Sorry, just not a great week for anyone except Taylor Swift, and she can’t win every week. Maybe Michael Mann for getting Amazon to bite on Heat 2, but let’s see if Leo actually happens.

Instead, some news…

It’s the dream scenario for a modern Hollywood producer, right? A deep-pocketed financial backer approaches with a commitment of up to $1 billion for a slate of movies and shows. Even better, they’re bringing their own I.P. to the table—a stable of video game and anime and action-oriented properties that, if adapted correctly, could represent the next generation of franchises. And they want to move quickly.

The catch? (You see where this is going…) It’s the Saudis. Such was the conundrum facing Erik Feig, the former Lionsgate executive and now Picturestart producer, and it’s a debate raging in the cash-strapped independent film community. (You can see where this is also going…) Tomorrow, I’m told Feig will unveil Arena SNK Studios, a new independent film, television, and live events studio backed by a pledge of up to $1 billion (it’s a step deal; a big tranche up front and more later) from MiSK Group, a fund that is separate from the Saudis’ super-active Public Investment Fund but is also controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; as well as SNK, the Japanese game company behind a bunch of 80s and 90s titles that is owned by MiSK; and MBC Group, the publicly traded film and television outfit that is also controlled by the Saudi government. Three entities, one throughline: MBS.

He and the Saudis have deployed money all over sports and entertainment, of course, from LIV Golf to European soccer teams to the recently announced $55 billion takeover of Electronic Arts. But Arena SNK Studios appears to be the biggest bet yet by MBS on a traditional Hollywood production studio, and the most glaring sign that, for the right price, top producers are willing to whitewash—sorry, do major deals with—a journalist-dismembering regime regularly accused of crimes against humanity. (Feig referred me to his publicist, who declined to comment.)

Listen, despite my finger-wagging about the Riyadh Comedy Festival and the Red Sea Film Festival and the various stars and musicians and trade media moguls who have taken Saudi money, I’m actually not a Pollyanna on this stuff. I get the argument that change in the most brutal corners of the Middle East can come in part through the influence of Western culture and business. (Though I don’t think that’s why Pete Davidson and Kevin Hart agreed to perform there.) Plus, Hollywood has for years bent the knee for China despite its human rights record, and several entertainment companies, from Miramax to Peter Chernin’s North Road, are backed by the Qataris, who aren’t exactly winning Nobel Peace Prizes. For me, personally, the Saudis and their combination of alleged journalist executions and persecution of artists they pretend to support through these publicity-generating cultural events and investments represent a bridge too far. And others in town agree, which is why Ari Emanuel was forced to give back a $400 million investment in Endeavor by the PIF back in 2019 after the death of Jamal Khashoggi.

But I’ll admit it’s easy for me to judge. I’m not trying to run an independent studio at a time when capital has, for the most part, dried up. And Feig, whose Picturestart will stay in business and be run separately, is joined by a board that includes well-known figures like Tron: Ares producer and former Disney film exec Sean Bailey; Andreessen Horowitz partner Andrew Chen; and Epic Games chief content officer Charlie Wen, all alongside board chair Majid Al-Ibrahim, a key figure at MBC and in the development of the kingdom as a production hub. Given the names involved, I have a feeling this is gonna open the floodgates, as those who have passed on similar deals due to fear of backlash may reconsider. Or maybe talent won’t work with Arena SNK? I doubt that. I’m betting once again that money wins.

“Neal’s price for a producer fee is huge. And to be honest, that’s what’s killing it.”
—Channing Tatum, weirdly blaming producer Neal Moritz in a trade interview for the long-gestating 23 Jump Street movie never getting made.

