Welcome back to a shorter version of What I’m Hearing, still recovering from the caloric sack of bricks that is the Tom Cruise bundt cake. Thanks to two generous WIH readers, I finally ate a slice on Friday at a little tasting party I threw in honor of the town’s most coveted gift dessert, so here’s my review: I get it. Ultra-moist white filling with little chunks of melted white chocolate throughout, a coating of vanilla cream cheese frosting, and a layer of lightly toasted coconut on top. Definitely a dessert to die for (and be reincarnated 1,000 times with L. Ron Hubbard).

Programming note: This week on The Town, Lucas Shaw and I named the winners and losers of the year in streaming, analyst Rich Greenfield predicted what will happen to Comcast’s spun-off cable networks, and Sing Sing filmmakers Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar explained how they paid everyone on the movie the same fee. Subscribe here and here.

Gift a Puck membership! Click here. Got a news tip or an idea for me? Just reply to this email or message me on Signal at 310-804-3198.

Discussed in this issue: Gail Slater, David Zaslav, Josh D’Amaro, Larry Ellison, Stephen A. Smith, Cindi Berger, Bob Iger, Chris Nolan, Pat Kingsley, the Murdochs, Stephen King, and… Taylor Sheridan’s “unimaginable feat.”

But first…

Taylor Swift, who concluded the world’s first $2 billion-grossing concert tour.

David Zaslav, the soon-to-be-NBA-less Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O., who closed new carriage deals with Comcast’s Xfinity and Sky without getting channels dropped, though the fees for TNT and the others are either flat or up only slightly, depending on who you believe. Zaz’s friends in the media are cheering for him, but given inflation, flat would be down. Still, it could’ve been a lot worse, and that’s a win. The WBD stock dropped slightly today after shooting up double digits in the past month.

Stephen A. Smith, for extracting more than $20 million a year from ESPN, a declining business.

James, Lis, and Prudence Murdoch, for successfully beating back their father’s effort to hand control of his company to favored son Kendall—sorry, Lachlan—convincing a Nevada commissioner that Rupert “demonstrated a dishonesty of purpose and motive.”

Gail Slater, Trump’s seemingly very anti-Big Tech pick to run the Department of Justice antitrust division, who will hold extreme sway over M&A-happy media executives for four years.

Hmm… I’d say it’s gotta be T Swift. Now please go away and direct that Searchlight movie for a while.

Honorable (?) mention: Bob Iger, who somehow managed to get Disney, the company he’s still running, to name its new NYC headquarters the “Robert A. Iger Building.” (Maybe it’s somewhat less vain because he did already retire once.)

The New York Post, which is often a vehicle for mid-level G.O.P. operatives to launder their opinions, ran two stories this weekend questioning the role of CBS in the approval of Paramount’s pending sale to Skydance. Normally those articles would be eye-rollers, but I keep hearing that Trump’s outrage over the mis-edited 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris could lead to the D.O.J. extracting some CBS-related concessions in exchange for greenlighting the Skydance transaction. Unclear what those might be, but given that Larry Ellison, the money behind the Paramount deal, has been spending enough time at Mar-a-Lago to get himself featured in a front-page Times story on the Trump transition team, a full kibosh on the deal seems highly unlikely.

Many, many questions here, but first: Lis needed Succession to tell her to make a plan for the death of her then-92-year-old, media mogul father??

Great news for producers of porn and slasher flicks: Popeye, Buck Rogers, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury lead the 2025 class of copyrighted works falling into public domain. [Copyright Lately]

Joe Adalian asks whether the integration of Hulu and ESPN on Disney+ is the first step toward those apps going away? [Vulture]

Some personal news: I’m going on my first Disney cruise over the holidays. Josh D’Amaro just needs a few hundred thousand more of me to meet the $12 billion in ship capacity he’s unleashing. [WSJ]

This week’s episode of Yellowstone, in which Taylor Sheridan goes topless and casts Bella Hadid as his girlfriend, was “an almost unimaginable feat of self-mythologizing.” [Vulture]

Global ad spend forecasts are pretty darn bullish for 2025, enough to “flirt” with $1 trillion. Just not for linear TV, of course. [Ad Age]

Apple’s two-year experiment with Major League Soccer is going… well?? [The Athletic]

Phew: Jared Leto finally found his lost Oscar. [Page Six]

Now, here’s Scott Mendelson with the lesson from another record-breaking box office weekend…

While this cinematic potpourri didn’t exactly light the box office on fire, the real issue is that the studios once again left vacant a key piece of theatrical real estate. Given that audiences spent $100 million on Moana 2, Wicked, and Gladiator II on a non-opening, post-holiday weekend, it certainly seems like a missed opportunity to have programmed a more ambitious film to take advantage of the lingering theatrical appetite.

