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I was at an Oscar party thrown by one of the agencies last month, and I happened to notice a personality there. He’s someone in the business who would wear the moniker “bro” happily and proudly, and for whom there could be no more appropriate description.

A big, loud, sports-obsessed, business-driven oaf whose lack of interest (or is it disdain?) in the creative part of the business he inhabits is projected from miles away.

I caught sight of him at this party, and noticed that he was yelling happily at a group of about eight other white gentlemen, similarly dressed in expensive but bland suits, expensive but bland shirts and no ties. They were all yelling at each other in great delight, and then marching through the party together in phalanx, shoulder-to-shoulder, bro-to-bro.

Then, as I looked further around the party, more bros: mini-mobs of bros, tromping through the event, yelling at each other, back slapping and shoving sliders into their flushed pink faces with evident glee.

Suddenly, as I pondered the issues of the past decade and Hollywood’s shrugging reaction to them, it was like I had been handed the Rosetta Stone to unlock the riddles of our kingdom.

I saw, for the first time, clearly how we’ve gotten to this point.

Of course, diversity is backsliding; of course, creativity has been sent to its room to think about its choices; of course, the preservation of a 100-year-old creative community is deprioritized; of course, every genre of film has been pushed aside in favor of bro-y action-comedy tentpoles; TV is populated with Reacher and Reacher copycats; and I’ve stopped counting the series and movies featuring middle aged-to-even elderly men engaged in various states of internal sad dad struggle — or heroism. Of course, you only have to look at the gatekeepers atop our companies who manifest an ur-bro persona to connect the dots of how we got here: They have become more important than the product.

“Character is destiny,” said the philosopher Heraclitus.

I have augmented that wisdom with Ankler Rule No. 2:

There is no factor more important in understanding a company’s decisions than what its leaders want to tell the people sitting next to them at dinner parties about what they are working on.

The bros don’t want to tell their dinner companions, fellow bros-in-arms, that they are working on a really interesting project from an emerging filmmaker — something that’s a little hard to explain, but sit with it, and it will grow on you.

They want to brag about their deals.

Their giant package.

Their EBITDA and their YoY growth charts!

Honestly, what is sexier than that?

And this isn’t just a matter of vibes. What these guys choose to brag about at dinner — the deal, the leverage, the win — is the same value system that also determines what gets dismissed. Not just challenging creative work, but entire groups of people. You don’t need access to private conversations to understand it (though the Epstein files do illuminate); the pattern shows up in who gets heard, who gets sidelined and who is treated as incidental to the story.

When I’ve bounced this theory off some friends, the younger ones in particular have explained to me that Hollywood has always been a land of bros, and I have just been blind to it.

And certainly, they are correct that it has been an unshakeable white male oligarchy since Hollywood’s founding.

But within that demographic, there is a category, or maybe a stylistic distinction that I think many miss.

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The Bros: Now On The Inside

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It all began with some buttons.

But my time as a CinemaCon headline was not the whole story of the week in Las Vegas. (For the curious, my final word on that imbroglio is ahead.)

However, there is something eerie about CinemaCon — like a real-life version of The Truman Show where journalists, exhibitors and executives dutifully repeat the same conversations every single year.

This year marked my 10th trip to Vegas for the annual event, a place where space and time collapse, and you can take 13,000 steps without ever leaving Caesars Palace or seeing the sky.

I was at a reception at a very lovely restaurant in the casino, and realized — I have been in this room over and over in the past 10 years, standing in the same spot, talking to the exact same people, about the same subjects…

You don’t need drugs to feel like you’re standing in the middle of a kaleidoscope during CinemaCon — a week here for a decade can produce a similar effect.

Fortunately, that’s probably appropriate for the state of the film world these days, which is somewhere between on its deathbed or roaring back stronger and better — depending on what time of day you ask and where you sit.

Coming out of my time tunnel, coherent, unified field theories can be hard, so allow me to present, in random order, some of the thoughts and impressions I took away from my journey to CinemaCon 2026. Starting first, with those buttons…

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Buttongate

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Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly takes on the industry’s passing parade.

Today, Jeff Shell’s second fall from the top, Zendaya’s total dominance, Netflix’s price revolt in Italy — and that baffling Oscars move.

But first.

Way back on Tuesday, I wrote about how Hollywood’s conversations around AI had broken down completely — devolving into a primal scream about the terrors of the age, and a moral panic desperately searching for witches to burn at the stake.

If you doubt the latter, check out the reaction on your favorite social network to Steven Soderbergh’s mention to Filmmaker that he had used some AI tools in his new film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono:

AI has been helpful in creating thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space. And that’s been really fun because you need a Ph.D. in literature to tell it what to do. But like every other piece of technology, it desperately requires very close human supervision.

If there’s a director on earth who deserves the benefit of the doubt that he is genuinely interested in exploring the artistic possibilities of innovation and not just looking to turn a quick buck, it is Soderbergh.

But now he’ll be lucky if he can show his face at Café Gratitude again.

As I wrote, the shouting into the void is extremely understandable. It’s just not productive at a time when we need to hunker down and find actionable approaches to this fast — like now, before the AI tsunami just washes us all away.

The problem is, when all we’re doing is screaming, we’re neither stopping the bad, nor harnessing the good — and Hollywood badly needs to do both things.

Today’s leading example of how off the rails the dialogue has gone is the new WGA contract, whose details were released yesterday. Of all the guilds, the WGA should be right at the forefront of this discussion — even leading it.

But three years ago, when the last contract was hammered out, coming out of the strike, all they could manage to do was basically kick the AI can down the road.

Well, they’ve had three years to look more closely at what really matters and what we really need to stand up against in these developments. Yet when the WGA announced last weekend that it had reached a new contract, it didn’t provide any details about its provisions on AI.

On Tuesday, I wrote:

We’ll see in the details of the WGA deal whether they made any significant advances on these things rather than… agreeing to form a task force to create a report to submit to a committee to put to a debate.

I tend to think that if they had made any real breakthrough, we would have heard about it by now.

If there isn’t something concrete, chalk it up to moral panic — our inability to focus on problems that can actually be solved, and solved quickly. If we can’t get it together to throw down some basic markers, AI will run us right over just like the last dozen plagues that descended on this industry.

