Hollywood eyes big business at the box office

JANICE MIN: This is when I talk about people getting caught up in headlines. Like Mission Impossible 8, I will be shocked if it becomes even a break-even proposition. If you fast-forward into a few weeks into the summer, we’re going to see a lot of big budgets coming. And we’ve seen this with Marvel movies, for example, that you used to be able to clear $1 billion in the box office, and that was amazing. And they don’t do that anymore, but the budgets have remained the same.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Janice Min, the CEO of entertainment industry outlet, The Ankler. Janice returns to the show to talk about Hollywood’s record box office success over Memorial Day weekend, and she peels back the curtain on movies from Sinners to Lilo and Stitch to DC’s revamped Superman. She also talks about the pressures on Warner Bros Discovery CEO, David Zaslav, and Paramount’s Shari Redstone. Plus, we get into Netflix’s revamped homepage, Google’s new video AI product, and HBO Max’s switcheroo rebrand. It’s a blockbuster episode, so settle in for the ride. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Janice Min, founder and CEO of The Ankler. Janice, it’s great to chat with you again.

MIN: So good to see you.

Copy LinkThe reality behind blockbuster budgets

SAFIAN: So, all of a sudden it seems like Hollywood is back. Memorial Day weekend, start of summer box office season, record numbers, record dollars behind what a la Barbenheimer is being called Stitch-Possible. Disney’s live-action Lilo and Stitch, paired off with Tom Cruise’s final installment of Mission Impossible. Were you surprised by the start of summer Memorial Day showing? Is it a fluke or is the movie theater magic back?

MIN: Okay, Bob, I think you’ve been reading too many headlines and you’ve bought in. And so, let’s frame it as that first, but lots of reasons to feel good about what we just saw. Right? These were numbers and a kind of excitement that if you were to have followed the last year and a half since the strikes ended, you thought, oh, we’re never saying that again. And so, that felt good. Let’s remember Mission, I mean it’s almost comical. Mission Impossible 8, basically, The Final Reckoning, and I guess the end leaves it a little open so maybe it’s not the final reckoning. I think it’s a little bit like the Rolling Stones finale tour of the last 30 years.

And then Lilo and Stitch, there’s a theme here, which is that people want family entertainment and even though writers here hate it, a lot of people who love original films here hate it. Known IP, for better or worse, still manages to do the trick.

SAFIAN: You feel like I bought into some hype here, that things have not changed in any dramatic way?

MIN: All right, so it shows that the market is still there, you can get people to come out for something exciting. So I will grant that, but can I just rewind a few weeks and go to Upfronts? And I know we’re talking about movies, but it’s a little bit related. I’m sure a lot of your audience was maybe at the Upfronts in one of these presentations, and if you thought this was a scripted business, you are so wrong. It is now a live sports business, and every single presentation was hewed towards that. So I think what we’re looking at here is a business of live sports, sports shoulder programming, and spectacle movies.

SAFIAN: I was looking at the cost of this iteration of Mission Impossible, something like $500 million, including marketing. Even a big Memorial Day weekend opening, it’s just a tiny fraction of that. Does spending on these blockbusters still make sense?

MIN: Studios will tell you it would be crazy not to do that because only in these big spends can you have these big recoupments and then some, right? But no, I mean, I think that this is, when I talk about people getting caught up in headlines, like Mission Impossible 8, I will be shocked if it becomes even a break even proposition, if it goes into profitability. These are off the box office, maybe there’s some long tail where it does recoup, but the last movie by all accounts did not. So then if you fast-forward into a few weeks into the summer, we’re going to see a lot of big budgets coming. And we’ve seen this with Marvel movies, for example, that you used to be able to clear $1 billion in the box office, and that was amazing. And they don’t do that anymore, but the budgets have remained the same.

Copy LinkPremiering blockbuster movies in the same weekend

SAFIAN: There’s another doubling up coming in July, Jurassic World Rebirth and the latest reboot of Superman. Do the studios try to align releases now to spark attention by invoking Barbenheimer? Is that a strategy?

