The Vanity Fair Endgame, Putin’s Forever War, MLB’s Sophie’s Choice
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Happy Friday and welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to Puck’s best new reporting.
Today, we lead with Matt Belloni’s second annual survey of Gen Z moviegoers, assessing which stars actually mean something to Zoomers (Zendaya? Madelyn Cline? Lola Tung?), their candid thoughts on the Marvel and DC universes, how they view Netflix films vs. Hulu TV shows, and much, much more. Hollywood might want to take notes…
Plus, below the fold: Julia Ioffe charts the bleak implications of Monday’s two-hour Trump-Putin call. John Ourand examines the frenzied media rights negotiations across the mid-tier sports market. And for Inner Circle members, Lauren Sherman offers a comprehensive power ranking of the purported candidates for Vanity Fair’s next editor-in-chief.
Meanwhile, on the pods: Dylan Byers and Julia Alexander reunite on The Grill Room to discuss OpenAI’s 10-figure partnership with legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive. Matt is joined by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg on The Town for a deep dive into their Apple TV+ series, The Studio. On Fashion People, Lauren rings up Erin and Sara Foster to discover how they built a successful apparel brand without traditional fashion credentials. And on The Powers That Be, Leigh Ann Caldwell and Julia Ioffe dissect the Oval Office shit show with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
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Matthew Belloni |
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A reprisal of my conversation with a group of teen movie watchers about what they like, the stars they watch, and the franchises that move the needle.
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Julia Ioffe |
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The Trump White House is belatedly recognizing what the foreign policy world has understood for years: Putin has no interest in ending the war in Ukraine until he gets exactly what he wants. And he’s prepared to out-suffer the West to get it.
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John Ourand |
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The current market for new sports media deals suggests that we’ve entered an era of belt-tightening for everyone besides the NFL. Now Major League Baseball, in particular, will have to choose between awareness and pure cash.
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Lauren Sherman |
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The scroll of contenders for the VF job is becoming endless—a bizarre, if unsurprising, phenomenon for a career-defining-ish role that the right people want to ignore and the wrong people covet, and that will be handed out by an inscrutable duo who won’t be in their chairs forever.
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Dylan Byers |
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Julia Alexander returns to discuss OpenAI joining forces with Jony Ive, the legendary iPhone designer, to build an entirely new, A.I.-powered device category. Then Julia and Dylan exchange notes about ESPN’s monumental pivot from a cable TV brand into a full-fledged app and direct-to-consumer platform.
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Matthew Belloni |
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Matt is joined by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the writer-director duo behind The Studio, to discuss how the show came together, what the show gets right and wrong about Hollywood, which characters are based on real people, and why the show presented a different challenge than anything they had ever worked on before. Matt finishes the show with an opening weekend box office prediction for Lilo & Stitch.
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Lauren Sherman |
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Erin and Sara Foster join Lauren on the pod to share how they built Favorite Daughter into a smash-hit apparel line, despite not being fashion people themselves. They also discuss how the success of Nobody Wants This, Erin’s hit Netflix show (that Sara also produced), propelled Favorite Daughter further in unexpected ways, and why everything they do—podcast, investing, TV, fashion—works in tandem. The trio also discuss Montana Avenue moms and black v-neck sweaters.
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Leigh Ann Caldwell |
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Julia Ioffe |
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Julia Ioffe joins guest host Leigh Ann Caldwell to unpack the fallout from Trump’s two-hour call with Putin earlier this week: Trump’s growing frustration with the Ukraine conflict, his willingness to hand it off to Europe, and the chilling implications for President Zelensky. Then, they turn to the Oval Office debacle with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, as Julia emphasizes the administration’s promotion of white supremacy theories—and their broader white supremacist agenda.
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