Well, lo and behold. They’ve done it again.

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A young friend sent photos yesterday from a drive through San Francisco and over to Oakland. The pictures capture the difference between our world and the tech world. Every billboard, real estate long taken over by tech titans preening to each other, just as our Sunset Strip features studios and streamers thumping their chests, now shares a distinct characteristic: Human beings have been removed from the picture.

In our place? “Sexy” messaging to the tech world — featuring words like workflow, optimization, amplify, prompt and cloud.

Advertising is, by definition, aspirational. And right now, the aspiration being sold by our overlords to the north is a world with fewer to no humans.

The images reveal the existential tension driving the AI conversation, especially in Hollywood. This is, by definition, the most humanist industry in existence, whose very product is about capturing emotion and experience and sharing that in a way that millions relate to.

Here are a few L.A. billboards today by comparison — just within a couple of blocks of our Century City office.

You can see why the contrast is just a little bit scary to some of us.

The problem is how we address this problem, that is moving our way fast, with AI the latest hyper-accelerated front in this invasion.

The conversation, such as it is, shoves everything in one basket and reacts to it all with a primal scream, lumping together theft and innovation, job loss and useful tools, corporate abuse and creative experimentation.

There are a dozen different fights with a dozen different stakes — and we’re losing all of them.

That’s where our conversation has gone off the rails. The working premise in a lot of Hollywood is that AI is evil and must go away. Anything less than total resistance is surrender. I understand the impulse. I’d also love to un-invent the internet while we’re at it. But that isn’t a strategy.

AI is setting off the same alarms that have been ringing for years from the changes wrought by the tech world — fears about our economy and democracy, a sense that control of our lives and families is being taken out of our hands. Here in Hollywood, where the disruption has already left the industry bleeding, the AI debate is sticking a hot poker into a very open wound.

A big part of those terrors centers on the nature of the industry up north, which seems intent on swallowing us whole — the idea that the most humanist of major industries is being devoured by the most inhuman of industries.

AI is already embedded in the workflows we use every day, in ways so ordinary we barely notice them. The question is what we allow them to do, who gets protected, and who gets crushed.

Here’s the matrix I keep coming back to:

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Finally, there are people paying attention.

Late last week, Senator Adam Schiff held a hearing in Burbank called “Lights, Camera, Competition: Promoting American Film Production,” where Schiff and his Congressional colleagues, Lou Correa, Sydney Kamlager-Dove and HBO alum Laura Friedman, seemed impressively engaged and informed on multiple topics, including the basic contours of the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal.

After months of the conversation about this deal being held entirely in media columns — and restricted to the topic of “how will this affect the shareholders?” — it was almost surreal to see the topic suddenly leap out of pixels into the real world, with actual concern for real-world consequences.

The witnesses before the committee laid out a buffet of reasons why this deal is terrible for the community, the people who create entertainment and consumers.

Jax Deluca — head of the Future Film Coalition, which has taken the lead in opposing this deal (see: blockthemerger.com) — testified to the corrosive effect of media mergers and made clear that vague promises made now have no legal standing down the line and are routinely disregarded later.

IATSE President Matt Loeb talked about the perilous state of production labor in the U.S. today.

The Pitt star-director-producer Noah Wyle testified about the number of jobs the HBO Max show has created for the local community, as one of the few shows that shoot here.

And former CNN anchor Jim Acosta noted the devastating effect on journalistic accountability that will result in so many of our major institutions falling under the control of one family, which has already bent over backwards to please this president.

“If this merger goes through,” he said, “the guardrails are gone. It seems to me the fix is in.”

That’s a lot of reasons to be concerned about this. Or at least a lot of reasons to think that something with the potential to have such a big impact on our community, our industry and our entire democracy should be a matter for consideration by someone other than Warner Bros.’ largest shareholders.

Indeed, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office is considering whether to take active steps against the deal, was also on hand at the hearing — and while he was tight-lipped, his presence signaled that he doesn’t consider this to be a closed case.

And yet, when you talk to… everyone in Hollywood, they roll their eyes at the suggestion that there’s anything that can be done here.

Worse than that, the crushing consensus that this is over has kept those who could make a difference right now from speaking out and getting involved.

Well, I’ve said this before and said this again — this isn’t over.

Oversight is not just a matter for one corrupt FCC chair to dispense with at his personal whim.

Worth highlighting two of my colleagues’ stories with some pretty stark warnings in the past week:

But more than that — having looked at this from all sides — I’m ready to turn this narrative on its head. This deal is so problematic and so tenuous at every level that not only is it not inevitable, but I’ve come to believe the inevitability lies in the opposite: It won’t happen. In fact, it has to fail because it is fated to collapse under the weight of its many issues.

Here are my top 10 reasons why the Warners-Paramount deal is doomed:

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Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly takes on the industry’s passing parade.

The problem is, we’ve only got so many 9 percents to lose.

That’s the first number.

The Oscar ratings are in, and… rough: down 9 percent from last year’s ceremony, and this with the new Nielsen methodology, which has generally given annual broadcasts slight bumps in the year-to-year data. Even worse: Last year’s best picture winner, Anora, was one of the lowest-grossing winners ever; this year, between winner One Battle and presumed runner-up Sinners, the Oscars had two relatively widely viewed frontrunners ($350 million combined in North American box office), led by real stars who were nominated.

Ten years ago, when Spotlight won best picture, 34 million people watched the Oscars. Two years ago, when Oppenheimer won, it was 19 million.

This year, it’s 17 million.

I’d like to give these last couple of years a mulligan and say it’s all going to be fixed when the Academy moves its ceremony over to YouTube, where surely… the influence of the streaming world will make everything fresh and different! And if Academy leaders don’t do it on their own, those Google execs will knock some heads together and make sure they do.

But I think it’s just as likely that, being handed this august event, YouTube will want to show it’s worthy of such a distinction and bend over backwards to support the most stuffy and pompous parts of the ceremony. (Let every actor in the city come forward and make a speech about the meaning of acting! More writers to say, “It all starts with the words…”)

And as for the Academy, it’ll be freed at last from the threat of low ratings. When has being freed from oversight and results ever motivated anyone to make tough choices?