MIN: Well, there used to be this crazy game of dating. It was called dating, and if you thought a big movie like Superman were coming, you’d be like, oh my God, I’m going to move my movie. Universal, who has Jurassic Park, would move their movie and get out of the way. And now, I do think there is a deliberate effort. You could think about, has anyone made up a name for that weekend yet?

SAFIAN: I’m sure they will.

MIN: Yes.

SAFIAN: I haven’t seen it yet.

MIN: Yeah, Super Dino. I don’t know there’s going to be something like that. So I think that weekend has all the hallmarks of a big weekend. Obviously Jurassic, I mean, these movies don’t get good reviews, they’re not “good movies,” but people really enjoy them. And no matter how many times you do the plot of dinos come back to life, it’s scary, there are jump scares, people will never get tired of them. And also, it feeds the theme park.

And then Superman, so this is one that people really should be watching. It’s the first big play by James Gunn and Peter Safran, who are the new creative heads of DC over at Warner Bros. And if you are following the saga of DC, it is for decades now, been the poor man’s Marvel. They feel sort of cheap and weird, and I think that maybe the last one was The Flash and Blue Beetle, which were kind of embarrassments. And David Zaslav had had egg on his face when he went out talking about how much he loved The Flash. It was going to be the biggest movie of all time, and it was definitely not the biggest movie of all time. And Superman is supposed to be this creative reimagining. A lot is writing on that. Nothing less than probably the future of the DC enterprise.

And if you remember on the other side of Warner Bros film, you had Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, who were going through the wringer earlier this year, they were going to lose their jobs. And then they have Minecraft and then they have Sinners, and they seem all good for right now.

Copy LinkInside Ryan Coogler’s deal for Sinners

SAFIAN: Yeah. I have to ask you about Sinners, massive hit. There’s been a lot of discussion around Ryan Coogler’s deal, the director’s deal with the studio to make the movie and how it could impact the future of the industry. Can you explain to our listeners what that’s about?

MIN: Yeah, so when a studio like Warner Bros is going to put X millions of dollars into your film, they own it, it’s part of their library. And Ryan Coogler ended up creating a deal where the rights revert to him after a certain period of time, and it is his film. And there are not that many directors who get this, I believe Quentin Tarantino is someone who has gotten it before. Obviously, Ryan Coogler is one of the biggest directors of our day, notably Black Panther was his big commercial breakout, and so he retained it.

This somehow made people’s heads explode, like how dare he? How could this possibly have happened? But what we’re seeing now is as Hollywood experiments with different kinds of models often returning to models of yesteryear. Warner Bros said yes and they got kind of killed for it, and now they look sort of smart. If you’re Warner Bros and David Zaslav and you are in the cash flow business right now, you’re probably in the leave it or love it phase of, am I keeping this company? You are trying to make your books look as good as possible, not in 2060, but in 2025.

SAFIAN: You maximize your profitability and lower your costs today, even if it might cost you revenue down the road. That’s not really what you’re most worried about right now.

MIN: And I don’t think there’s a lot of long-term thinking going on at Warner Bros Discovery at the moment. I think they have their eye on the exit and are trying to pick which door.

Copy LinkHow Trump is impacting Hollywood

SAFIAN: No business conversation’s complete these days without a mention of President Trump sowing disruption all over. Now, Trump says he wants to tax TV and movie productions shot abroad. What’s the buzz about this in the industry? Any Hollywood execs encouraging him or discouraging him?

MIN: Okay, this is one of these sort of weird, strange bedfellows situations, potentially. Obviously, Hollywood tilts really left, not a ton of love for Trump. There is, however, some. I’ve heard people say, “What if the silver lining is that he is the only person to actually bring production back to Los Angeles?” And you may have noticed, Gavin Newsom, who everyone’s been annoyed with in Hollywood because he has done nothing to bring back production, then jumped in and basically after Trump made his moves, sort of did a, “Wait, me too. I’m doing something too,” move.

