Of course it’s the fact that the presidential election is neck and neck, evenly split between a very reasonable Democratic candidate and a terrifying Republican who is a convicted felon, a pathological liar and more cognitively questionable by the day.  

I don’t trust the polls anyway, and neither should you. They got it wildly wrong in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was assured of a win, mildly wrong in 2020 when Trump refused to accept the result and insanely wrong at midterms in 2022 – remember the “Red Wave” that did not happen? That.

But what is giving me stabbing stomach pains is the blow to our free press, which is the one thing we cannot as a country do without. Free speech. Critical voices. Independent inquiry into our government and elected officials.  

A free and vibrant press is the single, indispensable pillar of a democracy. And those institutions are at risk. 

The decision by the Los Angeles Times billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong to quash an endorsement of Kamala Harris, matched by the decision by billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos to end the practice of endorsing any candidate, after the paper’s editorial board had prepared to endorse her as well, is a devastating blow to a free press.

Two of the country’s largest newspapers took their opinions off the table days before the election, even though their editorial boards wanted to be heard. Their doing so sends a terrible signal to other corporate leaders, and to other publishers. If they ducked provoking Trump, so will others.

It is legitimately scary. As historian Timothy Snyder has written, their decision on these endorsements is a kind of “anticipatory obedience,” a caving to Trump’s threats to retaliate against his perceived enemies before anything happens and without Trump even being elected. This is a perilous sign for democracy. 

“Do not obey in advance,” writes Snyder in his seminal pamphlet, “On Tyranny,” which is being widely quoted on social media. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.”

Hundreds of journalists in these newsrooms who have pushed back against their owners, thousands of readers who have cancelled their subscriptions in the past three days – are enraged that these billionaires would “bend the knee” to Trump out of fear of what he might do. 

The journalists at these papers have spent years showing their mettle, reporting on both Trump and Joe Biden in a sea of social media noise. They sift through facts, track down sources, try to identify misinformation – all under enormous pressure. Their work is essential at a time when voters do not know what information to trust. 

You trust the reporting of The Washington Post. And the LA Times. And a handful of others. Without them, our democracy is cut adrift. 

I worked at The Washington Post for eight years. And I have covered the ups and down at the Los Angeles Times under multiple owners for 20 years. I admit that I was relieved when Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family in 2013. And I was thrilled to see Soon-Shiong, a local L.A. resident, rescue (so I thought) the LA Times from the muddled mismanagement of Tribune. 

But these latest decisions give the lie to civic duty in billionaire ownership of our news institutions. Bezos has billion-dollar contracts in front of the U.S. government, and Soon-Shiong’s main source of wealth is his pharmaceutical research which depends on federal approval. 

Meanwhile both newspapers are losing massive amounts of money (The Post lost $100 million last year; the Times at least $50 million.) Both billionaires may well regret having bought them. 

The argument for billionaire ownership of newspapers was that the owners were so rich that they were immune from political threat or intimidation. The wealthy individual was making an investment in the community and gaining a tool of influence in the halls of state and national government, business and foreign policy. 

It gave them a seat at the table of power in a way that their money could not. But that ownership also confers obligation. That is a realization that seems to escape yet another billionaire who dabbles dangerously in media, X-owner and Trump booster Elon Musk. 

As I have argued for years, media is different. It’s not like a sports team or a packaged good or a car manufacturer. It brings with it a special responsibility to uphold honest, fact-based inquiry and have the courage to disseminate the results of those inquiries. 

It also means overseeing an unruly newsroom staff of opinionated, educated reporters and editors who will not be cowed or intimidated or bullied. 

Independently-owned media is essential in our age of disinformation. TheWrap remains fiercely independent, as we like to say. And all we do is news. Feel free to support us with a subscription, it’s worth the investment. 

But as for other publications – let us hope our billionaire problem does not spread further.

The post Billionaires, Newspapers and Politics – A Dangerous Mix appeared first on TheWrap.

But they may not be who you expect them to be. 

Start with AI. The arrival of artificial intelligence has moved past the panic phase to where we are now: What does it mean for me? 

At this year’s annual TheGrill conference, held Tuesday at the DGA Theater Complex, experts from Hollywood’s major studios will address where the industry’s biggest content producers are focused. We will hear from AI companies themselves who will talk about the ethics that continue to raise concerns for IP and copyright holders. And we will hear from creatives about how they are using AI to drive efficiency in their work and allowing them to stretch their abilities well beyond where they thought possible. 

At the same time: yes, some jobs will be made easier. But some jobs will be lost.  

This once-in-a-generation technological shift leapfrogs so many other changes that technology has brought to entertainment and media. But it is not the only change that is shifting the macroeconomics of our business, as is evident by the frustrating downward pressure on entertainment stocks.  

The stock prices of Hollywood’s historic major studios — Disney, Warner, Paramount — are down by 40% or more in the past three years. Disney and Warner are celebrating their centennials this year, and shares of Warner and Paramount are down 70% in the last five years. Meanwhile, Netflix, the streaming giant founded in 1997 as a mail order DVD rental service, stands at $701 per share at this writing. 

This is creating its own cascade of changes. 

Thousands of job losses have happened this year alone in cuts at Paramount, Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery and Lionsgate, in a full employment economy. These companies are adjusting to the new economic realities. 

TheWrap has written about independent producers changing careers; below-the-line veterans surviving on unemployment checks; production professionals starting side hustle jobs like Emmy-nominated hairdresser Sallie Ciganovich, who cuts hair in her backyard. 

Some sectors are being hurt more than others. Independent film has been in crisis for some time – even the best movies at Sundance have a hard time finding distribution. There’s the decline in reality TV production, as TheWrap wrote about Monday. And we have delved into what the results of a pivot to streaming five years ago has brought legacy Hollywood companies — and what that portends.