A little more here: No disrespect to Channing Tatum, but there are many reasons why that movie hasn’t happened. According to multiple sources, the Jump Street/Men in Black mash-up project was ready to go almost a decade ago (with Tatum and co-star Jonah Hill making $15 million to $20 million), but Sony’s Tom Rothman got nervous about the cost—producers Steven Spielberg and Walter Parkes both earn first-dollar gross on MiB movies—and the prospect of a flop taking down two of the studio’s few franchises. Then there was a script by 22 Jump Street co-writer Rodney Rothman that everyone liked, but Hill would only do the movie if it was shot in LA., which raised the budget beyond Sony’s comfort zone. The property isn’t currently active at Sony. But honestly, even if Moritz does carry a high fee, he’s kinda earned that, right? By my math, the dude’s movies have grossed more than $13 billion. The last Channing Tatum vehicle to cross the $200 million worldwide mark was… 22 Jump Street.

So says Eddy Cue, S.V.P. of services at Apple and overseer of its 6-year-old Hollywood experiment, Apple TV+—sorry, it’s just Apple TV now. Cue came on The Town today, and I asked if the recent analyst estimates of 40 million or 45 million worldwide subscribers are accurate. “We haven’t said what our numbers are but we’re significantly more than that,” Cue responded. He declined to elaborate further, but I believe that’s the first time Cue has given any indication of sub numbers. “Look, it’s a lot harder than it looks,” he said of building a subscriber base with original shows and movies and without a legacy library of content, adding: “I didn’t forecast being out of production for a year and a half, I didn’t forecast a nine-month strike from that standpoint, so we were a little further behind than where I’d like to be. But where we are today is great.” The full episode with Cue should post tomorrow.

38
Total versions of The Life of a Showgirl that Taylor Swift made available during its first week (27 separate physical editions—16 CDs, two deluxe CD boxed sets with branded clothing and a CD, eight vinyl LPs and one cassette—and 11 digital download editions), which helped generate 4.002 million equivalent album sales and break Adele’s decade-old record. [Billboard]

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32 percent
Share of U.S. adults who say they “sometimes” or “often” get their news from podcasts, up from 27 percent in 2024. [Pew Research]

5 days
Time it took OpenAI’s Sora 2 video-generation app to reach 1 million downloads, faster than ChatGPT, according to the company. [TechCrunch]

44 percent
Week-over-week increase in viewership for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, thanks to a TSwift appearance. This, and her spot on the similarly Lorne Michaels–produced Late Night With Seth Meyers, may explain why SNL hasn’t joked about (or even mentioned) Swift this season. [Late Nighter/Nielsen]

Now here’s Scott on Disney’s big weekend miss…

Let’s be honest: Tron was never an A-level franchise. Even when it debuted to Disney-sized fanfare in 1982, it only grossed $33 million domestically ($111 million in today’s dollars), behind such classics as Friday the 13th: Part III and the Burt Reynolds–Goldie Hawn rom-com Best Friends. Its 2010 sequel, Tron: Legacy, positioned as an Avatar/Lord of the Rings–level event, barely cracked $400 million worldwide (nearly $600 million today) on a $170 million budget. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Disney’s latest lukewarm offering, the almost $200 million Tron: Ares, opened this weekend to an anemic $33.2 million in North America and $60.5 million globally.

It’s remarkable how the film ticks every box for what not to do when building a viable, big-budget franchise. Sure, there’s the requisite fan service elements for the die-hard Tron folks—I assume there are a few of them somewhere. But what’s shocking is how little effort Disney seems to have made to offer anything of value to audiences who weren’t already invested in its 40-year-old I.P.

Disney could have cast a red-hot actor in a key role, like Warners did with Jenna Ortega in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice right after she broke out in Wednesday, to make it relevant to younger moviegoers. The studio could have tried leaning into nostalgia, as Universal did last summer in positioning Twisters as the first big-deal Hollywood disaster movie in a decade. Or it could have mimicked Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Jurassic World, both of which offered kid-friendly casts with killer hooks that turned the respective original premises upside down. That’s what development executives are for.

