Welcome back to this post-Easter, Monday edition of What I’m Hearing, where I’m beginning to sweat my deep position in Trump Media & Technology Group. (Last April Fools’ joke, I promise.)

Programming note: This week on The Town, Lucas Shaw and I debated who’s winning the “time spent” wars in streaming, we explored how Nelson Peltz might act on the Disney board, and ex-TMZer Van Lathan explained why the brand’s influence is and isn’t waning. Subscribe here and here.

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Discussed in this issue: Dana Walden, David Zaslav, Ike Perlmutter, Michael Rubin, Reed Hastings, Steven Newhouse, Michael Eisner, Scooter Braun, Nelson Peltz, Jay Penske… and the coveted Final Four in the Hollywood Power Bracket.

But first…

Runners-up: Todd Boehly and Jay Penske, the billionaire Golden Globes owners, who scored a five-year pickup from CBS, which also agreed to air the dying American Music Awards from Dick Clark Productions. With a long-term deal and the talent publicists securely in their pockets, the Globes are officially back. Congrats, everyone, we did it.

That’s a pretty strict definition of “competitors,” especially since Advance is a minority shareholder in both entities. But the point is that Biden’s D.O.J. will vigorously enforce the rules, which is doubly relevant now that Paramount is trying to sell itself and the Reverse Morris Trust rules governing WBD are expiring this month, meaning Zaslav can pursue a transaction. I asked Matt Stoller, the antitrust advocate and director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, what he thought of the move. He noted the Clayton Act rules are supposed to be strict, “but it also likely means the Antitrust Division is paying close attention to the studios given all the chatter about consolidation.” Exactly.

More on this, the Disney proxy fight, and how succession is intertwined here…

Yet, the foregone conclusion has become… slightly less foregone? “Please tell me Bob’s OK,” one text from an Iger friend read this weekend, after news hit that CalPERS, the massive California pension fund, would pledge its 6.65 million shares for Peltz and Rasulo. That followed the endorsement of Peltz by ISS, the influential proxy advisory firm. Last week, a Trian-friendly source leaked to the Journal that Peltz was actually winning with about 20 percent of votes tallied, a move that Disney called “a highly inappropriate attempt to sway votes.” Then, lo and behold, the Journal reported today that Disney had pulled ahead, with more than half of the votes counted. (Turns out, Iger and his friends can play the leak game too.) BlackRock, which owns 4.2 percent of the company, backed Disney, as did T. Rowe Price, which holds 0.5 percent of shares. Vanguard, another big institutional shareholder, is still holding out.

But those aren’t the kingmakers here, of course. Due to the unusual nature of Disney, nearly 40 percent of the stock is held by random individuals like the kids who get bar mitzvah shares from their bubbes or your weird aunt who collects Mickey pins for her vest. For that reason, the company has been forced to spend big—Disney says it’s about $40 million, others say it’s far more—on ads and advocacy to woo all those shareholders (including, it should be noted, in Puck). Combined with the spending by Trian and others, this is almost certainly the most expensive proxy fight ever.

At the center of this charade is Iger, once discussed as the greatest media C.E.O. of all time. Now, at 73, he’s been embarrassed by this whole undignified process. He didn’t come back to Disney so he could make the rounds at Toscana or the Bird Streets Club with everyone thinking about him being questioned in the press, or forced to defend his turnaround strategy on investor calls. He’s had to first listen to, and then publicly trade statements with, these guys—these effing guys!—over the best path for a company he’s been synonymous with for decades?! “If Peltz finds his way to the Disney board, that will be Iger’s biggest failure as C.E.O.,” one executive Signal-ed last week. “Not staying too long/assassinating all potential successors, not over-investing in streaming and overworking their brands, not choosing Bob Chapek, not thinking he could be POTUS. This.”

But in round two atop Disney, Iger decided he no longer needed to indulge his tormentor. Should Bob have just sucked it up and tolerated Ike for the good of the company? After all, Iger just resolved the whole Florida “Don’t Say Gay” fight, including backing off the litigation over Disney’s special governance, even though he knew Gov. Ron DeSantis would go on television and declare victory.

An ego bruise, perhaps, but it doesn’t make strategic sense for Disney to be litigating in Florida when it should be growing the parks business in the state. Similarly, while it might have felt good to shit-can Perlmutter, given the company’s struggling share price last year, it was probably foreseeable that Ike might take his 30 million or so shares and set up a spite store in Palm Beach with someone like Peltz. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. So… whose fault is that?

Still, if Disney loses this proxy battle, it won’t be because of the stock price, or the Florida issues, or ESPN’s future, or even Elon Musk’s war on wokeness. This is pretty clearly a referendum on botched succession. ISS, the advisory firm, made precisely that point, citing the “major missteps and severe consequences of the failed 2020 succession” as the prime reason to back new blood on the board. I won’t recount the whole embarrassing timeline here, but let’s just say there’s good reason to doubt Iger when he says the company is really focused on finding his replacement by 2026. And a decent reason for a shareholder to consider adding Peltz and/or Rasulo to the board, even if it’s just to make sure Iger actually leaves this time, which few in Hollywood seem to believe he will.

Fresh off Pitaro’s recent round of media profiles, today we got the Walden response. Disney’s TV chief isn’t quoted in this largely positive CNBC profile, but writer Alex Sherman got key interviews with her former partner Gary Newman, ex-bosses Peter Chernin and Peter Roth, and her former colleague and travel buddy Jennifer Salke of Amazon—the kind of people who don’t talk for a business profile unless the subject specifically blesses it.

