Business Features
Inside the Battle Over Fran Drescher’s “Robin Hood Fund”
In the final days of the SAG-AFTRA contract negotiations, when pressure was closing in on the guild to end what had been a crippling, nearly six month work stoppage, union president Fran Drescher was holding onto an unusual demand, one that most guild members knew nothing about. Drescher wanted a fund over which SAG had […]
- By
Why the Dying DVD Business Could Be Headed for a Resurrection
This year has been a melancholic one for collectors of physical media. DVDs and Blu-ray discs, once a source of billions in revenue for Hollywood companies, are at risk of becoming obsolete, or at least irrelevant. The first blow came at the end of September, when Netflix mailed its last DVD (a copy of the […]
- By
“It’s a Dead End”: TV Writers Assistants Lose Hope for Post-Strike Career Advancement
Although landing any Hollywood gig will always be a challenge, those who work as writers assistants and in other support staff roles within the television-writing ecosystem have found this moment particularly dire. The writers strike is over, and rooms for broadcast hits have reopened, but few jobs in this space have surfaced since then, and […]
- By
Everyone Wants Their Own ‘Drive to Survive’
If you’re a sports league or a superstar athlete, it used to be that you wanted all eyes to be on the field, court or track. Now, the real action occurs as much after the game’s over, with cameras still rolling. The runaway success of Netflix’s Formula 1 docuseries Drive to Survive and golf docuseries […]
- By
Fran Drescher’s Role of a Lifetime
In the heat of the actors strike that had ground Hollywood to a halt for months, Fran Drescher told the 34 members of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee a story about an aikido student in Japan who gets into a tiff with a drunk on a train. Throughout the strike, it has been Drescher’s practice to often […]
- By
From Private Jets to Security Spending: Breaking Down Hollywood CEO Perks
Everyone in the business knows that CEOs at big media and entertainment companies get lavish pay packages: nearly always eight figures, and sometimes nine if there’s a big deal involved (like Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos’ $38 million haul last year, or WBD CEO David Zaslav’s infamous $246 million haul in 2021). Their compensation has been scrutinized amid […]
- By
Why Hollywood Is in the Throes of an IP Frenzy
In mid-May, with the writers strike still in its infancy, UTA partner and media rights co-head Jason Richman found himself trying to gauge the industry’s appetite for dealmaking. A few years earlier, indie studio A24 had scooped up the rights to his client David Gauvey Herbert’s 2021 Esquire article, “Daddy Ball,” but the option had […]
- By
Why Netflix Wants to Make It 2013 Again
By the time the final episode of The Office aired on May 16, 2013, the NBC sitcom already had inked lucrative TV syndication deals. And its parent company, NBCUniversal, had decided to sell the streaming rights, too, to Netflix. Over the next few years, Netflix’s subscriber base discovered the show, ultimately forcing NBCU to buy back […]
- By
The NFL’s Taylor Swift Era: Who Wins the Most?
While the summer of 2023 had a blockbuster with Barbenheimer, fall is in the nascent stages of its own phenomenon. Call it: Football (Taylor’s Version). This NFL season has been anything but ordinary thanks to superstar Taylor Swift, who has attended two Kansas City Chiefs games after being linked with the team’s All-Pro tight end, […]
- By
‘Daredevil’ Hits Reset Button as Marvel Overhauls Its TV Business
It didn’t take long to see the problem after Marvel Studios’ Daredevil: Born Again paused production in mid-June during the writers strike. Fewer than half of the series’ 18 episodes had been shot, but it was enough for Marvel executives, including chief Kevin Feige, to review the footage and come away with a clear-eyed assessment: […]
- By
AI Tech Is Now Mainstream. What Could Go Wrong?
Charlie Puth had a problem: He’d written a lyric, “a little ditty,” but didn’t know what to do with those lines. The “Left and Right” singer-songwriter had joined a Google AI incubator program, so he fed the new lyrics into the artificial intelligence-assisted tool “like I would do if I were collaborating with anybody else,” […]
- By
What Big Moves Are Left for Lachlan Murdoch?
Rupert Murdoch’s American media empire was forged in dealmaking. The mogul transformed a regional newspaper business into a juggernaut through acquisitions, perhaps most notably the 20th Century Fox Film Corp. in 1985 and Dow Jones (owner of The Wall Street Journal) in 2007. But he also knew when to sell. Murdoch split his companies in […]
- By