And yet Tron: Ares did none of these things. Instead, it was merely marketed as… another Tron movie. Even the potentially intriguing idea of letting the Tron tropes loose in the real world came across visually as a budget-cutting measure.

It’s unwise to speculate about why Disney’s marketing played down (or at least did not emphasize) the film’s inclusive cast—including co-lead Greta Lee and supporting players Jodie Turner-Smith and Hasan Minhaj—but fear of becoming a target in the ever-raging culture wars might have played a role. The campaign instead focused on the film’s headliner, Jared Leto, who was also an active producer, and the music from Nine Inch Nails.

Alas, casting Leto as the lead was likely always going to be a negative signal to audiences and the broader market. Despite his Oscar, he’s not a box office draw, and general audiences don’t really care about him—as Sony’s Morbius disaster amply demonstrated. Yes, the guy can act, but it’s borderline malpractice to put a nine-figure, all-quadrant tentpole almost exclusively on the back of a 53-year-old actor whose last big movie as a franchise headliner was so ill-conceived that even kids and Marvel superfans thought it was terrible.

Perhaps more importantly, the team behind Tron: Ares appears to have gotten nostalgic over the wrong things. I.P. has to mean something to the generation you’re trying to pack into seats. Leto’s performance—essentially a “Tron Jesus” self-insert fantasy—leaned on nostalgia among fans of the 1982 original, rather than the 2010 sequel. Though its total box office was disappointing given its reported $170 million budget and tentpole-sized ambitions, you’re still better off capitalizing on the flick that earned $400 million globally 15 years ago than the one that barely cracked $50 million 43 years ago.

That’s an odd creative choice given the online fandom that supposedly justified this new installment. It’s not unlike when Fox sold Alien: Covenant as a nostalgic prequel to the 1979 original rather than a direct follow-up to Prometheus, the $400 million grosser from 2012. The original Tron has only ever existed on the edges of our pop culture consciousness, if at all. In some ways, the decision to pick up the narrative thread where that initial movie left off feels like yet more proof that the industry has run out of ideas.

Younger audiences will show up for something that feels explicitly aimed at them—even if it’s an aughts or 2010s nostalgia offering, like the Despicable Me/Minions flicks and follow-ups to Deadpool, Moana, and The Conjuring. Polling and focus groups of Gen Z show that they enjoy the theatrical experience: It’s possibly the only place where being forced to put down their phones is a bonus, not a bug. But success begins with acknowledging that not every piece of I.P. is inherently valuable simply because executives remember it fondly. Hollywood should have learned this lesson after the latest Indiana Jones debacle, or when younger audiences ignored The Flash despite all of us olds pretending it was cool that Michael Keaton was playing Batman again.

Disney, of course, has heavily recycled its recent franchises. Still, there’s a meaningful difference between sequels to hits like Inside Out or Black Panther and nostalgia grabs for the early-2010s flops that helped justify buying Marvel and Lucasfilm in the first place. National Treasure, the studio’s last truly original live-action franchise, turns 21 next month. It’s fair to wonder whether we’ll soon see attempts to revive Prince of Persia, Mars Needs Moms, or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

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Tron: Ares is just the latest example of Hollywood refusing to give up on a franchise until the evidence is irrefutable. Remember, we had three failed attempts to revive the Terminator series between 2009 and 2019, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton suiting up for the last one didn’t do the trick. There’s a third attempt at Judge Dredd in development, despite both the 1995 Sylvester Stallone vehicle and the 3D 2012 reboot flopping. Universal thinks that Miami Vice can be a hit in 2027, even though Michael Mann’s 2006 film version of his 1980s TV series grossed just $164 million worldwide on a budget estimated between $135 and $150 million. Legendary’s first big deal with Paramount was getting the studio to release what will be the third attempt at a Street Fighter movie. You can’t fault them for a lack of perseverance, I suppose.

