Welcome back to What I’m Hearing. I hope you handled today’s earthquake half as well as ESPN’s Malika Andrews did while on live TV.

It’s a news-driven WIH today, with a couple takes and tidbits behind the week’s headlines, including the Joaquin Phoenix–Todd Haynes disaster and the shock $50 million opening for It Ends With Us, which wasn’t that shocking if you were paying attention. Plus, the latest dispatch from inside Warner Bros. Discovery: “We are just resigned to the fact that we work for Michael Scott now.”

Programming note: I was back on CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning talking the Zaz-pocalypse at Warners. This week on The Town, Lucas Shaw and I debated Apple’s shifting movie strategy, Rich Greenfield explained the Great TV Write-down, and Brooks Barnes parsed Disney’s profits in streaming (and the damned D23 confetti). Subscribe here and here.

Not a Puck member yet? Click here to fix that. Got a news tip or an idea for me? Just reply to this email or message me anonymously on Signal at 310-804-3198.

Discussed in this issue: Blake Lively, David Zaslav, Justin Baldoni, Christine Vachon, Dana Walden, Linda Yaccarino, Celine Dion, Mike Mills, Ben Winston, David Muir, Marin Karmitz, Tom Cruise, Gunnar Wiedenfels, and… Johnny Bananas’ storied Challenge career.

But first…

Related: No, Cruise was not paid for that wild stunt and short film, I’m told. None of the talent was, and Cruise shot for four days (including rehearsals) and stayed in Paris for a big chunk of the Games to execute the jump from the roof. Overall, producer Ben Winston spent a little more than $5 million on the elaborately staged handover to Los Angeles, per a source familiar, which seems like a bargain given the impact and the need to juice sponsorships for LA28.

Related question: How much momentum did Paramount squander by not having a teaser for next summer’s Mission: Impossible 8 ready to drop this week while the whole world is talking about Tom?

After all, Marin Karmitz, the head of MK2, the French cinema chain and production/foreign sales company, and his son Nathanaël, plus a group of equity investors, together have sunk a few million bucks into this movie, and they’d very much like that back now. Producers have deemed Phoenix un-recastable, given his unique box office appeal thanks to Joker. (If Brad Pitt would like to drop everything and is cool with full-frontal and explicit gay sex, producers would probably love to chat ASAP.)

I didn’t realize it, but Phoenix apparently does this a lot. The nerves, the what-did-I-get-myself-into, the antics requiring a proverbial walkback from the ledge. He did it on Joker and the Mike Mills movie C’mon C’mon, per sources. But this one doesn’t look savable, which will probably require him to write a check before he starts doing press for Joker: Folie à Deux next month.

Runner-up: “I think Blake Lively’s ready to direct, that’s what I think.”
—Justin Baldoni, the It Ends With Us actor-director, suggesting at the premiere that his co-star should helm a follow-up, amid reports of a rift and dueling cuts of the film.

A little more on this one…

Baldoni didn’t mean it like that, according to Jamey Heath, C.E.O. of Wayfarer Studios. Heath told me today that despite the reports of fights during postproduction and dueling cuts of the movie, Baldoni didn’t mean to suggest in his Entertainment Tonight interview that if Lively really wants control, she should just direct the damn sequel herself.

Okay, whatever. Everyone’s been so consumed with this dumb feud that the outsize success of It Ends With Us almost feels like an afterthought. But a $50 million opening for a $25 million romance-drama with a domestic violence storyline begs the question: How did this happen?

Scott Mendelson gets into the marketing and release strategy below, but I was curious how Baldoni and his company, Wayfarer, ended up with the project in the first place. After all, this seems like a no-brainer for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine or Kerry Washington’s company, or any number of the production outfits that now specialize in female-focused book adaptations.

Instead, it ended up with Baldoni. Back in 2019, he was an actor on Jane the Virgin and had directed the hit romance Five Feet Apart for CBS Films. He started a production finance company with what ended up being $125 million in backing from Chicago-based software billionaire Steve Sarowitz. (Sarowitz shares Baldoni’s Baháʼí Faith, and there’s a “purpose”-driven flavor to their projects.) Before the book was a huge seller and the toast of BookTok, Baldoni messaged author Colleen Hoover with a pitch she liked, and Hoover went with Wayfarer over other suitors. Simple as that.

Sony came on board after Baldoni mentioned the project in a general meeting with longtime production executive Ange Giannetti, and the package grew from there, always with him attached to direct—and then, later, to co-star. Not a bad five-year overnight success story, and the caliber of projects at Wayfarer will likely get better, feud or no feud, Lively or no Lively. “We have the ability to pull the trigger on anything we want to make,” Heath told me.

Disney’s Dana Walden, who oversees ABC News, pulls a nothing-to-see-here when the Times follows up my item from a few weeks ago and asks about her decades-long friendship with Kamala Harris. [NY Times]

Question: Do David Muir and Linsey Davis, moderators of ABC’s Trump-Harris debate, now go harder on Kamala because of the scrutiny? I’m guessing yes.

Disney succession social media watch: During the D23 marketing blitz this weekend, Walden was active on her new Instagram account, as was film chief (and fellow succession candidate) Alan Bergman, though both lag far behind C.E.O. Bob Iger and parks guy Josh D’Amaro in the Disney-friendly corporate posting department. Alas, ESPN’s Jimmy Pitaro is not yet on socials. Nor is Kathy Kennedy, who no-showed Friday’s Lucasfilm presentation (she was at the Olympics, then returned to laud John Williams on Sunday). Which, given the fan base and their recent feelings about her, is probably for the best.

