Welcome back to What I’m Hearing on this soggy opening day for baseball…

Reminder, if you’ve been forwarded this email, join the WIH community by clicking here. And Puck is a great gift to suck up to your boss or placate your long-suffering assistant.

Let’s get started…

• Which rage-prone Florida resident got a longer middle finger from Bob Iger this week: the laid-off Marvel terrorist Ike Perlmutter or Gov. Ron DeSantis? I’ll take DeSantis, who looks pretty stupid for allowing Disney to approve—in a public hearing—the instantly-iconic restrictions on oversight of the former Reedy Creek district. Disney was setting this up for weeks, I’m told, and while I’m no land use attorney, the upcoming legal and political fight will be amusing to watch. Also fun: This Disney Dish podcast episode (around 39:00 mark) from January where host Len Testa actually attended the hearing and could kinda tell what was coming.
• Box office over/under: I can’t believe this, but I’m gonna take the over on the $30 million tracking for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Brand awareness, the 89 percent RT score, and not much else out there for families.

First, the topic of the moment…

I won’t summarize Fleiss’s well-known Bachelor scandals—resisting diverse contestants; that civil rights complaint claiming outright race bias; allegedly beating his pregnant wife (he denied it); waging a war on his Malibu neighbor David Charvet that included “loud barking sounds emanating from loudspeakers in the wee hours of the morning.” Behind the scenes, Fleiss has always been a consensus first-round pick for Reality TV’s All-Asshole team, not to mention a classic right-place right-time guy.

By most accounts smart and savvy, Fleiss happened to be pitching shows during that crazy 1999-2002 period when the juggernaut broadcast formats that still define the genre—Survivor, American Idol, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Big Brother, and The Bachelor—all debuted. He initially brought a dark genius to the concept of women desperately jockeying for a man, and in those early years he constantly pushed to up the humiliation and shock value, all while packaging the degradation as wish-fulfillment, fantasy romance and soap opera. Then he rode that Bachelor franchise train for two decades, never creating another hit show.

What’s probably less known is how vindictive Fleiss has been toward colleagues over the years, especially as the franchise flourished. When producer SallyAnn Salsano left the show after its early success, Fleiss vowed to destroy her, according to two sources who worked on Bachelor. Instead, she created Jersey Shore and sold her company to Fremantle for millions. (Salsano didn’t return my email.) When another Bachelor handler I won’t name left for a much better job with Mark Burnett, Fleiss lashed out at her husband, who also worked on the show, and refused to renew his deal. That kind of garbage.

In more recent years, Fleiss has been a more sporadic presence on the Bachelor shows, but he was still around and influential. It’s kinda amazing to think that there wasn’t a Black Bachelor until Matt James in 2021—a situation that spun out of control and led to host Chris Harrison’s exit—and no Black lead at all until Rachel Lindsay in 2017. In recent years, ratings for all the Bachelor shows have waned; this week’s finale averaged just 3.2 million same-day viewers, way down from last year’s 4.7 million and waaay down from the heyday. Despite industrywide declines, Fleiss would blame the erosion on the show’s efforts to diversify, even trying to edit Black people out of scenes. He also made moo-ing sounds when he saw a contestant he thought was overweight, according to one show source. Classy guy.

So why is Fleiss out now? According to two sources close to the show, the Warners inquiry began with complaints about casting. Mirabello and her team started with casting executive Lacey Pemberton, who ended up leaving the franchise, and it quickly led to Fleiss—and specifically, some racially biased casting directives he had allegedly made. In addition, Martin Hilton, a longtime Bachelor executive producer, had been an effective buffer between Fleiss and the rest of the staff. But Hilton’s relationship with Fleiss broke down less than a year ago, and when Hilton left, Fleiss interacted more with other producers and staff. Not good.

At some point, ABC unscripted executive Rob Mills, Fleiss’s longtime friend, who in later years worked with Fleiss to try to diversify the show, wanted to give Fleiss an ABC development deal. But that was scrapped when the investigation began.

And now he’s gone. Fleiss, in his ridiculous farewell statement, praised the choice of Claire Freeland, Jason Ehrlich, and Bennett Graebner as the show’s new shepherds—as if Fleiss himself was the showrunner being replaced. But those hires are also raising eyebrows because others who have been with the franchise longer had wanted a shot at the top jobs.

I’m not gonna go deep on Bachelor politics, except to say that several current Bachelor employees are looking at their own possible claims and have engaged attorney Bryan Freedman, the same lawyer that represented Harrison in his exit from the show, as well as Fleiss’s ex wife. Susie Arons, Fleiss’s publicist, declined to comment, as did Warner Bros. and ABC. But Fleiss did send me a statement in which he says he’s “proud of the work we’ve done over the past five years to make the show substantially more diverse, but I do believe I could have done more. Hopefully, the franchise will continue to move in the right direction.”

