Good morning,

It was another fabulous week: Matt Belloni rolled his eyes at the HBO
Max “rebrand”; Kim Masters revisited Tom Cruise’s career death and revival; Eriq Gardner considered Jon Voight’s plan to save Hollywood; Julia Alexander evaluated Zaz’s post-NBA vision; Dylan Byers broke down the Original Sin fallout; John Ourand diagnosed the tariff-induced paralysis at the upfronts; Lauren Sherman pondered the
Arnaults’ Trump genuflection; Rachel Strugatz took the pulse of the beauty M&A market; Sarah Shapiro assessed the economics of a hot new mom brand; Marion Maneker surveyed the gigaweek art sales; and Julie Davich measured the Magritte deal heat.

Meanwhile, Julia Ioffe investigated a State Department micro-scandal; Peter Hamby revealed some depressing new
data for Dems; and Abby Livingston checked on the progress of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”

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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John Deere, an American blacksmith and inventor, founded our company in 1837 in Grand Detour, Illinois. We're proud to
have helped build America over the past two centuries by supporting farmers, ranchers, and construction crews — equipping them to feed, clothe, pave, plant, grow, harvest, and build our country from the ground up. Literally. We look forward to carrying forward our founder’s legacy of ingenuity as we continue building – and investing in – America. We were born here, and we’re here to stay.

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Lauren Sherman
digs into Bernard Arnault’s four-dimensional Trump negotiating chess.
and…
Sarah Shapiro inspects Donni’s growth plans while Rachel Strugatz
dissects an $880 million beauty deal.

Marion Maneker
combs through Sotheby’s and Phillips’ big sales.

and…

Julie Brener Davich captures the nuance of the surrealist market.

Matt Belloni
offers his readout from the upfronts and digests Zaz’s latest pivot.
and…

Kim Masters recalls how Tom Cruise got his groove
back.

meanwhile…
Eriq Gardner foreshadows a potential regulatory blockbuster.

Dylan Byers
gets to the bottom of a Jake Tapper–Hunter Biden beef.
and…
Julia Alexander deciphers Zaz’s sports media rights
strategy.
meanwhile…
John Ourand examines the chilling effect of tariffs on the upfronts.

Bill Cohan
presages the next steps in the Saks debt crisis.

Julia Ioffe
details a tie-related Foggy Bottom scandalette.
and…
Peter Hamby reveals some brutal new data on the Democratic Party.
meanwhile…
Abby Livingston
chronicles the latest Hill headaches due to the “big, beautiful bill.”

Jeff Collins, Fox’s head of ad sales, joins Dylan on
The Grill Room.
and…
John and Sara Fischer chew over ESPN’s streaming strategy on The Varsity.
and…
James Scully, the longtime casting director, and Lauren
discuss the evolution of the fashion industry on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and former Republican congressman David Jolly trade notes on Trump’s new, $400 million plane on Impolitic.
and…
Matt
hosts YouTube C.E.O. Neal Mohan to dissect the platform’s Hollywood ambitions on The Town.
and…
Peter and Abby preview the new Biden book on The
Powers That Be.

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Members of my generation—the so-called geriatric Millennials—are, in many ways, the middle children of the
culture. We grew up in a world shaped by the institutions of the Boomers, and yet we were just coming of age when everything started changing all at once. I was in college during 9/11, the dawn of Napster, and the nascent rivalry between Facebook and Myspace (the less said about Friendster the better). I graduated on a sweltering May afternoon, in 2004, when Google was preparing the road show for its I.P.O.

Even if we didn’t have the circumspection or life experience to articulate what we
were seeing around us, the fin de siècle generation sure understood that the world was shifting under our feet faster than our forebearers could grasp. Another one of the hallmarks of that era, of course, was HBO—definitively the most influential cultural brand on the planet.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

John Deere, an American blacksmith and inventor, founded our company in 1837 in Grand Detour, Illinois. We're proud to
have helped build America over the past two centuries by supporting farmers, ranchers, and construction crews — equipping them to feed, clothe, pave, plant, grow, harvest, and build our country from the ground up. Literally. We look forward to carrying forward our founder’s legacy of ingenuity as we continue building – and investing in – America. We were born here, and we’re here to stay.

Learn how we’re moving America forward.

Everyone already knows this, but HBO’s run during the late ’90s and early aughts was unparalleled in its
innovation and sheer excellence: not only The Sopranos and Sex and the City, but also The Wire, Oz, Six Feet Under, Curb, and even Arliss. In addition to the extraordinary slate, it was a beautifully managed business. HBO garnered extraordinary subscriber fees and retention rates by promising a couple of brilliant original series per quarter and otherwise filling its pipes with Pay 1 movies, boxing, original documentaries, etcetera.
I’m simplifying here, but you get the idea.

Alas, the consensual hallucinations of the Big Tech era—fueled by cheap cash, hyperactive growth, and the preponderance of both social and mobile—led various corporate overlords to try to inflate HBO from a network and brand into a veritable platform of its own. After the WarnerMedia assets were acquired by AT&T, HBO was led on a forced march to become another Netflix—more content, less prestige, and pronto. After AT&T forked over the Warner
assets to David Zaslav’s Discovery Communications as part of his publicly traded L.B.O., the industrial thesis was clear: HBO content would be a hood ornament atop the teeming and low-calorie Discovery reality portfolio—Dr. Pimple Popper, Guy Fieri, etcetera—on the path to inevitable streaming glory. In a memorable indignity, Zaz changed the name of his streaming service from HBO Max to simply Max, as if the company was worried that a sterling
reputation would decrease the TAM of the My 600-lb Life crowd.

This week, of course, Zaz renamed the service HBO Max—the latest volte-face for a company that has had as difficult a time predicting its future as executing against it. A pair of excellent Puck pieces help articulate this journey and explain both what was lost as well as what lies ahead. In The
Unofficial ’25 TV Upfront Awards, Matt Belloni expertly assessed the true meaning behind the name change. “It’s a very big deal to admit, two years after smashing HBO, Warner Bros., and CNN together with Discovery Communications in a $43 billion leveraged buyout, that actually the combined content offering didn’t move the needle very much,” Matt noted. “With notable exceptions, most of the cheapo, lean-back Discovery shows that Zaslav built his linear career on
don’t matter nearly as much in an on-demand ecosystem where the Max service is not the first choice for consumers. Turns out, most of that stuff is deadweight.” Meanwhile, the time spent learning all this has created other headaches. In Zaz’s Less-With-Less Strategy, available to members of Puck’s Inner Circle, Julia Alexander explained his limited
options as he contemplates spinning off his other, non-HBO cable assets.

Perhaps it’s possible that HBO had to endure some turbulence in order to reclaim its role in the culture. And maybe Zaz & Co. had to endure their own period of trial and error in order to recognize that HBO was never going to front a Netflix competitor. A quarter-century into our media transformation, the brand formerly known as Home Box Office has ended up where it belonged—which is more than you can say for its
competitors, like Showtime. If the Boomer era was defined by familiar postwar institutions, this new era is simply about inevitable, and constant, change. That really is the story of our time, so familiar to people my age, and precisely what you can expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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