If ever TheGrill’s conversation about the changes technology has brought to the creators of content mattered, it’s right now. 

When we started TheGrill 15 years ago, entertainment looked very different. Netflix had only barely started a streaming service. Twitter was brand new. Facebook was still in its early years. Some guys had sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion, which seemed pretty crazy at the time.  

The box office was healthy. Cable television brought in billions of dollars to Comcast, which had just bought NBCUniversal, as well as to carrier companies like Charter, Cox and AT&T, and to Hollywood’s entertainment conglomerates like Viacom and Disney.

The streaming revolution is painful, but these changed consumer habits are here to stay.  

In response to all this, the industry is in the midst of a realignment, and it is what we will explore with our speakers, including Peter Guber, who led Sony and has Mandalay Pictures along with ownership in the L.A. Dodgers and the Golden State Warriors; and Jeff Sagansky, who has not only led CBS and NBC when networks were king, but now is a central figure in the drive for public investment via SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies), in his case for DraftKings and Lionsgate Studios. 

We’re excited to bring the smartest minds and most dynamic thought leaders to TheGrill this year. Those who will not only survive the shift that’s underway, but find the opportunity and prevail. 

The post TheGrill 2024: Navigating Change for Those Who Plan to Survive the Disruption appeared first on TheWrap.

One is the fear in our own Hollywood community, a microcosm of the pain and confusion that has convulsed in waves across the globe.

Stand with Israel? Or stand with Palestinians? 

It seems impossible to stand with both. 

Stand with a free Iran? Stand with a free Lebanon?

Now it’s become so complicated. 

Believe what you see on TikTok? Believe what you read in the New York Times’ headline #1, revised headline #2 and revised headline #3 with a long editor’s note?

I’m totally confused.

Believe Israeli women? Believe the U.N.?

Listen to Bill Maher? Or Mehdi Hasan? Bari Weiss? Or Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Who can tell us how to make sense of it all?

Better, we think, to say nothing. To take no side. To voice no opinion. For fear of offending someone, Jew or Israeli or Arab. 

I get it. 

Because I am Jewish, and because I am an independent journalist and because I spent years in my early career covering the Middle East, all year long I have heard from people desperate to understand where is the moral line, why are Jews are under attack, whose fault is all of this and why does no one seem to care about the destitute souls held hostage in Gaza. 

I have been frustrated and dismayed to find people with big platforms and no knowledge claiming center stage. And to see people who know the complexities shouted down, or worse still — avoiding the conversation because it’s too hot out there. 

The reductive slogans and performative screaming not only don’t help, but serve a more sinister agenda that is at work. That agenda does not want peace or reconciliation, or a two-state solution, or a functioning Western alliance.

A sign of this is that we have gone from a near-zero on the scale of antisemitism in this country and Europe to a raging Code Red. Why, we ask? 

From the day after Oct. 7, a crisis has reigned among Jews on the left who stand for social justice and equity but feel abandoned by Black Lives Matter and Queers for Palestine, not to mention AOC and the now-ousted Cori Bush. They note the pro-Palestinian rallies that sprung up in many places the day after Oct. 7, including universities like Columbia, even as the blood was fresh on the ground of the Nova Festival, where 360 were murdered, and Kibbutz Be’eri, where 100 were lost.

Others who acutely feel the pain of Palestinian civilians fear they will be punished for speaking out. And some have been, by losing social media followers, or agency representation, or jobs.

As I wrote on Oct. 8 of last year, we were about to confront a period of sad outcomes:

“I worry for the death of hope. I mourn for the dead and wounded, for the kidnapped, the tortured. And I mourn for the suffering that will be visited on so many Palestinians who have no control over their own destiny. I mourn for the despair in the hearts of so many who would dream of peaceful coexistence.” 

It is a rare few who understand both the nihilistic intent of Hamas and Iran’s other proxies, dismay over Israel’s prosecution of the Gaza war and also the agony of Palestinian families and Israeli ones. (And Iranian ones, because now it’s about Iran as well.)

In the past year, I have sought those people out, seeking to learn and understand. Seeking to hang on to a thread of common humanity as so much has unraveled. (If you care to follow them: dissident Gazan Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib; Israeli historian Fania Oz-Salzberger; ex-Hamas Ahmad4 Israel, who does not reveal his last name; Saudi peace activist Loay Alshareef; British didact Douglas Murray.)

And I traveled to Israel, looking to report on the ground — even if entering Gaza is still not possible — to listen, and learn, and share.

But clear information, in context, is scarce. Our elite universities have been revealed to be hornets’ nests of political naivete, slinging the slogans of collective liberation and identity politics onto a burning bonfire set by radical Islam. Honestly, if I hear the string “colonial, oppression, apartheid, ethno-state, genocide” litany one more time while the latest headline is about a Yazidi girl taken as a sex slave in Gaza, released to her family in Iraq… I just can’t. Read a book, I want to say. Or read the article.

It’s no wonder that the average person is confused, and would rather avoid this ugly subject completely. I have many prominent friends in media who for a solid year have studiously avoided the topics of Gaza, antisemitism, radical Islam and Israel, firm in the knowledge that this is a No-Win situation. 

But certain things require moral clarity. A death cult is a death cult. Terror is terror. Tolerating intolerance is not multiculturalism — it’s an invitation to self-destruction. The choices we permit as a democracy may determine the survival of our precious (if flawed) system of government. 

A Palestinian child is an innocent. An Israeli child is an innocent. A civilian is not fair game. Identifying an evil ideology does not make you prejudiced. Islam has a problem of extremism and radicalism, and Muslims or secular Arabs who speak out about that problem risk their lives, which is exactly the heart of the problem.

