The filmmaker’s Artificial, dumped by the Amazon wusses—sorry, prudent entertainment product managers—after the company’s $50 billion deal with Sam Altman’s OpenAI, finally found a distributor in Neon… which is way better than Amazon at releasing this kind of movie, anyway.

A little more on the deal…

Amazon is basically giving this movie away. Per multiple sources, Neon is paying no money but is committing to a robust $15 million in P&A spend (marketing and releasing costs). That’s much less than even the $10 million opening bid from rival distributor Mubi. They likely would have gone higher, but Amazon wasn’t looking to get paid up front for this one, so CAA didn’t even counter Mubi.

Ever since Amazon’s Mike Hopkins first called CAA’s Bryan Lourd to tell him the company couldn’t release the movie, Hopkins has been trying to save face with Hollywood while still serving his tech masters in Seattle. This deal potentially accomplishes the goal.

Artificial cost about $46 million to produce, with nearly $20 million in production rebates coming from Italy, where a lot of it was shot. Amazon could write off much of the remaining spend, and help the filmmakers, if it got nothing for the movie, so it was offloaded. If Neon’s Tom Quinn can generate real box office and international sales for the film, Amazon would recoup its costs (minus Neon’s distribution fees and expenses), and maybe Guadagnino and stars Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, and Yura Borisov would even make their promised backends. More likely, Neon will leverage the subject matter and controversy into a bunch of attention for the movie this fall, and hopefully gross enough to justify its spend, but Amazon won’t recoup and will write off its losses. And Luca will get his theatrical release.

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This isn’t exactly a happy ending. I’m told several distributors expressed interest in Artificial during the recent sales process only to backtrack or disappear, suggesting a pretty disgraceful chill around town—even if this movie turns out to not be potential Oscar bait. (I haven’t seen it, and as I wrote last week, distributor reaction at screenings was mixed.) The next question: Could Disney block Artificial from appearing on Hulu? Neon’s current two-year Pay 1 output deal with Hulu is about to expire, but negotiations for a renewal are happening now. I’m told that if that renewal closes, Artificial will indeed appear on Hulu after its theatrical run. For now, at least. (Amazon, Neon, and CAA declined to comment.)

“I didn’t make the 15,000 closest friends.”
—Dave Chappelle, on CNN, lamenting not being invited to the Swift/Kelce wedding.

Now Kim takes the temperature in Universal City…

$112 billion
Global media and entertainment deal volume in the first six months of the year, the highest level since 2021. [LSEG/WSJ]

349.4 million
Movie tickets sold domestically in the first half of 2026, up from 318.3 million in 2025. [EntTelligence]

48 percent
Share of U.S. World Cup viewers who opted for the Spanish-language broadcasts on Telemundo and Peacock through 72 matches. [MPN]

2.5 years
Prison sentence for director Carl Rinsch, who was convicted of defrauding Netflix of $11 million for an unfinished show. [AP]

$10.71 million
Fees paid to the Trumps for Amazon’s Melania, plus another $521,000 to license the first lady’s memoir. [Trump Financial Disclosure]

4
Mentions of pitchman Danny DeVito in the Jersey Mike’s I.P.O. filing. [Axios/Form S-1]

Now here’s Kim on Armie…

Late last month, Armie Hammer attracted a level of buzz he had not seen in years—at least not for an onscreen performance. The actor, whose once-promising career was derailed by a #MeToo-era cancellation, plays the starring role in Citizen Vigilante, a low-budget shock film from German provocateur Uwe Boll, sometimes cited as the world’s worst director. So how did Hammer feel about finally being in a film that grabbed international attention? “The first time he saw it, he was in tears,” a source in Hammer’s camp told me. And not tears of joy. “He called me and said, ‘Fuck. This is hateful, disgusting.’”

Citizen Vigilante, a kind of Death Wish on steroids in which Hammer plays an American businessman on a manhunt, largely for immigrants, has become a cause célèbre of the reactionary right this spring. After Germany blocked it from theaters on the grounds that it was anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim, Elon Musk posted it in full for two days on X, generating enough publicity to propel it to number one on Apple and Amazon—this just days after Musk was criticized for promoting rhetoric that allegedly helped spark anti-immigrant riots in Belfast. (The film had a limited theatrical release as well.) Had the actor starred in the movie without reading the script? Did he not grasp the nature of the film in which he played the vigilante?

“I think he knew it certainly leaned toward the right, but Uwe works in a very frantic way,” the Armie insider said. “It’s not like he sent him a hundred-page script. When he saw the final product, he was, ‘That was not the movie I thought we made,’ and he freaked the fuck out.” And Armie was desperate for work, this person continued. (Indeed, in a Hollywood Reporter feature published in the run-up to the film’s release, Hammer recalled receiving a scant 50-page script from Boll, and described his mindset at the time: “I would have done a fucking cat food commercial.” (An attorney for Hammer did not respond to requests for comment.)

I’d heard that before—from Armie, himself, who has been trying to mount a comeback from his 2021 cancellation over allegations ranging from kinky sex to sexual assault. (He has acknowledged being emotionally abusive but denied other claims.) Early in 2024, I found myself sitting opposite him at lunch as he weighed his best path forward. Armie had been living in the Caymans, where he had spent much of his childhood, but he had returned to Los Angeles. A Hollywood insider, who believed Hammer was earnestly trying to improve himself, thought that it might be helpful for him to do an on-the-record interview with me—a journalist who had broken a number of #MeToo stories. Perhaps it would show that he was prepared to confront the allegations against him honestly and sincerely. The liaison also believed that my reporting might reveal that some of the accusations were shaky or even false. Maybe that would smooth a path for an established director to hire him?