And I don’t know if there’s a ton of confidence that any of this happens. Los Angeles is struggling because production has left. The feeling in Hollywood is no one is defending it, no one’s trying to preserve an industry here. You hear the Detroit analogy with automotive. I know that there is behind the scenes work going on with the guilds at high levels trying to make some of this a reality, where incentives shift, the tax structure shifts. But I think because of the time we are in, I think they’re also trying, no one’s trying to publicly support it because A, there would be blowback from a lot of people in town. But B, the fear that Trump will take it away if Hollywood says they want it.

And adding to this, Bob, is the complication that, what is a domestic and what is a foreign production anymore? The world is filled with co-productions now, and everyone has been hedging their financial risk. A recent example of this is the Peacock Show with Eddie Redmayne, Day of the Jackal. That’s a co-production I think with multiple countries, including the United States, in order to finance that and get it done. So this just creates really challenging issues to unwind. But in spirit, weirdly, there is support. In practice, I think this is going to be something very different.

SAFIAN: Trump’s shadow also looms over at Paramount, poised to merge with Skydance. Controversy that Paramount owns 60 Minutes and CBS, which Trump has sued, there are high-level resignations at CBS News. It’s hard to keep track of all the twists. What’s the industry conversation like around that?

MIN: People are fatigued, people are confused. What is interesting is that the Skydance people here have no idea what’s happening, as far as I know. They are left in the dark because they can’t be part of the conversation that’s happening over on the Paramount side. This plays to both sides of the devil and angel on the shoulders of Hollywood. If I’m Shari Redstone, I’m taking the $2 billion and I’ll just take the press hit. And then the other side of Hollywood, which is, “Oh my God, I can’t, this is my legacy. I can’t be the person who has caved in and destroyed what many people in Hollywood think is one of the greatest journalistic institutions out there.”

So listen, no one wants to be in Shari Redstone’s shoes, let’s just say that. She has an impossible decision but with real-life consequences. And this is going to come down to the wire, the deadline is already extended, and it’s up at the end of June, I believe. And if this deal doesn’t go through, I mean, I have to wonder also on the Skydance side, if David Ellison is looking at all of this and saying, “No thanks.”

SAFIAN: Maybe I don’t want this headache of having to worry about Trump coming after me. Right? Because of something CBS is doing.

MIN: We’ve seen with Trump and the universities and the law firms, you may concede, he’s not done. They ask, it’s just the start of a extraction of more things he thinks he can get out of you. And I think it would be naive to think no matter who owns Paramount, that the 60 Minutes issue is the end of all of this.

SAFIAN: And so for media executives, while they may, I don’t know, emotionally want to display defiance to Trump, it’s more likely to have a chilling effect. They just want to keep their heads down.

MIN: Okay, I don’t think anyone’s emotionally, I don’t think anyone’s expressing any defiance to Trump if you are in a C-suite position right now. It’s too perilous, and all their businesses are too fraught. Right? They don’t have the sort of swagger at the moment to do that. And they report to boards, they’re publicly traded companies, it’s really sad.

And I know, I’m sure some of your audience saw that anecdote where even David Zaslav, and I don’t mean to be picking on David Zaslav today, but David Zaslav, he had New York Magazine, Michael Wolff had reported that they had reached out to the White House asking how they might have a better relationship with Donald Trump. So David Zaslav, longtime democratic donor, and the White House came back to them and said that they could give a hunting and fishing show to, I think it was Eric or Don Jr., one of the sons on Discovery. And Warner Bros, by the way, confirmed that this happened to The Reporter. And so there’s a lot of quid pro quo that seems to be an understanding, and Hollywood has always been a little quid pro quo, but not at this kind of sort of existential level.

SAFIAN: It’s fascinating to hear Janice share how Hollywood is navigating Trump’s second term, but that’s only one element of the tumult facing Hollywood right now. Netflix continues to royal business models, AI has set everyone on edge. We’ll talk about all that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, we heard Janice Min of The Ankler talk about the upcoming summer box office and how Hollywood is adjusting to Trump 2.0. Now, Janice and I go through today’s biggest flash points in entertainment, from HBO’s rebrand, to Disney’s lawsuit against YouTube, to Google’s new mind-blowing video AI product. Let’s get back to it.