Now to a big shift in the awards landscape…

It’s all being kept quiet for now, but the Oscars are poised to enact one of the most significant rules changes in the Academy’s recent history, potentially adding a new theatrical distribution requirement for films to be eligible for best picture. According to a plan that is said to be supported by Academy C.E.O. Bill Kramer, and which must still be approved by the 54-member board of governors at its meeting in late April, films will need to play in theaters in 15 or 20 of the top 50 markets in the U.S. to be eligible. That would surely bring smiles to executive suites at the theater chains and the traditional studios, and frowny-faces to the leadership of Netflix.

The Academy declined to comment, but here’s what’s going on, based on my conversations this week with studio executives and Oscars insiders. For the past few months, and really since Kramer took over for Dawn Hudson last summer, the Academy has been talking with studios, streamers, and small distributors about how to better leverage the Oscars to promote moviegoing. The Academy has always tried to stay out of the business of movies, but it does maintain a requirement—relaxed during the pandemic, but reinstated last year—that films play theatrically for at least a week in one of six markets: L.A., New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, or Atlanta. A streamer can put the film online day-and-date, but it can’t stream it before it appears in a theater.

That’s a pretty minimal theatrical requirement, and Kramer and some governors want to mandate a bigger footprint. The goal isn’t to hurt streaming, they argue, but to support elements of the art form—especially crafts like sound and visual effects—that were designed for theaters. The move would effectively force distributors to play their Oscar contenders everywhere from Orlando to San Diego—at least in one theater, or a handful of theaters, in 15 to 20 markets.

Seems reasonable, right? Sure, 300 films qualified for best picture this year, so there’s a question about whether the cost of multi-market releases will exclude some low-budget movies, and whether the shrinking number of U.S. theaters can absorb all these awards movies in December, when blockbusters like Avatar: The Way of Water and Spider-Man: No Way Home often hog screens. But the move would give audiences greater access to these films in the venues in which they were meant to be seen, and maybe generate more interest in the Oscars outside the bicoastal elites. Plus, one source says the Academy has been assured by the National Association of Theatre Owners that capacity wouldn’t be a problem.

To that end, Netflix has quickly become the outlier here—or, as Sarandos would say, a differentiated product with a singular business model. Netflix rejects big theatrical plays outside of awards requirements or when a filmmaker has leverage to extract a concession. I’m told that Netflix film chief Scott Stuber has been briefed on the Academy’s plans. I haven’t talked about this with Stuber, but I’m betting he might actually support the move—he’s told talent he wants Netflix to do more theatrical experiments—but his boss, chief content officer Bela Bajaria, plus Sarandos, co-C.E.O. Greg Peters and especially co-founder Reed Hastings are allergic to theaters.

Anyway, it’s not guaranteed that the Kramer-backed plan passes. Netflix has spent the past decade royally sucking up to the Academy, with Sarandos serving as chair of the Academy Museum. A quick perusal of the Academy’s board of governors reveals extensive ties to Netflix. Academy president Janet Yang’s most recent credit was on the Netflix animated film Over the Moon. Vice president/Treasurer David Linde runs Participant Media, which sells tons of projects to Netflix. And everyone from Ava DuVernay (When They See Us) to Susanne Bier (Bird Box) to the various craftspeople either have or would like to have business there. A Netflix-led coalition could kill this.

But I’m told Kramer thinks he has the votes to enact at least some kind of expansion of the theatrical requirement. And a couple top studio executives I spoke with were aware of the discussion and think it’s going to happen. Some want to go even further and require a theatrical window, meaning a film could not be nominated for best picture unless it played exclusively in 15 to 20 markets for at least a week or two. That would be an even bigger eff you to Netflix, and probably a bridge too far for the board at this point. Some also want to exclude “four-walling” (meaning the distributor rents out the theater) or require a marketing spend. Both options are unlikely to win support.

The Academy is not a governing body for Hollywood. However, in the past few years it has used the power of the Oscars to advocate for diversity by requiring certain race and gender inclusion to be eligible for the awards. So, the thinking goes, why not apply that same rationale to saving the theatrical business, itself? So what if it annoys Netflix, which, despite its generous donation to the museum and its fancy movie theater, is now the only company that openly does not believe in theaters. Sarandos can hold his nose and spend a little more money putting his awards films in multiplexes. Or maybe Netflix is so focused on producing gourmet cheeseburgers these days, it will simply take a step back from the Oscar game.

See you Sunday,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or an invite to your Dodgers Dugout Club seats? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.