Some interesting charts that show how much moviegoing has fundamentally changed since the Covid shutdowns. [WSJ]

Bill Cohan looks at the scary economics of Twitter now that Elon Musk and his puppet Linda Yaccarino have embarrassed themselves by suing the advertisers Elon told to go fuck themselves. [Puck]

Thanks, Amazon: Netflix has slashed the price of ads on the platform by more than half in two years. [Adweek]

Fox News flack Irena Briganti’s least favorite reporter Oliver Darcy launched his new, post-CNN newsletter. [Status]

In honor of the 40th season of MTV’s The Challenge, the exhaustive career retrospective of Johnny Bananas, including the greatest moment in Challenge history. [Medium]

Now, for Scott’s take on the ‘It Ends With Us’ phenomenon…

It Ends With Us drew an 83 percent female audience, according to Sony. And while that shouldn’t be a surprise, either, it may be for Hollywood. Indeed, female-focused melodramas have become an endangered species. The romantic comedies, melodramas, and cat-and-mouse thrillers that once provided starring vehicles for Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts, and Ashley Judd have since famously gone the way of the Western. The romantic comedy has declined to such an extent that Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, in 2015, was successfully sold as the last of a dying breed. By 2016, films like Practical Magic, Double Jeopardy, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and Julie & Julia had become at best once-a-year events in theaters.

But recent data suggest the illogic in sunsetting this genre. Half of the weekend’s It Ends With Us audience comprised infrequent moviegoers (consumers who go to theaters two times or less per year), suggesting many of them went to see this specific film. The recent success of Barbie, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, the Mean Girls musical, Inside Out 2, and It Ends With Us all also suggest that Hollywood would be wise to revisit its conventional wisdom and invest in these audiences.

Did this weekend’s infrequent moviegoers stop showing up because Hollywood stopped making splashy adaptations of female-focused bestsellers for theaters, or did Hollywood stop because those once-regular theatergoers became infrequent? Perhaps it’s a chicken-or-egg question. But in any case, prioritizing female-focused dramas, comedies, and thrillers—especially since a breakout hit can be profitable enough to justify a few relative misses—would help reverse that trend.

That said, right until the end of the 2010s, Hollywood was still putting out periodic “female-focused” films like Girls Trip, Crazy Rich Asians, and What Men Want. But during Covid, Hollywood leased, sold, or downgraded female-focused theatrical features like The Lovebirds, Shotgun Wedding, and Happiest Season to streaming platforms. Even would-be tentpoles like Wonder Woman 1984, Mulan, and Turning Red saw their theatrical releases undercut by streaming priorities. By the summer of 2022, Sony’s $24 million adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing was the only big-deal female-focused seasonal release. It earned more than five times its $17 million opening weekend in North America and eventually $144 million worldwide.

Two years after Crawdads, amid a summer where female audiences passed on Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy (a male-focused action-comedy) and Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth in Furiosa: A Mad Max Story (a prequel/origin story action-fantasy), Sony once again seems to be the only player in town. The studio positioned It Ends With Us as an event film instead of counterprogramming. They’re now poised to reap “tentpole grosses on a programmer budget” rewards.

Last summer, Barbie earned $1.4 billion worldwide not only because of the I.P. and Warner Bros.’ $150 million marketing campaign, but because it was an event film about women that wasn’t an action-fantasy franchise flick. Concurrent development schedules aside, It Ends With Us seems like the rare studio release to have learned the right lessons from the Greta Gerwig-directed and Margot Robbie-starring megahit. It Ends With Us and Anyone But You (a $25 million, R-rated rom-com starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell) will now be far more profitable than Madame Web and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

“Matt, you laid out the basics of the destruction caused by Zaslav, but the morale internally is even worse. People are miserable and would leave if they could. We are just resigned to the fact that we work for Michael Scott now—eye rolls and head shaking everywhere. 401ks are down and RSUs are worth a fraction of what we work hard for. This guy has destroyed a once-proud company. Sigh.” —A writer

“The arrogance and utter tone-deafness of peacocking around Paris while the nickel-and-diming back home is literally destroying the livelihoods of the people who actually make the shows and movies. Forget being fired, Zaslav belongs in jail.” —A producer

“Zaslav doesn’t want to hear the truth, so nobody can tell him the truth. Including Gunnar [Wiedenfels, the C.F.O.] and the Discovery guys. It’s a sad situation.” —An executive

“Sorry that you only got paid $100 million to follow a ‘strategy’ that was doomed from the beginning because it wasn’t a strategy, but rather a series of tactics and buzzwords in an area where you had zero professional experience, and where the window was already closed.” —Another executive

“You say a cynic might argue that the whole acquisition was about getting the execs paid as much as possible, while knowing that combining the companies would lead to thousands of jobs lost. Isn’t it more accurate to write: An optimist might argue that while they knew things would be bad, and thousands of jobs would be lost, they weren’t competent enough to predict how bad they would end up?” —Another writer

“The only way companies like WBD and Paramount survive the next decade is to pivot hard into A.I. and learn how to service the creators who now run the show. These guys need to get their heads out of their ass and realize that they are now literally competing with anyone with a mobile phone. Creators are engaging Super Bowl-level audiences on a daily basis while guys like Zaslav can’t wrap their heads around why their idiotic spends on shit no one wants to see aren’t working. The only thing of value these legacy companies have is their I.P.” —An actor

Got a question, comment, complaint, or suggestions for co-stars in the inevitable Snoop Dogg sitcom? Email me at [email protected] or call/text me at 310-804-3198.