In the old days, back when films were cheaper, legs were longer, and a larger variety of non-I.P. genres were commercially viable, Hollywood treated the post-Thanksgiving weekend like any other. Paramount took a canceled TV show (Police Squad) and turned it into a hit movie franchise (The Naked Gun) on this weekend in 1988. Warner Bros.’ National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation debuted over the same weekend in 1989 and legged out to $71 million domestic from an $11.8 million opening weekend, coming in just below the $12.1 million second frame of Universal’s Thanksgiving blockbuster Back to the Future: Part II. (Even when not accounting for 35 years of inflation, Christmas Vacation is still the top-earning Christmas movie ever released in December.)

Back then, of course, $30 million was a big budget, $10 million was usually a solid opening, and $100 million worldwide was—in most cases—the threshold for a hit. But as expectations for tentpoles expanded in the 2000s, Hollywood slowly became more reluctant to slot anything remotely significant between the Harry Potter- and Frozen-sized Thanksgiving blockbusters and the Lord of the Rings- and Avatar-type Christmas mega-movies. In an era where star-driven comedies, mid-level thrillers, and adult-skewing melodramas are barely viable in theaters, studios avoid the post-Thanksgiving corridor and hold their big movies for the lucrative mid-December-to-early-January blitz.

Instead, this time of year we periodically get smaller-scale Christmas genre flicks (mostly from Universal, natch), like the horror title Krampus in 2015 and the Die Hard-meets-Santa actioner Violent Night in 2022. Next year’s attempt will be Universal’s Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, a Blumhouse video game adaptation targeted at Gen Z that will probably shatter records for an opening weekend on this frame—even if it earns less in its first three days than last year’s $80 million-opening predecessor.

Still, that franchise is highly fan-driven and demographically specific, leaving room for another big or biggish movie. Indeed, the lesson from the #Barbenheimer phenomenon, as well as the concurrent successes of Moana 2 and Wicked: Part One, is that Hollywood should offer more must-see movies, especially if they don’t target identical demographics.

In fact, this should have been clear as far back as 2003. That fall, Warner Bros. released The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise’s ambitious period action-melodrama directed by Ed Zwick, the week after Thanksgiving. That film ultimately earned $456 million worldwide and netted an Oscar nomination for Ken Watanabe, thriving alongside New Line’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which opened weeks later and became the second movie to top $1 billion globally. Indeed, two big-budget period adventure epics from the same parent company debuted almost on top of each other and were both top-tier theatrical smash hits. Two decades later, however, The Last Samurai remains almost alone among big movies to be scheduled in this supposedly doom-and-gloom window.

Alas, we’re in a strange moment now where, as the theatrical business has become imperiled, studios have tended toward risk-averse or copycat behaviors when precisely the opposite is required. After all, Warners now treats the post-Labor Day weekend as its preferred multi-quadrant horror movie slot—specifically because it rolled the dice in 2017 with It: Chapter One, which snagged a $123 million domestic debut. Likewise, Disney opened Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on Labor Day weekend in 2021 to $94 million—triple the previous Friday-Monday record (Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake, with $30.6 million in 2007).

Studios are leaving money on the table if they ignore what has repeatedly proven to be valuable opening-weekend real estate. The sooner they realize this, the more reason we’ll have to hope that something big hits theaters on December 5, 2025. I mean, big for people who need to kill a couple of hours after dropping their kids off at Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.

“Very smart and very fair piece on the PMK situation. You nailed it. Thanks for taking the time to give a nuanced assessment of our side of the business. It’s times like this that I really miss Pat Kingsley. She would have summed it all up in a razor-sharp and funny quote about how silly all of this is.” —A publicist

“What a brutal list of companies that were started because their founders couldn’t stand Cindi [Berger, PMK’s C.E.O.]. And there are others. Why can’t IPG see the actual cause of the problem?” —A publicist

“You were way too nice to Cindi.” —Another publicist

“Most stars already see 30 percent of their income [vanish] out the door to reps [agent and manager at 10 percent each, lawyer and business manager at another 5 percent each]. Are you suggesting the publicist siphon off even more of that income? For booking media appearances? Really?” —An agent

“Why is PMK still in the talent P.R. business at all? It’s a crappy business and now that IPG is [trying to merge] with Omnicom, totally irrelevant to the bottom line.” —Another publicist

Got a question, comment, complaint, or an over/under on the days until Ryan Murphy plants a trade announcement flag on a Luigi Mangione limited series? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.