Hollywood once stood confident in its values, however “liberal” and “woke.” The entertainment and media community as a whole championed social justice and equity, promoted diversity and inclusion, celebrated democracy. This industry created and told the stories that showed the humanity inherent in those ideas — “Will and Grace,” or “Mary Tyler Moore,” or “The West Wing.” 

But I will remind you that the Writers Guild of America for weeks could not manage to condemn the Hamas massacre. On this issue Hollywood is visibly… lost.

We are not yet through the fog of fear or confusion. But that moment will come. So at this one-year mark since the Hamas massacre unleashed the worst impulses of humanity — as it was meant to do — let us hold tight to the knowledge that the best of humanity remains. In the shadows, perhaps, but waiting for us to coax it into the light. 

The post At the Anniversary of October 7, Seeking Clarity in a Sea of Confusion appeared first on TheWrap.

He spoke to WaxWord on Monday on the tumultuous changes happening in entertainment and his tenure running Sony.

“The next 18-24 months are going to be — chaos is one word you can use,” he said. “There’s going to be consolidation, buying, sales, potentially bankruptcies. At the end of which, only thing is very clear: Demand for entertainment is going to be really strong.”

Vinciquerra, who is passing the reins to COO Ravi Ahuja, who will become SPE’s president and CEO in January, said he expects write-downs of cable companies and a merger of Charter Communications with a competitor in Europe. “That’s the beginning,” he said. “At the end of that, cable companies will be on much stronger footing. The business will be good. There will be a rough time in the next 18-24 months.”

The outgoing executive said Sony is better positioned to weather the storm than many of its competitors. “We are probably the most stable company in the business right now, given the strategies we chose many years ago,” Vinciquerra said. “The fact is that we got out of cable networks, [while] everyone else is trying to figure out what to do them” and are facing “significant negative decline.”

Sony has not launched a full-fledged streaming platform to compete with Netflix, Disney+ and others, preferring to focus on being an arms dealer that produces shows it then licenses to streaming networks.

The Japanese-owned entertainment conglomerate operates Crunchyroll, an anime-focused streaming platform which Vinciquerra called “the most-profitable streaming service…outside of Netflix.”

Here is what else Vinciquerra told TheWrap:

TheWrap: Will Sony be protected from the chaos?

Vinciquerra: Absolutely.

We’re not in the businesses that are going to be challenged. We don’t have to restructure to meet that. We haven’t had massive layoffs.

What can you say about Ravi Ahuja?

 The good thing is he’s smarter than I am. Good with people and has good IQ and EQ, I think.

Is he tech focused?

He will be. Our whole company will be technology focused. There is a big push from Tokyo to be – not on the bleeding edge, but we want to be right behind. And to be industry leading. 

Was the streaming pivot by your peers in the industry a mistake?

I don’t think it was a mistake. Eventually they will become significant profitable businesses. If you fell to earth from Mars in 2005, you’d want to get into the cable bundle business. It was an amazingly profitable business and easy to run. Today it’s gone the other way, dramatically. The streaming services will never get to point where they’re as profitable as that, but they will become profitable after this period of consolidation. The business that won’t get better is the cable network business. That business is on a negative path and will have to be dealt with. 

What do you plan to do now? 

I don’t know. I like fixing things. I like fixing companies. Fox was a big turnaround, bigger than this one. This was good-sized turnaround. Experience counts in these things. I will take a little time off too.

Alexei Barrionuevo contributed to this article.

The post Outgoing Sony Pictures CEO Predicts ‘Chaos’ in Entertainment Industry Over Next Two Years appeared first on TheWrap.

The impossibly svelte television executive stood triumphant in the middle of a massive post-Emmys fete on Sunday, as Disney took over the entire outdoor plaza of the Los Angeles Music Center downtown and dressed it with a dazzling tent, gorgeous flowers, sumptuous food and chic seating areas. 

CEO Bob Iger hovered nearby like a proud papa, having sat supportively beside his star executive at the Emmy awards earlier in the evening. At his core, Iger is a TV guy – having come to Disney from Cap Cities/ABC in 1996 – and he was very much in his element. 

There was a lot to celebrate. Disney certainly knew it was in for a big night at the Emmys, which aired on the company’s own ABC network. But even so they could not have known the company would take home a record 60 Emmy statues, including a record-breaking 19 awards for “Shōgun,” 11 awards for “The Bear” and a bunch more for Ron Howard’s “Jim Henson Idea Man” and Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building.”

FX alone took home 36 Emmys, part of Walden’s television empire which also includes ABC, Disney Branded Television, Disney+, Disney Television Studios (20th Television, 20th Television Animation and ABC Signature), FX, FX Productions, Hulu and National Geographic. 

But it is not Walden’s only win of late. In the wake of the successful ABC News debate last week between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, with moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis winning widespread praise for handling Trump’s lies, and a massive 67 million Americans tuning in, suffice to say that Walden is on a roll.  

The embarrassing dispute with DirecTV got resolved ahead of the Emmys, ending a programming blackout that left ABC and ESPN dark on the satellite giant for 13 days.

Add to that the fact that Walden has a three-decade friendship with Vice President Kamala Harris who may be poised to win the presidency. Though the Disney executive has scrupulously stayed away from anything that publicly acknowledges that friendship – especially because ABC News reports up to her — it’s no secret that the two are tight. 

It certainly would not hurt matters were Harris to win the presidency, and Walden could have the country’s first female president a cell phone call or private text away. 

Walden is of course too savvy a player to comment on any such notion, and her spokesperson declined to say anything either for this piece.

Walden’s main rivals for the CEO position remain Jimmy Pitaro, chairman of ESPN; and Josh D’Amaro who oversees Disney Parks, a massive segment of Disney’s annual revenue. 

But but but. Walden comes from the entertainment ecosphere. As Co-Chairman, Disney Entertainment, she is responsible for what consumers see on television and streaming, overseeing the company’s full portfolio of entertainment media, news and content businesses globally.

