Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon assortment of Puck’s best new reporting.

First up today, Matt Belloni hands out his annual ignominious accolade: Hollywood’s Villain of the Year. While there were plenty of worthy contenders this year, none was more deserving than OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman, who unleashed Sora 2 with no meaningful copyright guardrails and, Matt argues, a stunning level of arrogance. What’s worse, thanks to a landmark licensing pact with Disney, Altman has gone from industry pariah to studio partner, with fresh leverage to bring the rest of Hollywood to heel…

Plus, below the fold: Lauren Sherman crowns her own fashion industry Villain of the Year. Abby Livingston foreshadows a Tea Party 2.0 as Zohran Mamdani begins to flex his political influence. And John Ourand explains how the unbearable Jake Paul–Anthony Joshua fight was nevertheless a perfect fit with Netflix’s live sports strategy.

Meanwhile, on the pods: Dylan Byers is joined by Katie Couric on The Grill Room to discuss the creator economy and journalism’s Trump-era integrity crisis. On The Town, Matt and Lucas Shaw offer part two of their annual Townie Awards. On Fashion People, Lauren and esteemed celebrity stylist Jamie Mizrahi break down her recent string of high-profile gigs. And on a special episode of The Powers That Be, Dylan and Julia Alexander rank OpenAI’s Sora 2 versus Meta’s Vibes.

HOLLYWOOD

A year before the OpenAI C.E.O. gets the Social Network movie treatment, the slop-ification of entertainment took a major leap in 2025 thanks to a copyright infringement hub called Sora 2 and Altman’s brazen courtship of Disney.

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FASHION

The demanding, annoying, and increasingly necessary “client”—from the desperate poseur buying the Louis Vuitton money clip to the oil heiress dropping $500,000 on a custom couture look. Like entertainment, politics, and media, the fashion industry has been laid low by the depths of post-monoculture influencer economics.

WASHINGTON

Dan Goldman, the popular resistance-lib congressman repping downtown Manhattan and much of brownstone Brooklyn, was a star on MSNBC. But in a year in which his rival was just endorsed by Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, Democrats fear he could be among the biggest names to fall in a Tea Party–style reckoning.

SPORTS

The Jake Paul–Anthony Joshua fight may have bored the in-arena crowd, but it perfectly illustrated Netflix’s live-sports playbook, where ringside celebrity, global reach, and social media chatter far outweigh the competition itself.

MEDIA

The one and only Katie Couric joins Dylan for a wide-ranging look back—and forward—at her career, from her stints at the Today show, CBS, and Yahoo to building her own media empire. She digs into the collapse of monoculture, the rise of a creator-driven media landscape, why authenticity matters now more than ever, maintaining journalistic integrity in an era of relentless political pressure—and much, much more.

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HOLLYWOOD

In part two of podcasting’s biggest night, Matt and Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw hand out the Executive Fail of the Year Award; the Savviest P.R. Move Award; the Mea Culpa I Was Wrong Award; the Suck It Haters, I Was Right Award; and the Biggest Self-Inflicted Wound Award. Then they declare which executive and talent won 2025.

FASHION

Lauren is joined today by red carpet savant Jamie Mizrahi, who styles everyone from Adele and Mia Goth to Pedro Pascal and Jeremy Allen White. They discuss her recent string of gigs; the sartorial allure of Zoë Kravitz and Harry Styles’s coupledom; the art of wearing your mom’s vintage dress à la Apple Martin, Kaia Gerber, and Lily-Rose Depp; the fashion in everyone’s favorite Christmas movie, Eyes Wide Shut; and the 1990s style of Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett.

HOLLYWOOD

In this special episode from the Grill Room archive, Julia and Dylan dive into the launch of OpenAI’s new video-generation app, Sora 2, and Mark Zuckerberg’s A.I. social media platform, Vibes. They explain why these releases have sent Hollywood into a state of not-so-mild panic, and how these A.I. platforms might reshape the media industry writ large. Then, they turn to the YouTube TV–NBCU carriage dispute and what it portends for similar industry battles going forward.

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