throwing ads on Prime Video, they could steal even more market share. Source: Advertising: Corporate SEC filings.; Ratings (opposite page): Nielsen live +7 linear ratings for this season, through March 4.…
Abbott Elementary (ABC) 3.78M viewers | DOWN 4% from 2022-23 The Emmy-winning comedy has dipped in linear ratings this season, though it’s a modest decline. The audience hasn’t gone away so much as switched to platforms outside the reach of Nielsen’s linear ratings. Per ABC, the show frequently doubles its first-night audience after three days of cross-platform viewing, with most of that coming from Hulu. The Floor (Fox) 3.47M viewers | FIRST SEASON The Rob Lowe-hosted game show quietly became one of Fox’s best-performing shows of the first quarter. The Floor consistently — and substantially — added viewers from its lead-in, Name That Tune, and had the second-highest viewer tally of any show on the network in January and February, behind Next Level Chef. Next Level Chef (Fox) 3.97M viewers…
A legal showdown is brewing between Michael Kassan and UTA over the MediaLink founder’s departure, with the agency saying it fired him for stealing company funds and Kassan claiming that he resigned after being lied to about his responsibilities and privileges at the firm. In an arbitration action initiated by Kassan on March 13 against UTA that names chief executive Jeremy Zimmer, he claims that UTA fraudulently induced him to agree to a sale of MediaLink “only to then walk back the very promises made” regarding what he would oversee at the agency and allowances for his special expenses budget. He resigned on March 6, preempting the agency terminating him the next day. UTA, in a lawsuit filed in L.A. Superior Court the same day Kassan filed for arbitration, accuses…
While David Zaslav and Bob Iger’s tax-optimization strategy of deleting films and TV shows from their streamers has triggered plenty of agita among creators, the custodians of Hollywood’s digital era have an even greater fear: wholesale decay of feature and episodic files. Behind closed doors and NDAs, the fragility of archives is a perpetual Topic A, with pros sweating the possibility that contemporary pop culture’s master files might be true goners, destined to the same fate as so many vanished silent movies, among them Alfred Hitchcock’s second feature, The Mountain Eagle, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Oscar-winning The Patriot. For the business, these are valuable studio assets — to use one example, the MGM Library (roughly 4,000 film titles including the James Bond franchise and 17,000 series episodes) is worth an estimated…