It’s time to decide: Is this show a fundraiser for the Academy and a PSA for its various branches, or does it exist to serve the larger industry? If the former, that is fine, but maybe we can get a few talented people together and start a show focused on promoting film.

I hear ABC has an opening.

So 9 percent, that’s one number.

The other is $79 billion.

And it might be even scarier.

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You Take the Good

At a moment when it felt like things couldn’t get any worse, Oscar found and nominated 10 terrific films for best picture.

And what’s more, the nominees crossed a wide spectrum — from giant commercial success (Sinners) to obscure arthouse (The Secret Agent) to streaming phenom (Frankenstein); from international (Sentimental Value) to very Hollywood studio (F1). There is not one film on the list that you can say made it for any reason other than its quality or entertainment value. For the first time, maybe in my adult lifetime, I would have been fine with any of them winning.

But for the ultimate winner, One Battle After Another, which received six awards — including three for director Paul Thomas Anderson after 11 previous tries — there was a reason this film was a juggernaut from September. It’s an exceptional tour de force from a filmmaker who has become a national treasure, featuring big, showy performances by genuine stars and exciting newcomers both.

For Hollywood, at this moment, being able to put together such a collection of work shows that all is not lost yet. We’d love to say this group points the way to the future, but let’s check back in 10 years and see how that works out.

In Conan O’Brien, the Oscars have a host who is also at or approaching national treasure status, who understands and appreciates the historic grandeur of the event, but is not intimidated by it.

I’ll leave the rest of the punditry on the winners and losers of the night elsewhere — my colleagues Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen recapped the whole thing on the Prestige Junkie podcast — but I’ll just say that all the nominees can feel very good about their part in lifting us up in this wretched time. Better yet, they should know that history — the final voter — will be very good to them all.

Kieran Culkin (pictured, fourth from right) was among the bar patrons to watch Michael B. Jordan win his historic Oscar for best actor. Jordan is only the sixth Black actor to win the award.

That. Said.

Guys, guys, guys…

…what are we doing here?

Does anyone know?

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You Take the Bad

The fact that most of this night was a competition between two singular films (Sinners and One Battle After Another) made by a studio that might soon not exist is all the metaphor you need to understand where we are.

Are we fighting for the future of film, for the survival of filmmaking as a mass medium, or not?

And frankly if you believe, everything’s fine — film will be great, we don’t have to worry about that, we’ve been through speedbumps before — if that’s your sense of where we are, I’m going to have to recommend that you click to the next article; read another email. At this point, I’d have to say we’re just in two very different places, and the next few years will show which of us was right. (History, the final voter…)

But if you think that we are indeed at a perilous moment — if you agree with watchdog group Free Press, which posted a billboard on Hollywood Blvd. railing against David Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros., and think that we are fighting for the very future of this medium — then what the hell are we doing here?

With the survival of filmed entertainment on the line, its primary public outreach event is a three-hour-and-44-minute contest between two films that were largely released in theaters many months ago.

Where, after a six-month “season,” the suspense has been whittled down to which of just two films has a chance. And that this sector’s head is so far up its own nether regions that they think that constitutes actual suspense for anyone who isn’t being paid to follow this.

So I’m getting some serious Joe Biden 2024 vibes around this. If the stakes for the larger industry are that high, then why aren’t you acting like that? Why aren’t the Oscars and their leadership treating this battle like it’s of paramount importance? Where is the noise and outrage from all the people with a vested interest in the current gruesome awards calendar?

I said it before; I’ll say it again: In journalism, best-of lists start right after Halloween, and by mid-December, everyone is sick of them. This year’s Oscars were held on March 15. The last time the show was even in February, it was 2020. Even with a lineup of fairly popular films and winners — it’s the first time all four acting winners starred in movies that made over $100 million worldwide since 2013 — that doesn’t work. Just wait for another year of films that couldn’t crack $5 million.

What was the general mood last night inside the Dolby (apart from feelings about the nominees, which were positive)? I’d say:

Deflated and exhausted, with a surplus of gallows humor.

Plenty of who knows, and lots of whadya gonna do?

And mostly a bottomless supply of just not wanting to talk about it.

Which about sums it up.

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Now, onto my photos of some of your favorite studio and streaming executives, agents and stars from the night — including Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Maya Rudolph, Mike & Pam and more.

But first, here’s a look at a young actor named Timothée Chalamet making his royal entrance:

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Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly takes on the industry’s passing parade.

Signs of the Times

At the Oscars on Sunday night, much of the industry will be looking for a break from thoughts of consolidation and downsizing, but before the show, the topic will be front and center on Hollywood Blvd.

I can exclusively reveal that media accountability watchdog group Free Press (not to be confused with Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, now owned by Paramount Skydance), which has been campaigning against the merger, will stage a protest outside the Dolby Theatre.

The group will be on site with a large mobile billboard “congratulating” David Ellison with this rather brutal image below:

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As lame duck studio boss David Zaslav prepares to exit the stage, there has been a lot of talk suggesting Zaslav — based on the size of his payout and the dubious future his studio faces after the deal — may be the worst studio owner in history.

It’s not an exit to brag about, that’s for sure. But how does one assess terms like “the worst”?

To take a very subjective stab at it, I looked at the major exits of studio owners in the 2000s. I wanted to figure out a ratio of the good or harm done to the company versus personal profit, with the idea that you could say justice had been served when the correlation was closest (so that if an owner ruined a company’s future, they would pay for it). Or, on the other hand, a big payday could be forgiven if they left their campground stronger and healthier than they found it, passing it off to capable hands who had the wherewithal to actually maintain it.

In assessing the success of our owners in the past, we tend to look at it only through the prism of how much they bought it for and how much they sold it for. If they increased shareholder value, their tenure is seen as a wild success — and by that standard, David Zaslav is a great hero.

But, as the Zaslav example shows us, there is another element to it. Forgive me for considering the well-being of anyone besides the shareholders, but in the eyes of history, the question of how they left the company for its employees, the community and its audiences will matter.

And to make it even more complicated, there’s one more element that comes into this — where the company was when they found it and what they did with it during their tenure. If they started the company from nothing and built it with their bare hands, that gives them a lot more leeway at sale time than if they took over a healthy studio and knocked it down by 40 percent.