There’s zero chance that Team Walden pitched this story. As a former publicist and expert media navigator, she knows that even the appearance of positioning in the media won’t go over well with Iger or the board. Plus, succession won’t be decided for a while, and it definitely won’t be decided in the media.

But…once Walden and the Disney TV P.R. team knew the story was happening, they obviously mobilized to make it clear that the TV industry is behind her. And Salke is helpful to remind everyone that Disney has never had a female C.E.O., noting how she and Walden are often treated differently than their male colleagues by the town and the media. Dana’s superpower has always been her relationships, but this piece probably went a bit overboard—did we need two agents lauding her creative chops when everyone knows that agents are stand-by quote machines for executives who regularly buy shows from their clients? The only person missing, honestly, was Ryan Murphy, who typically pops up in Walden press to talk about how close they are. He’ll probably be in the separate piece that Vanity Fair is working on, and we’re likely gonna see similar press for D’Amaro and even Bergman. They kinda have no choice but to match. This will be a long, drawn-out process.

Dana’s job for the rest of this year is to pretend that she’s not thinking about succession when everyone around her knows she’s probably thinking about nothing else. That also goes for Pitaro, Bergman, and D’Amaro, all of whom need to present the business case for their ascension while subtly marketing themselves internally and externally.

In a way, that’s kinda what Iger himself has been doing lately— expertly, I’d say. From the George Lucas, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Jamie Dimon endorsements and the aggressive cost-cutting, to the flurry of project announcements on the last earnings call, he knows what the Disney shareholders want to hear. “Since returning as C.E.O. in Nov ’22, Bob Iger now appears to be in command and control and on a growth offensive,” BofA analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich wrote in a well-timed note to clients today. The Disney stock might be trading at about $122, down from $197 three years ago. But it’s up almost 50 percent from six months ago. There’s momentum.

That narrative is probably enough to fend off these guys, these mother-effing guys. But if it’s not, and if we’re talking on Wednesday afternoon about how Peltz and Iger will mix on the Disney board, it will be the biggest failure of Iger’s tenure. Because it will have come down to his abdication of the biggest challenge for a C.E.O.: replacing himself.

Apple TV+ has the “highest quality” content, as judged by IMDb ratings, and Prime Video the lowest quality. Just one little caveat: Apple TV+ carries just 271 titles, whereas Prime Video offers 13,827. [Streamable]

New details on how Fanatics’ Michael Rubin, Forbes’ annual Douchiest C.E.O. nine times running, railroaded Michael Eisner out of Topps and took over the entire trading card industry. [Bloomberg]

Dylan Byers has more on Ronna McDaniel’s NBC News flameout and the very real chance that nobody at NBCUniversal will be punished. [Puck]

Did Facebook tank its popular Watch video service to save its “special relationship” with Reed Hastings and Netflix? An antitrust suit says yes. [NextTV]

“Scooter Braun and the Twilight of the Music Manager.” Click! [New Yorker]

Former MTV VJ Dave Holmes made a good podcast about the demise of MTV, Who Killed the Video Star? (and I’m in it a bit). [Audacy]

And now, here’s contributor Scott Mendelson on Warner Bros.’s early box office success in ’24…

After all, only nine Hollywood films have passed the $300 million threshold worldwide since #Barbenheimer in mid-July. Of those films—including Godzilla x Kong—six were Warners releases. And say what you will about David Zaslav, currently the most antagonized C.E.O. in Hollywood, with a stock price down 25 percent this year, but Warner Bros. Discovery is crushing its Hollywood rivals in raw box office revenue right now. Warners releases, also including Wonka ($85.2 million) and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom ($48 million), account for $465 million, or 29 percent, of the total $1.612 billion year-to-date domestic box office revenue.

And that share will increase over the next month as New Empire continues to pack auditoriums. So with a summer slate that is light on A-level franchises, and with Disney mostly staying on the bench until Inside Out 2 in June and Deadpool & Wolverine in July, WB is excelling at pulling A (or at least B+) level grosses from B-level franchises. That may be enough in an industry that we’re now grading on a curve.

Continue reading online…

“How does CAA justify cutting Ronna McDaniel? Who she was and what she did had been long-established. They cut her because somebody else woke up and objected? Not exactly a profile in courage.” —A (rival) agent

“On Netflix, the movement to performance-derived economics is definitely starting. They are now circulating a MAGR [modified adjusted gross receipts] definition on offers, first time I’ve seen them do that. The definition has imputed license fees right now, but it wouldn’t be that hard for them to move or adjust it from arbitrary imputation to some kind of performance indicator.” —An executive

“Challenges in the business is exactly why studios should take risk on younger talent (execs). The aging generation of leaders’ complete lack of vision and copycat strategies during the boom times is exactly why we are in this mess in the first place.” —Another executive

“Good piece on Tubi. What’s not talked about is their strength among African-American viewers. They are for real. If they really figure out how to collaborate with Fox network… would be very helpful. Right now the relationship is fractured.” —Yet another executive

“Your ‘Industry Think Tank’ program at CinemaCon sounds like the setup for a Maury Povich episode.” —Another executive

Got a question, comment, complaint, or your own bracket of media industry journalists? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.