That matters because the CEO position requires a solid grounding in entertainment content, in understanding what goes into the recipe for great storytelling, compelling characters and enduring IP. The Emmy sweep is proof positive of that quality, even if part of that is holding on to the legendary FX tastemaker John Landgraf. 

Timeline? Iger’s contract ends in 2026, and he has vowed publicly that he would “definitely step down” at that time. But he has been extremely circumspect about the succession process. 

The job requires relationships with Hollywood talent, and a knowledge of how to manage that talent when tough decisions loom. Does she have passionate love for legacy Disney content, the classic animation of “Bambi” and “Snow White?” Probably not. “The Bear” is way more Walden’s speed, coming from two decades at the edgier 20th Century Fox.  

She also needs to show strategic business chops, and it is here that Walden privately complains that she does not get enough credit. To her, she still gets underestimated for her business savvy in a manner that reeks, to her, of old-school sexism. She has more than proven her business chops.  

And while it’s unclear if Iger sees it that way, he certainly beamed from ear to ear at the Disney shindig.  

Will it last? That remains to be seen. 

Everyone loves a winner. And right now, Dana Walden is winning. 

The post The Emmys, Disney Succession and Dana Walden’s Moment  appeared first on TheWrap.

As for women, whose voices and performances are sometimes second thoughts, they are angry and unafraid to show it, whether in Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch” starring a feral Amy Adams battling her own resentment over caring for her adorable toddler; to “The Assessment” starring Elizabeth Olson and Alicia Vikander by director Fleur Fortune, whose bleak view of maternity in an authoritarian future reflects fears over continuity of the human race.  

But first, the joy. 

David Gordon Green’s “Nutcrackers,” literally sings with a hokey sort of family, farm and fraternal happiness. The director lately known for horror (“The Exorcist: Believer” and “Halloween” series) has had enough of the darkness. Instead he frolics with four real-life young brothers –Homer, Ulysses, Atlas and Arlo Janson – on a farm in Ohio. Orphaned but more focused on planning mischief with their pigs, mud and a visitor’s Porsche, they torture and then embrace their uncle (Ben Stiller) in a movie that critics agreed tugged at the heartstrings. 

At the premiere, Green confessed he needed a moment of joy. 

“I was looking for lightness,” he said at the Q&A. “We’re in a comedic drought… and I was trying to find my own creative instinct.”

Stiller, too, said the script drew him back to acting, after his work directing the dystopian series “Severance.” “It was intuition,” he said after the screening. “I wanted to make this movie, I wanted to meet these kids.” He added: “We need more movies like this.” 

Likewise, Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night” – while many years in the making – burst into the festival with the kinetic, joyful energy of young comedians reliving the start of comedy history in the first season of “Saturday Night Live.” 

The movie features a sprawling cast reprising the great John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and, of course, the still-“SNL”-boss Lorne Michaels. Reitman called the extraordinary effort “controlled chaos.” 

“Surrender,” was his advice as we tried to settle the group of actors – Dylan O’Brien, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Gabriel Labelle, Lamorne Morris – for an interview at TheWrap studio. 

TheWrap’s Steve Pond noted something similar in his awards analysis of the festival: “Maybe there’s something in the air in this divisive, dark time; maybe filmmakers are gravitating toward lighter material coming out of the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes and global unrest and a slumping movie business.”

On the flip side, there were many movies embracing the fears. We’ve become accustomed to seeing the dystopian views but they are becoming darker, more urgent and more … normalized. 

Notably, Mike Flanagan’s “Life of Chuck,” based on a Stephen King novel, takes us to the end of the world and then backwards to current times and before that. The blandly grinning face of Tom Hiddleston as “Chuck,” who ominously appears everywhere as a sign of The End, is just plain creepy. But Chuck Krantz the character – which Hiddleston embraces with joy and pathos – is a reminder of the normalcy we crave. 

Ron Howard’s “Eden” reaches back in time for similar themes, in this case after World War I, as Europe faces the rise of fascism, to a remote Galapagos island where a few random people seek escape. This movie also seems underpinned by an everpresent awareness of the potential ending of everything as we know it; democracy undermined by looming forces that may end a couple of centuries of free society, and spread destruction. 

These worries are clearly on the minds of our filmmakers at a time when many are preoccupied by fears for our democracy and the consequences of technology as it visibly impacts traditional community and emphasizes our political division. 

Finally, the stories starring women at the festival feature a series of internal dialogues and struggles as women cope with their personal frustration. These movies feature particularly fierce performances from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Amy Adams and Demi Moore. 

In Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths,” Jean-Baptiste is a woman angry at the world. In “Nightbitch,” Amy Adams is angry about what a woman gives up in choosing to be a mother. In “The Substance,” Demi Moore transforms into an actual ogre as she paradoxically seeks to maintain her youthful beauty. In “The Room Next Door,” Tilda Swinton’s fatally ill character struggles to choose the manner and moment of her death. In the masterful “Emilia Perez,” the title character transitions from Mexican drug lord to soigne woman in Switzerland and still rages internally over the loss of her children. 

From the deep yearnings for motherhood (“The Assessment”), to the anger over the demands of motherhood that no one warns you about (“Nightbitch”), from the uncompromising demands of society on female beauty (“The Substance”), to the punishing indignities of life that lead to a constant state of anger, resentment and self-loathing (“Hard Truth”), the themes intersect.

These are character studies in many cases, but they are also larger statements on the predicament of women across the world, across the board. 

Amy Adams at the opening screening of “Nightbitch” looked to all the world like the very image of placid, composed womanhood, but she and author Rachel Yoder and writer/director Marielle Heller agreed in the after-screening Q&A that the commonality of women’s experiences amounts to the things that often go unsaid about motherhood. In the film, Adams’ character – just “Mother” – actually transforms into a dog who runs wild through the neighborhood in a desperate prison break from the world of motherhood that she chose. 

