Good morning,

As always, it was an extraordinary week: Matt Belloni chronicled a Netflix power play and evaluated David Ellison’s UFC ambitions; Julia Alexander divined the young mogul’s streaming master plan; Eriq Gardner and Ian Krietzberg revised Hollywood’s A.I. doom-and-gloom narrative; John Ourand heralded CBS Sport’s new swagger; Dylan Byers previewed the dawn of a new media era; Bill Cohan pondered Trump’s appetite for Wall Street revenge; Lauren Sherman diagnosed Gap’s challenges; Rachel Strugatz juxtaposed Gwyneth and Martha’s beauty plays; Sarah Shapiro scrutinized the Khaite business model; Marion Maneker ranked the hottest artists in the middle market; and Julie Davich got the readout from Monterey’s car playground.

Meanwhile, Julia Ioffe prophesied the Trump-Putin endgame; Leigh Ann Caldwell examined John Cornyn’s moment of truth; John Heilemann chatted with Rep. Garcia about his third-term anxieties; and Abby Livingston delved into the Epstein recess questions.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

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Lauren Sherman offers a grab bag of delights: notes on the Vogue succession game; an analysis of Gap Inc.’s business, and scenes from the Susan Plagemann-WME divorce.
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Rachel Strugatz compares the agonies and ecstasies of Gwyneth Paltrow and Martha Stewart.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro details Khaite’s ascent.

Marion Maneker digs into proprietary data on all the auction action under $500,000.
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Julie Davich goes shopping for a $23 million McLaren.

Matt Belloni explains the profundity of Ellison’s $7.7 billion UFC play and laments a Sony bag-fumbling.
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Scott Mendelson divvies up the credit for Warner Bros.’s hot summer at the box office.
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Eriq Gardner, Ian Krietzberg, and Julia Alexander trade notes on the perils of A.I. slop.
meanwhile…
Julia Alexander assesses the fate of Peacock.

Ian Krietzberg huddles up with the Character.AI C.E.O. and sorts through the GPT-5 wreckage.

Dylan Byers perspicaciously envisions the dawn of a new media age.
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John Ourand surveys David Berson’s offensive at CBS Sports.
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Julia Alexander dissects Paramount’s UFC-Sheridanverse strategy.

Bill Cohan captures Wall Street’s anxiety about Trump reprisals.

Leigh Ann Caldwell spotlights John Cornyn’s latest headache.
and…
Abby Livingston measures the Epstein recess tremors.
and…
Julia Ioffe imagines the endgame in Ukraine.

Dylan and the Ruthless guys discuss the podcast-cable intersection on The Grill Room.
and…
Axios’ Sara Fischer and Ourand predict the next sports media rights shoes to drop on The Varsity.
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Lauren and Marisa Meltzer update the girlboss discourse on Fashion People.
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John Heilemann and Rep. Robert Garcia game out Trump’s third-term strategy on Impolitic.
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Matt and the Times’s Brooks Barnes break down Cindy Holland’s Par+ plans on The Town.
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Peter Hamby and Lauren reassess the cultural power of a good magazine cover on The Powers That Be.

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On Monday morning, as a mid-August heat wave passed through the Northeast, I was texting with my partner John Ourand about the lineup for the upcoming issue of The Varsity, his excellent private email on the sports business. One of the recent themes of John’s work has been the chill in league rights deals. After the NBA’s astonishing $76 billion, 11-year agreement with Comcast, Disney, and Amazon, a seemingly mild recession set in: ESPN broke up with Major League Baseball, which has since struggled to find new partners at the same revenue tier, and even Formula 1 was hard pressed to bring bidders to the trough. (The league is allegedly closing in on a ~$150 million annual agreement with Apple TV+ for its U.S. rights.)

But it only takes a couple new data points to reset a market. Earlier this month, TKO’s WWE announced a historic five-year, $1.6 billion pact with Disney’s ESPN to air its Premium Live Events, like WrestleMania and the recently broadcast Summer Slam. (Naturally, WWE president Nick Khan exclusively conveyed the genesis of the deal to John on the Varsity podcast.) And while we were trading notes on Monday morning, John surfaced the motherlode: Less than a week into his ownership of Paramount, the young mogul David Ellison had brokered a seven-year rights deal for UFC, TKO’s other core business, for a staggering $7.7 billion. John told me he’d have the backstory by the afternoon, and we’d build The Varsity’s lineup around the news.

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After the Ellison deal came across the transom, it broke Puck’s internal Richter scale. After all, this was the sort of news event that encroached on so many power corners within our cinematic universe. My partners have been following Ellison’s pursuit of Paramount since Matt Belloni first broke the news more than a year and a half ago. The deal died with age, as you well know, only to be revived and nearly collapse several times more. Meanwhile, every vicissitude was eloquently chronicled in these digital pages by Matt, Bill Cohan, Dylan Byers, Julia Alexander, Kim Masters, and, of course, John. Indeed, Ellison’s new project occupied the true intersection of Hollywood, finance, technology, legacy media, and sports—and, if we’re being honest, the role of primogeniture in the increasingly gilded American oligopoly.

Unsurprisingly, the Ellison deal became the true leitmotif of this week at Puck, and in the best possible way. As promised, John delivered a piece on Monday afternoon, Ellison Goes on Offense, that traced the deal’s origins to a stray comment at The Sphere a year ago, back when Ellison’s Paramount conquest was far from certain. (What happens in Vegas…) Subsequently, Matt published his own well-informed thesis, Why Ellison Doubled Down on UFC, which popularized the view that the deal was as much a statement as an actual broadcast agreement.

John even followed up with his own reported perspective on what this meant for CBS, which has long been a dormant participant in sports rights outside its core portfolio of golf, the NFL, and March Madness. In a masterstroke, Julia Alexander saw in the deal the true ambitions of Ellison’s plans for his streamer. Here’s my favorite passage from her piece, Ellison, Ari & The Power of CBS. “Until now, Par+’s  most engaging assets outside of the NFL had been the Taylor Sheridan-verse and SpongeBob SquarePants,” Julia wrote. “But with the addition of UFC, we’re beginning to see a fuller picture of the streamer Ellison has in mind—a vaguely Trump-inflected mix of fight nights, Sheridan’s cowboys, and CBS cop shows supplemented by popular reality fare (Survivor, Amazing Race) and studio hits. Indeed, research firm YouGov found that top overlapping interests for Paramount+ fans included Fox News and Jesus Christ.”

I won’t build upon the tempting metaphorical opportunity, but Ellison’s vision for Paramount is becoming increasingly clear. In another media environment, a centibillionaire heir’s decision to plunk down NFL money for a niche red state sport might have elicited groans from Midtown to Beverly Hills. But Ellison, with his massive war chest and retinue of high-profile advisors, is telegraphing that he will spend and cut his way to a Paramount remade for the new age of streaming—and impossibly expensive sports rights. Soon after they finish their long-awaited integration, with its promised billions in savings on “efficiencies,” Ellison & Co. will have to turn their attention to their MLB rights and their NFL renewal.

Meanwhile, murmurs abound regarding what they might buy next. Kim has already previewed a Warner Bros. deal. Last night, in What I’m Hearing, Matt surfaced the hypothesis, put forth by well-wired sources, that New Paramount might even take on the whole pre-split Warner Bros. Discovery “enchilada.” All that’s certain is that Ellison’s journey will remake multiple industries at once. I say this often, but it has rarely been more true: This is one of the great stories of our time, and precisely what you can expect to consume voraciously in Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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