So, a lot of factors to consider, and I wasn’t quite able to come up with a mathematical formula that translates all of that into a perfect numerical score (are we having fun yet?). But! Taking stock of those factors and eyeballing them, I have assigned a letter grade to each that I feel would be in the ballpark of any equation you can invent for these.

The bottom line is — in this century, very few sales have heralded anything good for the company that’s sold. It is a sad history. But it’s also one that occasionally surprises, so don’t give up hope quite yet.

Now, onto the list.

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There are good ideas for Hollywood’s next evolution, and I’ve heard them with my own ears.

I’ve long railed against the industry’s willingness to speak loudly and do nothing as it falls off a cliff. But last week at Slamdance, the Los Angeles-based filmmaker-first celebration of emerging artists, some of the brightest minds in the NonDē (or non-dependent) cinema movement championed by Ted Hope came to play.

Their guidebooks — all excerpted below, thanks to Ted and the Slamdance participants — were revealed during a panel called, “Fun and Dangerous Ideas to Disrupt What was Once ‘Indie’ and to Separate from a Broken Corporate Film Industry.”

As the festival program explained:

Working from the premise that both Hollywood and Indie are on their death rattles — if not yet quite a rotting corpse — what does an ecosystem that prioritizes the sustainability of the art, artist audience and ecosystem look like. In collaboration with Slamdance, NonDē presents a rapid-fire feast of dangerous ideas delivered in 10 minute rants, sermons, and pleas… each to build this thing we love (cinema) better than before — and always along practical and positive lines.

I found the day incredibly uplifting, not just from the relentlessly positive and undaunted spirit — something I haven’t encountered much of lately — but because I found the presentations to be incredibly concrete, plausible and constructive. Each was grounded in the realities of building something new, while fueled by the spirit of rebellion. I don’t think I could have laid it out better than Ted did in his opening remarks:

So, a little change of pace today. While the world fumes and burns and Hollywood’s leadership seems like they’re on a mission to dismantle the whole thing, green shoots are sprouting in the New New Hollywood (I will make this stick by hell or high water). There, people are building and making plans for a future that is non-dependent on handouts from the studios. With the participants’ permission, I wanted to share highlights and synopses of the presentations, which may yet come to be seen as the founding documents of what will grow from the studios’ ashes.

The 14 speakers laid out what at first seemed like wildly different approaches. But by the end, a pattern emerged for a blueprint to rebuild this broken industry.

The ideas clustered around four pillars:

• Pillar I: Build your own system

• Pillar II: Own your audience

• Pillar III: Reject corporate gatekeeping

• Pillar IV: Organize politically

Taken together, they don’t just critique Hollywood. They route around it. With swagger.

And here’s what that actually looks like in practice.

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Death by poison or death by firing squad is still death. But even after the news that Paramount had won the bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery, as Netflix bowed out, it’s not too late to fight — as California Attorney General Rob Bonta intends to do:

“This is a big political issue. People are fucking pissed in this country, and it’s happening in every industry,” antitrust expert and BIG newsletter writer Matt Stoller told me moments after the merger news broke last night. “I don’t know if we can win. Maybe we can’t win in this particular fight, but America is worth saving. And if we just give up, it all goes away, and we will just live in a deeply impoverished society.”

Historically, giving up the fight has stark consequences in the war: The Disney-Fox merger and even the Warner Bros. Discovery merger sailed through without much handwringing from the industry, putting us in this current situation.

“If those had been blocked, this wouldn’t be happening,” Stoller told me. “Even if you lose, you’re in a better position if you fight.”

So, it’s time to fight. Watch our conversation above for context and ammunition about what can be done — including how Bonta and other state attorneys general can rally to make a move to block the merger before it sails through — and read on for an edited transcript of our chat.

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Richard Rushfield: Now what?

Matt Stoller: The deal can be challenged by a variety of authorities. Normally, a deal takes about 12 to 18 months to close. So there’s a bunch of logistical stuff that happens, and then the regulators or the enforcers will have time to investigate, and then they can bring a challenge or not, or they can say, look, sell off these lines of business, but you can buy the bulk of it. And that’s usually with a consent decree of some sort. In this case, Paramount has a very savvy and cynical lawyer named Makan Delrahim. He used to work for the Trump administration. He’s the guy who actually got rid of, ironically, the Paramount Decrees. He has put forward this very aggressive strategy. Normally, the reason it takes 12 to 18 months is that the government asks for a lot of information, and there’s a long negotiation over how much the company wants to provide. You don’t necessarily want to give the government everything they’re asking for. There’s a lot of dirty laundry that you might expose in that case.

Well, here, Makan Delrahim probably just gave them everything they wanted immediately and just said, “We’re going to move this really quickly,” because I think he might assume that if there’s dirty laundry, it doesn’t really matter because these are his friends. This is all cronyism. If they find something illegal, they won’t care because the Ellisons, who are financing this, are close to the Trump administration. This is the speculation.

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Are they going through the motions as you would in a kind of normal regulatory process? Are they pretending?

There’s another set of enforcers who can act, not under the control of the Trump administration. These are state enforcers. So every state has an attorney general, and they have jurisdiction in their particular state. Usually, states will band together and challenge. The reason Makan Delrahim is doing a rush job, pushing this really hard to get it closed quickly, is that he wants to avoid states coming after him, since plenty of states are controlled by Democrats. If he can get this closed — and I think what I’m hearing is that he can probably close it by early April — before the state AG brings a challenge, then that means they get to take over all of these assets and start running them. They can fire people, they can intermingle the assets, they can choose new lines of business and they can move people around. All of the bonuses get paid out; they can do layoffs, et cetera, et cetera.

In that situation, even if there is a challenge, you have to unwind something that’s already operating — and maybe it’ll take a few years, and by then all the assets are already intermingled. So it doesn’t really matter that much, or it’s very limited what you can get out of that situation. It’s kind of like unscrambling eggs. If the state AGs get a complaint in before they close, then what will happen is a judge will say, “Hold off, don’t close. You’ve got to operate these entities separately until the trial is over.” And it can be up to 15 months before that trial takes place. So, during that period, these are separate companies that are still running. Then the trial happens, and a judge will decide whether to allow the merger.