I’m going to jump you through a bunch of topics, because there’s been a lot of entertainment media news of late. So, if you’re ready?

MIN: I’m ready.

Copy LinkHBO’s brand identity crisis

SAFIAN: All right. HBO’s branding switch goes from HBO Max to just Max, now back to HBO Max. What’s going on?

MIN: Okay, I said I wasn’t going to make fun of David Zaslav more, but here we are. So I mean, I went to the presentation when they invited press to the lot at Warner Bros when they unveiled their PowerPoint with, “Why Max?” And I remember there was a line, I think David Zaslav said at the time two years ago. He said, “HBO is kind of one of those Grey Poupon brands.” It’s like, I think he used the word clearly not speaking to any steelworkers. He said, “It’s not the kind of brand a steelworker in Pennsylvania knows about or cares about.” And so I think they had this idea of going for mass, and that Max was oh, for the elites. And then it turns out that HBO has a phenomenal run over the last few years. Just, and most recently, White Lotus, The Last of Us season two.

And Zaslav, as I think many people who know him and read about him know, he is probably uniquely susceptible to what his friends who he sits court side with at the Knicks game or when he’s riding his Blade helicopter out to the Hamptons, say about his shows. And they probably like White Lotus a lot more than Dr. Pimple Popper. And so, I mean, listen, I think people would pay money to hear the behind-the-scenes conversations about how all of this went down. I have to assume it was led by David Zaslav, and then the company was basically like, oh, okay, here we go. And then they were very smart what they did on social, they owned the ridiculousness of it, they roasted themselves intensely. But it’s this theme we talk about a lot at The Ankler, that everything is just returning to where it was. We’re rebuilding a cable bundle in streaming, we’re going back to back ends. These old models sustained an industry for a long time, and these brands did and they largely worked.

Copy LinkWhy Netflix revamped its homepage

SAFIAN: All right, Netflix. Netflix revamped its home page for the first time in years. Why? They continue to dominate streaming, posting strong numbers, why rock the boat?

MIN: Because I assume they had some technology or algorithm or research that said we will move our subscribers 0.8% if we put this look in or it just feels fresh, or who knows. But as we have learned, we’re definitely post the phase, the shot in Florida phase of where Hollywood roots against Netflix, like core historic Hollywood, because Netflix won. Right? So, everything they do seems to actually be for strategic reasons.

And I think I also would watch this very closely with Netflix, two things. One, their move into the creator economy, their desire to take on YouTube. They’re done with us, they’re done with Hollywood. They’re like, no, we’re setting our sights on something much bigger: YouTube. You little Paramount+ people, you go duke it out. And so they’re doing the thing that they’ve always done really well, which is sort of punch up and try to find the bigger market, instead of trying to win in a smaller ecosystem. So I would watch their move into the creator economy, which Ted Sarandos said they would be doing on their last earnings call.

And I would watch their move in advertising. At their Upfront, it was not even an Upfront, really about programming. It was an Upfront about ad tech, which is boring, but to the people in that room meant something. And they had their Head of Advertising out there speaking for 13 minutes, which as you know in a live room is an eternity. I think 93 million people now use the ad tier, and they clearly see that as the next opportunity. They brought up AI a lot in talking about advertising as well, and being able to match advertising into the worlds of their shows, whatever that means.

Copy LinkYouTube’s growing threat to traditional media

SAFIAN: You mentioned YouTube. Disney sued YouTube for poaching executive Justin Connolly to run YouTube Media and Sports. How worried is ESPN about YouTube as a competitor? Is everybody worried about YouTube as a competitor?

MIN: Okay, everyone should be really worried about YouTube as a competitor; I’m not sure everyone is worried about YouTube as a competitor. Its penetration into living rooms continues, and I mentioned the creator economy. You’re really seeing the convergence of traditional internet culture with traditional Hollywood now, that it’s all because of technology blending into the same thing. Right? And it’s this battle for screen time and audience.