But talking about fierce, Mikey Madison practically stole the festival in Sean Baker’s “Anora” (which previously won the Palme d’Or in Cannes) playing an erotic dancer who takes on a Russian billionaire and his set of crony-thugs, after she marries his son over a Vegas weekend. 

Anora – “my name is Ani,” she insists – is a diminutive sex worker not to be trifled with. She kicks, screams, bites and thrashes her way to demand respect and recognition in a world of heavyset men with lots of money. 

Oh, and did I mention? It’s a comedy. 

The post In Toronto, Movies Seeking Joy, Feminist Fury and Making Sense of a Tumultuous World appeared first on TheWrap.

“We are getting toothless,” Abbasi says, referring to Hollywood. “The studio bosses told me themselves they’re not taking enough risk.” 

None of them would take a risk on his feature film about Donald Trump, starring Sebastian Stan as a much-younger Trump and Jeremy Strong as his mentor Roy Cohn, which just had a sneak screening for press at TIFF. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and, despite strong reviews, was snubbed by one US distributor after another. 

Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment and Shani’s Rich Spirit closed a deal just last week to acquire distribution rights. They will release the film in 2,000 theaters on Oct. 11, ahead of the November election. 

Abbasi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker whose last film “Holy Spider” about a serial killer of sex workers in Iran made him a target of the Islamic government, did not imagine his film about Trump would be such a tough sell in a democracy. 

“I thought – ‘Fuck Iran. Fuck the Islamic dictatorship.’ I thought, ‘I’ll make a movie in a free country.’” 

But it has been unexpectedly difficult. And for him, the Hollywood rejection amounts to censorship. That bothers him, even as he appreciates the win of getting a deal done. “We’re here, yes, but I would call it a sort of censorship,” he said. 

Hollywood “sells everything as if it’s ice cream. Not everything has to be political, but whether you like it or not – it’s content, it’s not ice cream. Even a Marvel movie is political in its own way. And what you choose not to say is also political.” 

The movie has been in the works for six years, Abbasi said. He wanted to do a portrait of Trump, not because he aimed to do a hit piece, but because he considers the former president and current candidate an icon of American culture. 

“Like Andy Warhol. Or Muhammed Ali,” said the director. “He’s a president of the age where truth is broken, and cubistic.” 

He went to the studios to get financing, having worked with Sebastian Stan for years in developing the project. “They said to me, ‘We would love to do this film, but if Trump wins, if the studio gets sold – they’ll come after us.’ Or they would say, ‘We don’t want 85 million consumers to hate us.’”

Still, the movie came together three years ago, and then Jan. 6 happened. “Before January 6 there was interest. After that the emails came one after the other, ‘No. No. No. No,’” said Abbasi. “Everything fell apart. It fell apart a few times.”

In the end, he said, the movie is not terribly anti-Trump, although Dan Snyder, the conservative financier from Kinematics who backed the film, sold his ownership because he considered the film more critical than he expected. 

“It’s an entertaining character piece. It’s not a hit piece,” said Abbasi. “Donald is really ‘made in America.’” 

Donald Trump sent Abbasi a cease and desist letter, but hasn’t seen the film. Abbasi said he was curious what the former president would think. 

“Trump will watch it, that’s for sure. And I’d really like to watch it with him so I can answer all his questions,” said Abbasi. 

The post Up Late With ‘The Apprentice’ Director Ali Abbasi: Censorship, ‘Toothless’ Hollywood and Donald Trump | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

Can she really pull off what she seems poised to do? 

It’s one of the unlikeliest pivots to power imaginable. Harris – who most of us were lukewarm about just six weeks ago, be honest – is now the Black-Asian knight with a dazzling smile sent to save democracy. Heroic images of her have saturated our media, from TikTok to Time magazine. Hollywood has embraced her and so have the labor unions. So has Mark Cuban. 

If she doesn’t blow it – or if Trump doesn’t try to steal the election again – she stands on the precipice of American leadership, and thus world leadership. 

So far, Harris has played this moment with textbook discipline. Choosing her moments strategically. Seeding stories of her middle class family growing up and the blended family in her marriage to Doug Emhoff. Letting her post-college-age social team show humor, sass and swagger. Resisting the calls by Fox to give a news conference before she’s ready.

Letting Donald Trump spin himself into a frenzy of absurd accusations (“she isn’t really Black!”, “She’s a radical leftist!”) without once taking the bait. 

Her speech on Thursday night had to be pretty close to perfect, and it was. 

In accepting the nomination, she was authoritative. She was personal. She was human scale and heroic at the same time. She talked a lot about her mother, as she always does. But she also talked policy and showed a fierceness about her commitment to American security – and to defeating Trump – that at least one focus group found convincing. 

In a speech that is likely to define her to much of the American public, she created the context of a life of service driven by the civil rights ideals of her Berkeley parents, to the judicial system and the move to a different sort of public service in the Senate and now the White House.

She alternated between her childhood in a middle class home with two immigrant parents determined to grasp the American dream, to embracing her career as a state prosecutor and tying it back to a desire to find justice for a high school friend who was sexually abused. 

Great line: “Every day I stood in the courtroom and said five words: Kamala Harris, for the people. In my entire career, I’ve only had one client, the people.” 

Why was the speech so strong? Her statement on Israel and Gaza is a good example. She forcefully supported Israel, and condemned the Hamas attack on October 7 as terrorism. She said that Israel must never face an attack like that again. 

Yet she also called out the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and asserted their right – not to a state, that would be risky – but to self-determination and freedom. It threaded the needle in a thoughtful and convincing way for one of the trickiest policy issues she will face ahead of the election and beyond. 