Hell, we might still get a straight-up Matrix reboot even after Matrix Resurrections tanked in late 2021. (Yes, even on a Project Popcorn curve.) And in what looks like a game of blindfolded development darts gone awry, Lionsgate announced just a few weeks ago that we’re getting a follow-up to Vin Diesel’s 2015 flop The Last Witch Hunter. It’s one thing to spend big bucks going back to the well on franchises that were at one point big-deal success stories, which is why I’m slightly more forgiving of the Alien series versus the (always commercially B-level) Predator franchise. But we’re now seeing revivals and reboots of properties that were never significant hits—or, in some cases, never even successful in theaters.

This isn’t a new problem. It’s just that now, it’s easier for studios to shrug and blame Covid, or streaming, or some strain of “anti-woke backlash” to avoid admitting that the distribution-side bet on an I.P. didn’t remotely justify the investment. However, this never-give-up, never-surrender attitude toward once-viable or never-that-robust properties is now being tested by a much more perilous theatrical ecosystem. It’s all too easy to argue that nobody wants to go to the movies anymore when multiplexes must subsist both on fewer movies overall and a slate of would-be tentpoles that more closely resemble tottering Jenga towers.

The semi-public auction for Warner Bros. Discovery has begun, with C.E.O. David Zaslav “rebuffing” Skydance-Paramount’s $20-ish-per-share offer as too low. [Bloomberg]

Bill Cohan thinks the price of WBD could rise to $30 per share or more.  [Puck]

Chris Brown’s short and not very difficult path back from cancellation. [NY Magazine]

Speaking of Saudi cash, Benson Boone, Post Malone, and Calvin Harris have signed on for the kingdom’s Soundstorm event. [Billboard]

Here’s Blake Lively’s contract for It Ends With Us, if you’re into such things. Not much jumped out at me, except maybe the $200,000 Oscar win bonus. [Court Filing]

You won’t believe it, but Sora 2 video watermark removers are flooding the web. Sam Altman never could have foreseen this. [404 Media]

An actual investigation into Taylor Swift’s favorite booth at Musso & Frank’s. In The New York Times. [NY Times]

R.I.P. TiVo, you changed TV and enabled hours of rewatching Man vs. Beast in my law school apartment. [MPN]

My take on Disney’s H.R. capitulation and Kim Masters’s fiery critique of Bari Weiss and David Ellison were the hot topics this week. Some examples…

“We’ve seen this all before. Hollywood bent the knee to Mussolini in the 1930s. Wild that it is happening again.” —A producer

“If Disney were smart they would cast Lisa (of Blackpink, The White Lotus) as Rapunzel [in Tangled]. She’s a talented actress and singer with global appeal, which should be reason enough. But think about it... Disney could reinforce their inclusive values while trying something that feels genuinely new and relevant. Let the anti-D.E.I. Trump fanatics go head-to-head with the K-pop fans. They might finally meet their match.” —A writer

“I have always held [Kim Masters] in the highest esteem, but [her] commentary tonight elevated [her] in my eyes, and heart, higher than highest, if that is possible.” —A filmmaker

“Chutzpah. Hubris. Pride always before the fall.” —An executive

“Kim Masters needs to take a Valium. The idea that Bari Weiss is some far-right firebrand is patently absurd. She committed the crime of exposing the woke lunatics at the NYT who scare leadership. And contrary to what she claims, I can assure you David Ellison is easily one of the most respected leaders in town right now. And will continue to be. Everyone at Paramount with a brain will stand in front of a train for the guy, and anyone on the outside wants to be working with the most exciting project happening at any studio.” —Another executive

A month from release, Paramount’s The Running Man remake is registering strong awareness and interest, according to the latest early tracking chart from The Quorum…

Have a great week,
Matt

Maya Tribbitt contributed research for today’s issue.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a sledgehammer to smash over Matthew McConaughey’s head for suggesting with a straight face that his 17-year-old son was cast in ‘The Lost Bus’ without the director knowing he was the star’s kid? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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