Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, where we’re celebrating what would have been Chris Farley’s 60th birthday by rewatching the greatest talk show entrance of all time.

🚨🚨 Super Bowl Winner!: Forget Mahomes and Kelce (and Swift). Thomas Andriello, a Westchester high school history teacher who also leads a pop culture and media class, is the winner of the WIH Super Bowl ratings contest. Out of about 300 predictions, only Thomas guessed 123.7 million, which is the exact final viewership number from CBS. If this were The Price Is Right, he’d get a $100 bonus, but instead some priceless Puck merch (including a boat tote) is in the mail.

Runners-up: Shoutouts to Andrew Marshall (123.65m), Maggie Pearson (123m), and me! (I guessed 123.1m).

As always, if you were forwarded this email, click here to become a Puck member. And send me ideas or news tips by replying to this email.

Let’s begin…

• ZuckerWatch ’24: Another U.K. deal: Congrats to Jeff Zucker and Gerry Cardinale, whose RedBird IMI vehicle has closed a deal for the British production outfit All3Media, I’m told. (Zucker is telling friends the acquisition will be announced in the next couple days; his rep didn’t immediately respond.) The purchase will put Zucker atop the proprietor of Squid Game: The Challenge and The Traitor, among other assets. The Financial Times floated a couple months ago that Zucker wanted to take All3Media from Warner Discovery and Liberty for about $1.3 billion, even as the British government is still holding up the Emirati-backed RedBird IMI’s controversial deal for The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator.

• Buffett’s Paramount bath: Everyone seems to have a theory about why Warren Buffett is dumping Paramount Global stock at a big loss. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway recently sold about a third of the 15 percent stake it bought in 2022, which made him Paramount’s largest investor. The thinking was that Buffett (or an underling) was betting on Shari Redstone finally selling the company, which could lead to a windfall. Maybe he now has reason to believe that sale won’t happen? Maybe he thinks a deal with David Ellison or someone else will spark messy shareholder lawsuits? Maybe he’s doing the Ellisons a favor and tanking the stock so they can buy the company cheaper? Or maybe he’s just taking losses to cover gains from Apple, which he also sold? Adding to the mystery, Buffett has a long relationship with banker Byron Trott, who also happens to be helping Shari field offers for the company (and prop it up in the meantime). My leading theory might be the most obvious: Warren realized he made a huge mistake.

• Box office over/under: I’m cheating because Paramount’s biopic Bob Marley: One World and Sony’s Marvel-lite debacle Madame Web opened last night to $14 million and $6 million, respectively. So I’ll take the over on the adjusted 6-day tracking of $35 million for Marley and the under on $25 million for Madame Web, with an added prediction that Dakota Johnson and the Dakota Johnson Madame Web Press Tour will both be nominated for Razzies.

Or at least that was the thinking. Then the movies started flopping, Star Wars got eviscerated by South Park, and in November, Iger himself publicly criticized the company’s push toward more agenda-driven storytelling. If you remember, he dropped this declaration at the DealBook conference: “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages,” adding that when he returned as C.E.O., “what I have really tried to do is to return to our roots.”

Iger wasn’t explicit, and the comment could simply be taken as a call to refocus on Disney’s core competency, which is pleasing family audiences. But many in the creative community interpreted his words as, Okay, people. We did what WE wanted for a few years. Let’s lay off the lesbian kisses and revisionist Black mermaids and disabled dogs for a while. That’s probably overstating his mandate, but Iger doesn’t use a public appearance to call out Disney “messaging” unless one of two things is true: Either he sees the “wokeness” of the past five to seven years as negatively impacting the creative process, and ultimately the output; or he fears the escalating culture wars and the polarization of red and blue America as having a potentially significant impact on the ubiquity of the Disney brand. Most likely, it’s both.

Disney under Iger has always leaned left politically, and nobody cared much until his successor/predecessor Bob Chapek enraged both his own employees and DeSantis by flip-flopping on Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law. But now, it’s a problem, and for many, each Disney miss is viewed through the lens of whether a flawed process focuses too much on virtue signaling over creative execution. In the current proxy fight, Nelson Peltz and his fellow spite store proprietor Ike Perlmutter haven’t expressly gone after the politics of the Disney content. But given that both are Palm Beach residents with Trumpy politics, they kinda don’t have to.

But how big is this problem? And does it actually prevent people from going to see Disney movies? That was the impetus behind a study called “Left and Right: Are Political Divisions Impacting the Box Office?” that was prepared for Puck by The Quorum, which has done other branding research for us. This project surveyed 2,000 people over five days in January to test the conventional wisdom that Republican-leaning audiences feel alienated from Hollywood in general and Disney in particular.

Respondents were presented with 29 companies in various industries (Pepsi, Kraft, Toyota), including 13 media companies (all the major Hollywood studios and a few new entrants like Apple and Amazon, which bring their own general brand profile), and asked if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of those companies. (They could also answer “no opinion” or “not familiar.”)

The results were a bit unexpected. All 29 companies have high favorability ratings (that’s consistent with most opinion surveys of major companies), and people actually carry pretty positive feelings about the major studios. But Disney clearly scores the lowest, with 21 percent unfavorable. No other entertainment company had an unfavorable rating above 11 percent, meaning Disney is nearly twice as disliked as any other Hollywood entity we included. (Hulu, which is owned by Disney, scored especially well at only 8 percent unfavorable, indicating the problem is the Disney brand, not any of its sub-brands necessarily.)

Worse for Disney, polarization by political party is especially apparent in the survey. Fully 30 percent of Republicans and 26 percent of independents have an unfavorable opinion of the company, compared to only 8 percent of Democrats. Republicans also have an elevated unfavorable opinion (about 19 percent) of HBO, and Democrats overindex on negativity toward ESPN. (Importantly, Fox News or Fox was not included in the survey; I think we know how that would poll.) Bottom line: When it comes to Disney, you are much more likely to view it negatively if you are conservative.

Now, the study didn’t ask whether people stay away from Disney movies due to ideological differences, which might have yielded a much higher number. But with so few citing politics as a deterrent at all, it’s unlikely that specifying “Disney movies” would have moved the needle that much. “The data suggests a separation between the brand and the content,” David Herrin, the lead pollster, told me today. “While conservatives give Disney higher unfavorables, it’s not ‘perceived wokeness’ that’s keeping people from theaters. The more immediate issues facing the entire industry, not just Disney, is the quality of the content and the price of moviegoing.” Agreed. People don’t care about the “messages” in content, as long as that content is entertaining. Barbie could have been ignored or pilloried by the Fox News crowd for its feminist messaging. Instead, it sold tickets about evenly between Republicans and Democrats, per polling data.

More study details:
Respondents: 2,000 (U.S. only)
Women: 54.7 percent
Frequent moviegoers (at least once per month): 26.3 percent
Casual moviegoers (less than once per month): 46.1 percent
Mostly home viewers: 24.9 percent
Non-movie watchers: 2.7 percent

Democrats: 35.3 percent
Republicans: 35.3 percent
Independents: 30.1 percent

Correction: The NBA’s exclusive negotiating window with current TV partners ends April 22, not in March as I said on Sunday. Apologies.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or suggestions for who should play Saddam Hussein in the Barry Keoghan Saddam Hussein movie? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.