Beyond that, it was not all positivity and “Yes She Can.” Many are aware that Harris has a thin record when it comes to foreign policy. She has convincing to do on that front, and she started to frame that argument on Thursday night. She warned of the dangers of Donald Trump, and showed unexpected grit around her own determination to keep America safe and free.

“Know this: I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our interests against Iran and I will not cozy up to tyrants like Kim Jong Un who are rooting for Trump,” she said.  

Several commenters pointed out that Harris showed a fierceness in her delivery that was previously unseen. She staked a claim for her future persona with lines like this: “In the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny I know where I stand, and I know where the United States belongs.” 

And of course, she did not shy away from embracing her most obvious advantage over Trump who ended Roe v. Wade – being a champion for women. She called out Trump’s promises to “limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban.” Then she added a revelation which was news to many (including me) that Trump plans to create a “National Anti-Abortion Coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.”

She wrapped up that bombshell neatly in a quotable quote: “Simply put, they are out of their minds.” (Actually in the text of her speech handed out by her team, it reads thus: “They are. Out. Of. Their. Minds.”)

I’d also point out that the fact that Harris does not have biological children of her own could have been an issue had Republicans been more clever than JD Vance clumsily calling out “childless cat ladies.” The issue that may matter to heartland voters has been deftly sidestepped by constantly showcasing Harris’s warm interactions with children of all kinds, in addition to her close relationships with her nieces and nephews, and stepchildren. This could easily have been spun differently. 

But a lot can happen in the next 70-some days before the election. Trump – who flailed about by tweeting more than 40 times last night – is giving desperate. And Trump’s team is surely feeling desperate. That can lead to serious mischief. They will make their own attempt to define Harris as a Marxist, untested, inexperienced person. Who isn’t really Black. Or who is. Or – what did they say again? 

For the moment, Harris appears to be on a glide path. Wisely, though, she is not taking this triumphant moment for granted. When NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell lobbed a question at Harris as she and her posse exited the United Center, Harris turned and with that 1000-watt smile said: “I feel good. On to tomorrow… That was good. Now we’ve got to move on.” 

The post Kamala Harris Can Pull It Off — If She Shows the Discipline and Grace of Her Nomination Speech appeared first on TheWrap.

The question is: What moves are left? 

The stakes are high. Zaslav has presided over a stunning 70% decline in the company’s stock price since the April 2022 merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery. And now WBD is on the brink of losing a massive NBA deal to competitors Amazon and Comcast, which will negatively impact lucrative cable carriage deals.

The once-mighty company’s market cap now stands at $17.75 billion, down from $27.39 billion at the end of 2023 and well-off the $280 billion market cap of AT&T in 2019, who sold off the WarnerMedia assets to Discovery.

Analysts, studio insiders and Hollywood investors who spoke to TheWrap suggested Zaslav’s options are limited, with the company weighed down by $41.4 billion in gross debt and after two solid years of cost-cutting moves. 

Zaslav has indicated that the media giant will ramp up its streaming growth efforts to offset linear TV’s declines through an international expansion of Max, more bundling and continued price increases. 

But observers said that is not likely to yield sufficient growth in the tight time frame facing the CEO. Other options include selling assets to raise cash and pay down the debt, or another financial deal that could include anything from an outright sale to a merger with another entity.

“None of the options facing WBD are great right now,” Ross Benes, a senior analyst at eMarketer, told TheWrap. “WBD will try to M&A its way out of its issues. But the AT&T and the Discovery mergers were financial disasters, so investors should take caution before buying into ‘synergies’ of any proposed merger.”

The company has already considered and rejected splitting off its debt and linear TV business from its studio and streaming businesses, concluding that would lead to lawsuits, according to a company insider. 

“The loss of value has been so remarkable,” said a leading entertainment industry investor who declined to be named. Warner, he said, still has some of the greatest assets in Hollywood, and Zaslav should lean into those by investing in content. 

“HBO is still the greatest programming team around,” said this observer. “Compared to Netflix, their hit rate is unbelievable. I would double down if I were him.”

Warner Bros. Discovery declined to comment for this story.

Is Zaslav’s job at risk? 

Zaslav has made plenty of enemies in Hollywood as well as Wall Street. He has angered creatives by cancelling completed movies to get a tax write-off, and by removing content from streaming services as a cost-saving measure. He infamously said Warner didn’t need the NBA, and now finds himself in a lawsuit with the basketball league after its proposal to match Amazon’s $1.8 billion per year package of games was rejected. 

Despite all that, one senior insider told TheWrap there is no particular momentum for him to step aside. 

“The whole company, the structure, the staff is built around him,” this person said. “Taking him out would be a huge operational disruption.” 

Zaslav, who was previously the CEO of Discovery from 2006 onward, has long been protected by his relationship with billionaire John Malone, who was a key shareholder in Discovery, owns 11 million shares of WBD and sits on the board. 

“On paper, he could have been forced out already or placed under activist investor pressure, but that hasn’t happened,” Benes said. But he expects any calls to replace him will only grow louder if Warner loses its NBA lawsuit.

Moody’s Ratings senior vice president Neil Begley told TheWrap that while losing the NBA is a “pretty big” mistake, he’s not convinced that would be enough to threaten Zaslav’s position. But Begley acknowledged the pressure he’s under to turn the business around and scale streaming. 

“At some point, this strategy is either going to come through and make him look like he’s a hero or he’s going to flop around for a while. It’s not always a straight line from here to there and Netflix zigged and zagged quite a bit,” Begley said.

But the WBD board could soon grow weary of all the time the company has squandered if the strategy doesn’t bear fruit, the Moody’s analyst added. “By the end of next year, we should have a good sense for whether it’s working or not,” he said.