And so Disney, I mean, I’ll just use one example. The battle for kids is a big part of this. And so you see Netflix doing not even exclusive rights on Ms. Rachel, this kid’s entertainer for preschoolers, and Ms. Rachel remains in the top 10 week after week, because kids just sit there and watch the same things over and over. And then you saw Disney taking Coco Melon from Netflix. Also then Nickelodeon, remember them? They are piloting a show, they’re trying to create new kids franchises on YouTube. So I mean, I think all these places sort of know YouTube is the incubator for kids. I mean, we saw what YouTube was able to do with NFL, and they just have so much money, it doesn’t matter. YouTube was coming for your audience, and now they’re coming for your ad dollars.

The people who are moving big marketing budgets, they get a lower CPM on YouTube than you would on traditional streamer, Hollywood streamer, and they’re trying to level the playing field. I mean, the old cliche, cat videos, blah, blah, blah. They’re trying to show we have better late night shows. We have better programming, higher quality production. We’re getting more viewers. I mean, if you look at something like Hot Ones or Rhett and Link’s morning show, these are way outpacing Today Show, Good Morning America, late night on network television. So, they want the money from advertisers to rise to the occasion.

Copy LinkGoogle’s new mind-blowing AI video tool

SAFIAN: A technology question, AI question. So, Google’s new Veo 3 tool creates video with audio, dialogue via text prompts. It’s mind-blowing. If listeners haven’t seen the early examples, check it out, it’s all over social. Is Hollywood terrified by this? Are they trying to pretend it goes away?

MIN: Pretending it goes away, at the moment. I mean, I think there are probably some companies doing some work on this in the background, but we’re still on a phase of this, Bob, where writers are using it and won’t tell their friends, where there’s still a level of shame involved in using AI. Remember, this is a union town, and everyone who works on one of these productions is a member of a union, whether it’s Screen Actor’s Guild, Director’s Guild. They are very protective of maintaining that perch. And so there was just a lot of resistance. I think we saw this even with the Oscar campaigns earlier this year, when it was discovered that The Brutalist had used AI to change the Hungarian accent of, I think Adrien Brody. People lost their minds. And I think that what a lot of Hollywood doesn’t realize is that the world is moving in a certain direction, and you might not like it, but it is here.

We wrote a couple weeks ago about an AI company that has the same investor as A24, Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital and that this AI company does kind of remarkable work in post-production and production. And we wrote about how what if A24, already this disruptor in the film space, what if they become the first with their $100 million dollars from Josh Kushner to incorporate AI in a meaningful way in their filmmaking? In this kind of sclerotic state of the studios here, you will see the rise of independence behaving differently and I think that’s what we’re starting to see.

SAFIAN: I saw that the Oscars have a new AI eligibility policy. It’s sort of like, anything’s allowed, it doesn’t even have to be disclosed when used. Do we just have to presume going forward that movies we see are made with AI, or is the reaction like, that’s scandalous?

MIN: Well, we’ve always, I mean, I think it’s, AI became this kind of catch word for anything computer-assisted or generated, and that has been going on a long time. Anyone who ever watched Star Wars or any Marvel movie, I mean, call it what you want, but that was AI that was empowering those effects. And so, I think when it crosses over into people might lose their jobs, that’s where I think Hollywood really begins to feel ripped off.

SAFIAN: One final question, if you only went to one summer movie in the theater this summer, what would it be?

MIN: Wow. Okay, I would probably take my daughter to see Freakier Friday, which again, back to the IP vault. And it actually stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan together again. But I’ll probably skip M3GAN 2.0, probably skip Jurassic World Rebirth, and probably skip Fantastic Four. So, not my jam, but I’m not the demo.

SAFIAN: Well, Janice, this was great. Always great to talk with you and thanks so much for doing it.

MIN: Thank you.

SAFIAN: I always appreciate how Janice tells it like she sees it, whether she’s talking about Hollywood movies or studio moguls. Janice is right, that old media models like bundling are coming back, repackaged as something new. But she also makes clear that we are on the precipice of a legitimately new chapter, one dominated by individual creators as much as legacy brands, radically reshaped by AI with leadership potentially cowed by political repercussions. Hollywood business may be a dream factory, but it’s also a reflection of larger trends impacting all of us. I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.