I was somewhat hesitant about this plan. Armie had already done a long interview (with Air Mail, now our sister brand), but that hadn’t won him a reprieve: no agency had represented him since he was dropped by WME, and he wasn’t getting any work. I imagined there could be blowback just for giving him a platform, and it would probably be worse if my reporting exonerated him even in a small way. Still, my reporter’s curiosity won out.

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The lunch was about an hour of semi-awkward small talk. Armie is so distractingly handsome that it may explain why certain industry people have waited in the wings, unofficially advising him, to see what acting work might yet come his way. Surely, they think, there must still be some hits left in that bat. Armie told me that he had not inherited a family fortune and was very much in need of money. He had tried selling timeshares in the Caymans, but said that the government wouldn’t license him. At that point, he said he was working as a sober companion, helping addicts and alcoholics stay on the straight and narrow.

In the weeks following the lunch, Armie came up with one reason after another for postponing a decision about that on-the-record interview. Finally he called to say he wasn’t ready to commit, which was something of a relief. Not long after that, he did an interview with Piers Morgan. (Piers or me? You decide.) He went on a podcast called Painful Lessons. He started his own podcast. Then he agreed to play the lead in Citizen Vigilante, for which I’m told he was paid in the ballpark of $250,000.

This wasn’t exactly the careful next step that his associates would have recommended to rebuild his career. Now that he’s done it, the person in his camp told me, “Look at the results of the movie, but please don’t watch it. It’s breaking through because it’s very extreme, but it’s also a testament to his star power.” Maybe, though, Elon’s star power had something to do with it, too.

Since then, Armie has shot a handful of small movies, including Night Driver, an ultra-low-budget (less than $1 million) thriller written and directed by John Bevilacqua. And he appears with Josh Lucas in Rockets Red Glare, about the founding of JPL, directed by Chinese actress and screenwriter Luo Yan. But the source in Armie’s camp said finding a small independent movie that can break through is like “looking for a needle in a haystack.” The way back, he said, would be for an established director to cast Armie—someone like Luca Guadagnino, who did well when Armie agreed to take a chance on Call Me by Your Name. Of course, Guadagnino has had some troubles of his own recently, with After the Hunt bombing and Artificial having gotten dumped by Amazon MGM.

Meanwhile a sequel to Citizen Vigilante is already in preproduction. I asked whether Armie is planning to reprise his role, given how appalled he is said to have been at the original. “It would have to be life-changing money,” the source said. “Everyone has a breaking point.”

Sky’s $2.1 billion takeover of ITV only reminds everyone that Comcast paid nearly $40 billion for Sky back in 2018, one of the great overpays of all time. [WSJ]

First, Disneyland offered a $59 evening ticket, now it’s $71 for Anaheim residents. Something tells me Disney parks’ attendance numbers this quarter needed major goosing, especially with the World Cup distracting families. [L.A. Times]

Scott Mendelson isn’t worried about Minions and Monsters after the subpar $62 million domestic opening over the five-day holiday. [Outside Scoop]

More: I know the supposed reasons: Minions fatigue after Universal and Illumination rushed this one into theaters after just a two-year break…World Cup and Toy Story 5 competition for attention… a studio distracted by other summer tentpoles The Odyssey and Disclosure Day. But is it possible this movie was actually too good for its core audience? Critics loved it (91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes… far above the other Minions movies), but my 10-year-old Minion lover was confused by the silent-era Hollywood setting, and the marketing had no choice but to show that this one was different.

The final days of Tom Colicchio’s Craft. [Esquire]

The decline of second season viewership on Netflix made me want to see the completion rates on those first seasons. [Bloomberg]

You will not believe this, but a studio tested competing cuts of a troubled superhero movie. [THR]

Just in time to keep the NFL happy, Nielsen will rejigger its ratings system to better account for co-viewing. [Front Office Sports]

I support Amanda Dobbins’s ranking of L.A. movie theater parking lots, except she left off the Ovation Hollywood hellscape under the Chinese Theatre. [Hobbies]

Very nice of Michael Rubin to move his White Party so attendees like Mike Tyson, Jake Paul, and the Kardashians could not attend the Swift wedding. [Page Six]

Netflix’s balls… bigger than Paramount’s?: When Paramount+ shelved its completed JonBenét Ramsey show last fall, execs cited legal issues with the limited series, which stars Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen. After all, the company’s CBS News had years earlier settled a $750 million defamation case brought by Ramsey’s brother over a docuseries on the beauty queen’s 1996 death. So when Netflix picked up The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey last week, I figured producer 101 Studios had agreed to make cuts or changes for the lawyers. Nope! Netflix bought the show as is. As Eriq Gardner has noted, Netflix seems to care less than other Hollywood players about getting sued. So here, either Paramount has less stomach for controversy… or streaming chief Cindy Holland—a former Netflix-er—just didn’t want the show.

Nothing good this week. Remember to email me your takes!

Sony’s Insidious: Out of the Further could avoid the late-August-dumping-ground curse, according to the latest early tracking chart from The Quorum…

Have a great week,
Matt

Correction: Last Monday’s mention of the 34 million who watched UFC Freedom 250 should have said across all broadcasters worldwide, not just on Paramount+. Apologies.

Maya Tribbitt contributed research for this issue.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or Sun Valley vest critiques? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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