Warner’s plan to boost streaming

Warner currently boasts 103.3 million direct-to-consumer subscribers and has forecast it will reach streaming EBITDA of at least $1 billion in 2025. Though it reported a DTC profit of $103 million in 2023 and $86 million in the first quarter of 2024, the segment posted a loss of $107 million in its second quarter, a huge jump from a $3 million loss in the prior-year period. The segment’s results includes Max, Discovery+ and traditional HBO cable subscriptions.

During WBD’s earnings call, Zaslav emphasized that the company would focus on expanding Max internationally over the next 18 to 24 months. The service is currently in 65 international markets, but is still not present in nearly half of global addressable markets, including Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy.

The company also will expand the rollout of its ad-lite tier, which has launched in 39 markets across Latin America and a handful of European countries. And WBD is “reimagining” existing partnerships with international distributors of its linear channels to further support the expansion of Max, the CEO said.

“These partnerships help get Max on the devices of more consumers, faster and at a fraction of the acquisition cost,” Zaslav added. “We’ve done more than 150 of these deals to date in Europe and in Latin America, and you’ll begin to see them really pay off, and we have more to come.” 

While Begley praised the move to expand internationally, emphasizing its importance to reaching scale, he warned that the company also needs to double down on its investment in original content.

“There’s a cost to launching these businesses, but are they going to essentially do what they appear to have been doing in the U.S., which is really not investing significantly in new content and relying just on licensed and library content?” Begley said. “Or are they going to really try to drive the subscription growth by investing in original content, both exported out of Hollywood, as well as locally produced in each of these markets that they’re going into?”

Warner Bros. Discovery has been a proponent of bundling, with Max recently teaming up with Hulu and Disney+. Subscribers for Venu Sports, its planned joint venture with Fox and Disney, will also have the option to bundle the service with Max. Venu is slated to launch in the fall, subject to regulatory approval, though its launch could at the very least be delayed in the event Fubo is successful in its antitrust lawsuit attempting to block the offering.

WBD also plans to start cracking down on password sharing by the end of the year, with a broader rollout in 2025, and recently raised prices in the United States on Max’s ad-free tiers. 

In a research note, Wolfe Reseach’s Peter Supino agreed that scaling the DTC business and transitioning viewership from linear to streaming is the “next best option” after a possible break-up — and the right long-term path for the company. But he warned the loss of the NBA coupled with affiliate fee renewals coming up in 2025 will make that transition “long and challenging.”

Will M&A save the day?

Warner Bros. Discovery is reportedly considering sales of smaller assets, such as Polish broadcaster TVN or a stake in its gaming division. Bank of America has said spinning off those two assets could be worth $3.5 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively. 

While many have suggested also offloading CNN — Ehrlich has estimated the network could be worth $6 billion spun off — WBD management remains against a sale, with an insider emphasizing it is part of the company’s “core thinking.” 

Wall Street has also long pondered the possibility of Comcast acquiring WBD in an outright sale. Begley believes Comcast CEO Brian Roberts would covet a lot of Warner’s assets and that a transaction could be done in the next couple of years. But Roberts likely wouldn’t want to overpay or catch a falling knife given that the majority of WBD’s cash flow is tied to linear, the analyst added. Outside of Paramount Global, WBD has the most exposure to linear, with its networks segment making up $5.27 billion of the company’s $9.7 billion in revenue reported during its second quarter of 2024.

“If he’s going to make a run at it, he’s going to wait until it’s the optimal valuation,” Begley said. “By ripping [the NBA] away from Warner Bros. Discovery, it may accelerate that knife that’s falling to get to a point where maybe you reach that optimal valuation point sooner… Brian Roberts likes to build through acquisition more than he does organically.”

Comcast and NBCU are also likely to face less regulatory scrutiny and less overlap than some other potential combinations since they don’t have broadcast network assets in their portfolios, S&P Global streaming analyst Seth Shafer told TheWrap.

Tech companies or private equity firms could also be potential buyers, Shafer added. “But there still seems to be some hesitancy in general for buying traditional media companies with heavy exposure to the traditional linear TV world given the ongoing declines we’re still seeing there due to cord cutting and an overall shift to streaming.”

Though Benes agreed that Warner could become an attractive takeover option if its value keeps declining, he argued it would make more sense for Comcast to pull out of the linear business rather than go deeper. 

Roberts himself has previously stated that the company has a “high bar” when it comes to M&A deals. 

Keeping their heads down

For now, WBD is staying heads down, continuing to reduce its debt, grow streaming and look for where it can be opportunistic, the insider said. Outside of streaming, WBD’s executives touted its Studios division and particularly the DC brand as areas for growth and opportunity.  

“There’s a recognition that on one hand we have some of the best brands and assets in the world. We’re way undervalued right now,” the insider said. “There’s no magic bullet, no flip of the switch that makes this immediate.”

“None of the options facing WBD are great right now,”

Ross Benes, senior analyst at eMarkete

Zaslav told analysts last week that while the company feels “very good about where we are,” they are also open to opportunities surrounding M&A or other strategic partnerships.  

“We have to look at all, and consider all options, but the number one priority is to run this company as effectively as possible,” he said. “And you will see as our studio begins to grow, and if our global direct-to-consumer business scales the way we believe it’s going to, then that’ll be very apparent to investors, and we expect that will create shareholder value.”

Over the next five years, WBD has a “ton of firepower,” the insider said, estimating the company could have about $45 billion to $50 billion of EBITDA to play with and “plenty of free cash flow to help this transition.” 

The Hollywood investor said that Zaslav needs to invest much more heavily in the quality content that will drive loyalty to his streaming platforms. Warner has more than double the monthly churn rate of Netflix — 7% — and he attributes that to a dearth of buzzy, culturally relevant content. 

“There’s a direct correlation between what you spend on programming and churn,” said the investor. “The guys that spend the most have the least churn, and that’s because you’re always waiting for the next thing.” 