The last thing I’ll say is that the reason this is unusual for the states to bring a challenge without the federal government is that the federal government just has a lot more bodies to throw at the problem. They have a lot of antitrust lawyers. They know how to challenge these kinds of cases. They’ve been doing an investigation. They have a lot of sort of unique information. States don’t have that level of capacity. California’s a big state. They have a bunch of antitrust lawyers. New York, same thing. When they get to Texas, when they get together, they can sort of put together a meaningful set of bodies. They don’t have the expertise, and they haven’t been doing the investigating. So this is really a logistical question. Can they actually put together a case by early April or late March? I know they’re interested. They’ve said they’re interested. They desperately want to put together a case. The question is, can they? And that’s sort of the fundamental question.

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What’s the answer to that? Can one state, doing this in two weeks, put a hold on it?

Yes. I mean, a state can do it, but if you file a ChatGPT complaint with no evidence, the judge is just going to dismiss it. So you have to have some evidence, you have to have interviewed people, you have to have some documents. You have to have a reasonable case that this merger is unlawful. And structurally, there are guidelines about whether it is — the law itself is called the Clayton Act. That law says that combinations that “may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly are illegal.” Now, that sounds like this kind of merger. There is a similar merger, the Penguin and Simon & Schuster merger, that was blocked a couple of years ago on these grounds, so it’s possible to do it.

But it puzzles me why no one in Hollywood didn’t just hire a lawyer, put this evidence together, and give it to the state AGs. That is just baffling to me because it’s not that much money, and Hollywood has a lot of money. I’m not saying everybody in Hollywood is rich. I’m just saying, in aggregate, there’s a bunch of money there, and there are rich people, and they just didn’t do anything about it. And it just baffles me why people are so passive when you can actually knife-fight on this stuff. But maybe that’s happening. Maybe someone is doing that, and I don’t know about it.

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What should they be doing right now, if you hear this?

Just organizing your community and saying, “We don’t want these mergers, this will reduce my bargaining leverage,” will not work. If somebody has an experience of pitching Paramount and pitching Warner and having them bid against each other for something, that’s useful evidence. An enforcer can say, “I think this merger is illegal. Here are three examples of people who sold screenplays or were actors or did this thing on a film, and there was a bidding war, and that bidding war would not happen today because now those two companies are one.” And that is a substantial lessening of competition. Those are exactly what they presented. That’s the kind of evidence they presented in the Penguin-Simon & Schuster case.

And so I would just say: If you had that experience, or know someone who has, send an email to your state Attorney General’s office — Rob Bonta’s office in California. But you don’t have to be in California to do this; you can just send it to him and say, “I have evidence that is relevant to this merger.”

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Does anyone have standing to move on behalf of the consumers here, and what could this do to them?

So the class action suit against the Netflix acquisition of Warner was actually filed by consumers. I mean, it was the plaintiff’s lawyers who were bringing it, but it was on behalf of consumers.

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And what about Congress? When I saw Ted Sarandos testifying at those hearings, the questioning he received did not give me much confidence that the members of Congress were sufficiently versed or ready to take on this really complicated issue. Do they have any role here, and are they capable of performing that?

You and I have slightly different views of that hearing. In congressional hearings, a member has five minutes, so that’s not a lot of time. The CEO knows the business and the member usually doesn’t. Occasionally, you’ll have a really, really well-prepped member, but that’s not common. The hearings are for judges and enforcers to indicate where Congress stands. Even if those members didn’t nail Ted Sarandos, most of the committee members said, “We don’t like this merger, or we don’t like this kind of consolidation.” And that was meaningful because the antitrust division’s budget is run by Congress. It’s basically the person who gives you your allowance telling you they like what you’re doing or not. And that’s the way that I hear these kinds of hearings. They’re not the ones who are going to a judge and saying, “Block this merger.” They have a different role.

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If we get to a trial, would looking into the process vis-à-vis the Trump administration and currying favor with them come up?

These are very preliminary questions. We’re all assuming the Trump administration’s not going to challenge the merger. If they do, it’s different.

But one of the things that Paramount is going to say is, “Look, the federal government thought this was fine. Why are the states having such a problem with it? Every jurisdiction in the world thought this was fine. Our government thought it was fine…. the states are the only ones who didn’t, these California weirdos.” So in that context, it’s really important to discredit the federal government’s choices. And so you’d be able to say, “Hey, the Trump administration is doing this for bad reasons.” And I think that some of the comments that Trump has made do suggest that. If I were judging this, I’d be like, “Yeah, of course.” It’s common sense, but you do have to prove it.

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Today comes news that Ted Sarandos is in Washington today for a meeting at the White House, yet again. Apparently, the meeting is private and closed to the press.

Which leaves the vacuum of information about the fate of this industry growing even larger.

All anyone is talking about these days, for good reason, is the latest in the contest to take Warner Bros. — pitting two of the most aggressive titans on the stage in an increasingly bitter battle to the death.

As much as we talk about it, however, the ratio of what we know to what we don’t know is totally out of whack.

Basic questions are completely unanswerable.

Questions like: Why do they really want this? Why are they willing to pay so much for it? What are they willing do to get it? (Is there anything they wouldn’t do to get it?) What will they do with it if they win it?

(Unanswerable, that is, if you don’t take their public statements and whispered propaganda these days at face value, as for some reason, most everyone covering this seems all too ready to do.)

I don’t know the answers to these questions either, but I’ve got a lot of theories. So while we’re all sitting here in the dark waiting to hear our future (or lack thereof), let’s think through what might actually be going on.

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The Question

My biggest thought exercise lately has been trying to figure out whether Ted really wants this, or if he is just trying to thwart Paramount from becoming a true rival; would he be just as happy if this just wound on in review for years and then got stopped?

Paramount’s motives, rationales and plans are more transparent and straightforward: Do anything to please Trump (watch UFC boss and Trump pal Dana White on CBS Sunday Morning this weekend, his second interview with the network in five months!) and get the studio to achieve the scale to take on Netflix frontally.

It’s not pretty, but you can follow the logic.

Netflix is harder to read.

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What is Netflix’s Actual Endgame?

Here are my thoughts on the likelihood of a conspiracy being afoot:

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Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently explained why artificial intelligence is misunderstood.

He said people complain about how much energy it takes to train an AI model. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.

“It takes like 20 years of life, and all the food you eat before that time, before you get smart,” he said.

The fair comparison, he argued, is how much energy it takes for ChatGPT to answer a question versus a human to answer that same question. AI may already be more efficient. And so — he seemed to imply — shouldn’t we be asking whether humans are not the real waste of energy?

That worldview is not some fringe Silicon Valley thought experiment. It is the philosophy that steers the companies that now own, consolidate and shape Hollywood.

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

If you’ve been wondering how we got here — the endless mergers, the suffocation of the industry’s middle class, the replacement of storytelling with “content,” the quiet acceptance that entire studios can be swallowed whole — there you have it.

Since I’ve been doing these addresses, since I’ve stood before you as your duly elected columnist, the state of our union has never gotten to a particularly fun place. Some years, it almost seemed on the brink of hitting bottom.

Then, it inevitably got worse.

So rather than add one more declaration of oblivion onto the back catalog, this year I’d like to get you there by way of a story, or to be more precise, the words of someone who knows much better than I.

Within the last year, I found myself in an off-the-record conversation with a titan of this industry — someone whose name you would know, someone not given to melodrama. We were talking about the state of things, the pressures, the shrinking margins — the usual woes of the poobah class. But as we talked, the titan’s tone grew increasingly grim.

At some point, I interrupted and asked this person to look me in the eye and tell me that everything would be okay.

“Okay?” the titan said. “Okay for who?”

“The industry,” I offered. “You know. Hollywood.”

"Hollywood?" The titan replied and then summed it up for me, the answer I had been holding at bay for a long time now. "Hollywood is dead."

I gasped. The small group around us gasped. And then I spent months arguing with it in my head.

The problem is that the ecosystem is being dismantled in plain sight.

And almost no one with the power to stop it seems particularly interested in trying.

Once you see that clearly, everything else starts to make sense.

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But Whose Hollywood is Dead?

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Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly takes on the industry’s passing parade.

Before I get into what I found inside the public disclosure filings from the WGA this week — and there are doozies — let’s first talk about another train wreck.

It was an easy choice for this week’s Hollywood Profile in Courage award, with Stephen Colbert calling out the demand — er, “provided legal guidance” — from the honchos at CBS that he not only kill his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, but also not talk about their strong suggestion that he cancel the planned broadcast.

The idea that CBS lawyers would recommend to a man they have already fired — with little to lose at this point other than his self-respect — that he should not talk about something like this is so idiotic that I’d be tempted to say, “Well, that couldn’t possibly be true.” Too bad the company has already done 20 similar things in the past few months — from spiking the CECOT story on 60 Minutes to… whatever the hell is going on with the CBS Evening News.

The attempted flex on Colbert also didn’t work. The Talarico interview — now posted on YouTube — has millions of views and more attention than it would have if it had just… happened without interference from above.

Colbert’s description of the entire thing is a good, solid lesson to Hollywood in how everyone should be responding to the demands — er, “options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled” — in this era.

And maybe if we’d all responded this way to the Rise of the Weasels from the first, they would have backed down long ago (see: The Kimmel Affair).

But here we are, and thank you to Colbert for demonstrating how it’s done.

It’s also an easy pick for this week’s Hollywood Spin Award, as seen in Deadline, passing along what was dictated to them as the totally normal, nothing to see here, we don’t understand why everyone is making such a big deal about this, explanation for the Talarico cancellation.

Deadline explained:

In January, Carr issued guidance that highlighted that Congress put “protections in place to ensure equal access to broadcast station facilities for legally qualified candidates.”

Those last three words are key: Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Texas, is a “legally qualified candidate,” facing Jasmine Crockett and Ahmad Hassan in the Democratic primary, which will be held March 3.

Ossoff, however, isn’t a “legally qualified candidate” — yet. While the former documentary filmmaker, who was first elected to the seat in 2021, has announced he is running for reelection, the qualifying period for the primaries in Georgia doesn’t kick in until the start of March.

Oh, well, of course. That makes perfect sense.

CBS and Paramount certainly seem to be bending over backwards to scrupulously adhere to every millimeter of every possible interpretation of every regulation.

Especially when it comes to things that Donald Trump might not like.

Or should I say, only when it comes to things Donald Trump wouldn’t like. Because I haven’t seen many examples of such ruthlessly rigorous observance when the outcome falls the other way.

That’s the thing here. There’s always a perfectly good, reasonable explanation of why this has nothing to do with the bigger picture.

But when every time those little things all bend in one direction, it’s hard not to feel like maybe there’s something bigger involved here — like the giant merger deal consuming the focus of the owners.

To look at it even more darkly, however, all the outrage and bluster over this — including everything you just read written by me — could be exactly what the company wants at this moment, provoking a very loud reminder to this administration of why you want to have your friends with their hands on the wheel of media.

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WGA Card Sharks

I heard from a few writer friends who were annoyed that this public disclosure filing by the Writers Guild included the names and amounts of loans individuals had applied for seeking relief during the strike.

Unfortunately, that disclosure is required of labor unions, so I’m told.

While perusing last year's quarterly report, I found a couple of other things that caught my eye. The first was the final — I believe — $182,648 paid to David Young, the former WGA West executive director and the guild’s chief negotiator…

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There’s a conversation I’ve had a lot over the past decade, but in recent days, it feels like I have it more frequently, if not constantly.

It goes like this.

I’m talking to someone who has got something they want to communicate with the public about — a cause, an independent film release, a piece of news — and as we get into a discussion of how to get the message out, they very quickly get mired in hopelessness and the impossibility of communicating anything in this environment.

Getting a message out has never been easy or simple, but there were paths and strategies. You could always… throw an event!

@paramountplusAre you a Liz or a Liz? We're definitely more of a Liz. 🤣 #ComedyCentral #KrollShow #Yogurt #Water

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But lately, as attention spans shrink to the subatomic level, following the usual strategies and paths feels futile. The idea of conveying and implanting a message — a narrative — into human consciousness feels absolutely perverse to even try. It’s like trying to train a dolphin to appreciate quinoa.