Begley emphasized that the future of Warner and its legacy media competitors depends on how well they can manage their declining linear businesses, and that figuring out the right strategies to do so is an “existential issue.” He warned that if WBD is serious about leaning into the growth of the DTC business, the company’s financials, debt and credit metrics in the near-term will likely get worse before they get better.

“This company has the cash flow and it has the assets. The only excuse they have is that they’ve only had a year or two now to really work with it,” Begley added. “It takes time.”

The post What’s the Path for Warner Bros. Discovery After Dismal Earnings, Sunk Stock Price and Shrinking Options? | Analysis appeared first on TheWrap.

From her friendships with power players like Disney’s Dana Walden and CAA’s Bryan Lourd, to her connections to a network of Black creatives like Beyoncé, Octavia Spencer and producer Reggie Hudlin and his wife Chrisette, to common cause with advocates for LGBTQ rights and climate protection, Harris is practically without peer in being able to mobilize an army of cultural influence to propel forward her historic bid for the presidency.

That army has wasted no time moving into gear. 

Beyoncé gave Harris the rights to use her song “Freedom” for rally walk-ins this week. George Clooney endorsed Harris on Tuesday, and she received $7 million in donations from Netflix co-fouder Reed Hastings. 

But that’s the least of it. The abrupt rise of her candidacy sent a jolt through Hollywood, driving a new flood of donations and drawing together an energized power base that has known Harris for more than a decade, since she ran for California attorney general in 2010.

“As California Attorney General, she was very much a rising star so that helped her tap into Hollywood,” Dan Morain, author of the 2021 Harris biography “Kamala’s Way,” said in an interview with TheWrap. 

“Every Democrat in Hollywood’s going to be with her now,” he continued, noting that she and husband Doug Emhoff live in Los Angeles’ tony Brentwood neighborhood, “so she would have more contacts in LA now than she did as a San Francisco-based attorney.” 

The Hollywood list of Harris donors since then is a Who’s Who of politically engaged power players: JJ Abrams, David Geffen, Casey Wasserman, Aaron Sorkin and Jamie Foxx. Many of them gave to her successful 2016 Senate campaign, and practically every major studio donated to her disastrous presidential primary campaign in 2019.

Influential figures in Black and Brown Hollywood who are already vocal in their support of Harris include not just the Hudlins and Spencer, but Mindy Kaling, Kerry Washington, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Spike Lee, among many others. 

Christy Haubegger, the firecracker former head of inclusion and communications at WarnerMedia and previously a top inclusion executive at CAA, is consulting to the Harris campaign, TheWrap has learned. 

To some degree, this will set Harris up to be criticized as a captive of soft Hollywood liberals, as the Clintons were in the 1990s when Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen would stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. 

But Hollywood support is nonetheless crucial to Democratic candidates. And losing that support can be crushing, as George Clooney and Jeffrey Katzenberg proved in recent weeks, when Clooney called for Biden to step down in a New York Times op-ed, and Biden campaign co-chair Katzenberg had to deliver the message to the president that donors were pulling out in droves.

On a livestream call on Sunday with some 40,000 women of color — which included Beyoncé’s publicist Yvette Noel-Schure, “Professional Troublemaker” author Luvvie Ajayi Jones, as well as industry insiders, publicists, influencers and journalists — Harris energized one enormous part of her power base.  

“People aren’t necessarily thinking about this as a Democrat or Republican winning. It’s like good and evil,” said one influential Hollywood journalist, who was on the call but declined to be identified. “So with Hollywood, more people than usual will be stepping up and speaking out. It’s not about alienating fan bases this time. It’s like, ‘If she doesn’t win, I won’t have a career or life to come back to because we will be dead.’”

She added: “It was giving ‘Ok, ladies, now let’s get in formation,’” the journalist said. “This is what must be done, failure is not an option.”

A longtime network

Harris also has a tight circle of powerful female friends in Hollywood that advise and support her, including Disney’s Walden, Amazon Studios chief Jen Salke and Sharon Klein, Disney’s head of TV casting. 

Walden is a particularly close friend of many years, having met and been friends since 1994, according to an individual close to Walden. The rise of the two women is indeed remarkable. While Harris finds herself catapulted into a race for the Oval Office, Walden is Disney Entertainment co-chairman and is seen as a potential heir to CEO Bob Iger.

As Puck pointed out this week, Walden and her husband, Matt are among the closest in the industry to Harris and Emhoff, along with Reggie and Chrisette Hudlin. 

At a 2022 fundraiser at the Waldens’ home, Harris recalled that the Hudlins introduced her on a blind date to Emhoff, after the Waldens introduced the Hudlins. “So, in many ways, Dana and Matt are responsible for my marriage,” she said according to the pool report. “But [they] have always been extraordinary friends.”

That said, Walden has stopped fundraising for her powerful friend, since as the head of Disney’s television business she runs ABC News, according to a knowledgeable Disney insider. (Though Donald Trump’s friendship with Rupert Murdoch hasn’t made Fox News shy about its support of the Republican candidate.) 

Still, the excitement is palpable on the Disney lot, says the insider. “Every woman that I know at Disney is over the moon right now,” this person said. “It feels like an exciting moment.”

Of course there are plenty of cynical reasons for Hollywood to stay close to Harris. She has been a heartbeat away from the presidency for three years, and is a direct line to the center of power in Washington.

“Hollywood likes proximity to power and no one is more powerful than the president,” said Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University film school. “She has a very good shot of being the next president. You’ll see people who may not have been her supporters come out of the woodwork.”

“All these people who supported Biden in Hollywood are going to switch to Kamala,” said Morain. “People believe that she actually stands a chance. Hollywood approaches things like the Oscars. If we think we can win with money, it’s no different.”

Natalie Korach contributed to this story.

The post Kamala Harris Has an Unprecedented Hollywood Power Base – and It’s Already Gone to Work for Her appeared first on TheWrap.