It’s time, however, to recalibrate the narrative about our attention spans and stop trying to squeeze square pegs into non-existent holes. If we’re going to communicate with the world, we’ve got to meet the human brain where it lives, not try to replicate the 1980s, when understanding developed after watching the CBS Evening News and reading Time magazine. Too much of Hollywood’s cultural messaging seems tailored to a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

We in the culture business must acknowledge that humanity’s capacity to join our parade has been fundamentally altered, and if we want to speak to them, bring them on board and build interest in products, we have to take the world as it is.

Here then are 26 principles for a new paradigm of marketing:

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The Goldfish Rules

1. The Goldfish Rule: We don’t have a short attention span; we have no attention span. You don’t have three seconds to get your message across. You have zero seconds. You must convey what you have to convey in a flash of lightning.

2. Memory doesn’t exist. Unless you are in the public’s face at a specific moment, you don’t exist, and you have never existed.

3. The new point system. There are two scores for messaging: zero and one. If the messaging is ineffective, you get zero. If it is effective, you receive one.

4. There is no higher score than one. Don’t make your message complex in search of a higher score.

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Late yesterday, a remarkable thing happened — something akin to spotting Bryan Lourd driving a Winnebago down Wilshire Blvd. in these crazy times.

Chappell Roan, one of the biggest musicians on the planet, took an actual moral stand and announced she had left Wasserman. This after agency head Casey Wasserman showed up in the Epstein files looking, shall we say, not his best.

After a year of silence, it seems protest may be having its pop culture moment. Finally.

Roan’s decision came a few days after Bad Bunny’s MAGA-triggering Super Bowl halftime show and after the Grammys kicked off a wave of anti-ICE chic in the culture. Meanwhile, at the Winter Olympics, the vice president was roundly booed at the opening ceremonies, as no world leader has been in recent times.

Somehow, the Culture War has turned inside out to the point where the NFL and NRA are, for the moment, willing to antagonize Trump…

But still, there is one corner of our world where the elites are still cowering, terrified of speaking out. And still actively fawning over a leader who shared racist memes of Barack and Michelle Obama, and pressured Sen. Chuck Schumer to name New York’s Penn Station after him. And that is only in the past week.

Congratulations, Hollywood, you are the winner!

So, it’s time we named names. Not just the leaders who are too afraid to protest, but also those actively aiding and abetting an administration misaligned with 90 percent of creative people in this industry.

Let’s start:

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Given the time of year, you might be confused into thinking that the trade press has just invented a new Olympic sport.

But no, you’re not watching the live feed from Milano of the Freestyle Josh D’Amaro Butt Kissing finals. It’s just the industry media welcoming a new titan to this throne — in the critical, probing, relentless, un-dictated show of journalism on which they made their name.

A lot of folks filed “How Josh Did It” stories this week, and from this fearless reporting, the journalists who looked deep and hard at the question, turning over every rock, came to an iron-clad conclusion that… he did it by being probably the greatest executive who has ever walked the earth.

If not the greatest human period.

Maybe the only person on the planet who could even consider walking in the footsteps of Mr. Robert Iger.

For many journalists, the coronation of a new king is the moment to begin ingratiating themselves with the new leader and winning over sources and friends in the new regime.

So how much do we love Josh D’Amaro, a man so perfect for the job that it entailed a years-long bakeoff? Let us count the ways.

Here are the events in which media competed in the various “we’ll take down your talking points without question” competitions:

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🥇Double Luge: Dana and Josh, Happy Forever!

If there’s one big takeaway you get from this week’s coverage, one message that the company seemed to want to beat into the ground over and over — lest anyone make any mistake about it — it’s a variation of this thought:

“This isn’t just Josh ascending. They are both moving up, he and Dana. Both of them. Together, as God intended it.”

This story serves a few purposes, particularly targeted toward the industry readership. It dampens the disappointment that yet another company, once again, passed over the strong female contender for yet another 50-something white man. And it speaks to concerns that a non-creative executive has been put in charge of a company where creativity is the fuel that powers everything. Because we all remember how well that went last time they tried it.

But neither of those things happened! Josh D’Amaro and Dana Walden are both rising up the ladder! Two people taking charge together, and they couldn’t be happier about it — so why aren’t you?

The finalists in this very competitive event:

“She and Josh get along fabulously, so that’s going to work great,” Mr. Gorman said on the telephone interview. “This long process either brings you together or tears you apart,” he added, referencing the board’s lengthy succession planning effort. “They’re true professionals.” — New York Times

“And in running the sprawling Disney empire, D’Amaro and Walden will have a kind of left-brain/right-brain division of labor….Now Disney has two seasoned execs to lead the media conglomerate in partnership.” — Variety

“Attendees said D’Amaro came across as charming and he and Walden, who joined halfway through, had a nice rapport, with both looking happy and excited. The two executives are, in fact, said to have a close working relationship that appears to have overcome a long and grueling audition for the top job.” — Deadline

Note that there was also a side competition to this one: Extraordinary Achievement in Dana and Alan Journalism. There, it was suggested that Alan Bergman, Disney Entertainment’s co-chair and film boss, is a winner in all this, too:

“Studio insiders go on to add that Walden and Bergman already have strong ties after sharing the Co-Chairman title for the past couple years and that relationship will help strengthen the film side of the company.” — Deadline

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🥇Ice Dancing: Josh Loves Technology!

Did we mention that he loves technology?

Loves it like a brother!

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All right, so they finally did it.

I mean, we’ve said that before, but this time maybe for real.

Josh D’Amaro is the new Disney CEO.

The Bob-cession has been the central narrative question of Hollywood’s biggest legacy studio for about a decade, and now that we’re through, maybe we can see what’s on the other side?

Just to be clear: This wasn’t just a succession decision. It was a referendum on risk.

There’s a lot to take in — including how Dana Walden missed (nothing personal, just numbers here), whether it’s smart to run back another parks guy and a presumed end of a merger dream — so let’s roll up the takeaways here in no particular order.

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1. There Is No Dana and TV. Only Parks

First of all, let’s acknowledge — what a shock — that Disney’s board didn’t go with a female candidate. What a shock that after conducting a company-wide and nationwide search for a job that just about anyone would kill to get, they found the white man who has been at the company for 27 years.

Who could’ve guessed after all the drama, that’s how it would end up?

Let’s hope that James Gorman and the Disney CEO search committee were paid enough for their work here, and not just handed 15 percent discount coupons for food purchases at the parks (although if they take their family a couple of times this year, that could add up to a lot).

So, doing the math here, when you factor this announcement in, that brings the percentage of female chiefs at Hollywood studios, streaming companies, and agencies to — hang on, just checking the numbers here (let me just carry the one)…

Zero percent.

Zero point zero zero zero, if you want to drill down.

Perhaps we can set an industrywide goal of 2 percent by 2075?

Does that sound achievable?

Below: What Disney’s choice of a parks CEO says about risk, creativity and talent in the next decade.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook has had a long, distinguished career, arguably the most successful career of any current non-founder executive in America. He received widespread praise and support when, in 2014, he became the first Fortune 500 chief executive to publicly come out as gay.

“No one owes the public such a deep view of his personal life. People underestimate how hard this is,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said at the time. “But someone had to be first. For Tim, this was a commitment to make life easier and better for others. It was a generous and courageous thing to do.”

But now, following his appearance at the Melania premiere this week, if you search for him today on any of the social media platforms, here’s what you’ll find:

On one level, so what? Social media, or corners of it, being mad at a zillionaire is nothing new. Plus, like all social media outrage, this too shall pass, probably the minute someone else plops down in the hot seat.

But it didn’t.

What followed was almost certainly not what Cook had in mind when he agreed to watch one little movie at the White House.

And that’s where this story actually begins:

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At Sundance, I’ve written about the racist attack on Rep. Maxwell Frost, this year’s Sundance It Girl, indie film’s plan to fight industry consolidation and why this year’s fest was make-or-break for film.

As I lurched toward my last days at Sundance this year — my last days in Park City, Utah, perhaps forever — I thought it would be easy to consolidate my final hours, running out of steam as I was, into one last dispatch.

But somehow, I feel like I’ve lived 1,000 years in the past two days.

To give you a sense of this year’s vibe, I had one of my more memorable lunches with three producer/executives: Miramax chief Jon Glickman; producer, podcaster, politics and food commentator Jamie Patricof; and Pinky Promise Films founder/CEO Jesseamine Burgum.

There was interest among the group in watching “The Game,” one of the NFL playoff bouts, so we convened at Collie’s, a Main Street sports bar, and locked up a table near the front just before the game began and crowds formed all around to watch.

It should be noted that Collie’s has shockingly good onion rings.

All three are Sundance veterans, of various sorts. Glickman has been many times since the ’90s with various films; Patricof came with Half Nelson in 2006, Ryan Gosling’s breakout role, and another film in this year’s Sundance retrospective; and Burgum, in just a few years, has had multiple films here, including Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul and The Starling Girl.

As people began to stop by and come and go, the group engaged in the boilerplate Sundance conversation of “What have you seen/What have you liked?”

We talked a bit about AI, which all agreed could have a devastating impact on employment in the business, but as producers of productions that have to make every penny count, they recognize that it can give them tools to take their films to another level at lower costs. Actors will still be the center of the film, and they can never be replaced, but everything around them will change, they agreed. Particularly in post-production. They talked about one film that has been very well-received in the festival that they all enjoyed, and noted that the budget is rumored to have been in the $10 million range, but looked like a $40 million film, speculating whether AI had been used to get it to that level for such a modest budget.

One hotly debated topic that came up — flexible ticket pricing.

One believed it was the key to getting more people to see a movie, allowing it to build momentum and gain the all-important word of mouth (a particularly important factor for non-tentpoles). He cited the massive success theaters enjoy with discount Tuesdays and noted that “affordability” has become a national crisis, and that a night at the movies has become too expensive for many, setting the bar too high for what a film must deliver to be worth the trip.

Another dismissed the affordability question, saying film was still the least expensive thing you could do out of the house and said it’s up to theaters to provide better houses, and studios to make better films, and we need to create great experiences on every level, and that is what will make audiences return.

As the game surged on, Daniel Roher, who has two films showing this year — the already acclaimed Tuner, starring Dustin Hoffman, and The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist — arrived. Seeing me scrawling in my little notebook, Roher snatched the pad away and took out a mini-traveling paint set and began sketching and painting something. A few minutes later, he returned the notebook, with this self-portrait added, entitled “Bleary Eyed @ Sundance”:

Yes, that is my actual handwriting on the left. And no, I can’t actually even read it myself.

As the weather turned deathly cold outside and the game surged forward, the conversation continued on to mergers, consolidation and inevitably, the terrifying state of the world.

And then all looked ahead to the night’s premieres and what wonders were in store.

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This is the madness, the hardship and the delight of film festivals. These kinds of conversations — fleeting, intense, strangely intimate — are the connective tissue. Sundance is a kaleidoscope: You only glimpse fragments of the constantly shifting picture, and only for moments at a time.

Under the Sundance banner, there are so many different festivals for so many different people. There are critics who see five movies a day and don’t go near the parties. There are people who come for the parties and don’t even see a movie. I met several people this year who came just for the panel discussions. There are tourists who just want to walk down Main Street and take in the excitement. There are executives taking meetings and professional autograph collectors searching for a big catch. (One told me Natalie Portman, in town to support Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist, is the most valuable autograph this year.)

All of them are doing this one last time in the little faux Old West ski resort town where Sundance went from a little niche get-together to a phenomenon that launched a sector that changed Hollywood and culture forever.

In my last two whirlwind days, I stepped through many different phases of the kaleidoscope and tried to find the words goodbye.

Here are a few of the images I passed through in my final laps at Sundance 2026, including my can’t-miss video of Guillermo del Toro singing with a mariachi band, and details on why I could not abide by the Charli XCX afterparty…)

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About The Parties

There’s a certain lesson I have had to relearn every year for the past 10 or so.

After seeing the premiere of Charli XCX’s very enjoyable mockumentary self-portrait, The Moment (in theaters this week from A24), I was caught up in the ultra-cool crowd and festive spirits, and I excitedly accepted the invitation to the after-party.

However…

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