Let’s go with both Timothée Chalamet and Sydney Sweeney, whose holiday releases are bringing a shred of hope to the star-driven film business. Marty Supreme is at $56 million domestic for A24 (on a $70 million budget… so still a ways to go), and The Housemaid, with a week longer in theaters, is at $75 million for Lionsgate (on a $35 million budget). Timmy added a Critics Choice Award, which means nothing, but with little competition, these movies could play for a while. (Note: Scott Mendelson will be here on Wednesday with his full box office analysis for 2025.)

Runner-up: It’s gotta be Toby Morton, the TV writer (South Park) who secured the TrumpKennedyCenter.org domain before the now-obvious name change actually happened.

“Don’t trust billionaires.” —Stephen Colbert, the fired CBS host, when asked on New Year’s Eve by Andy Cohen what his big lesson of 2025 was, adding, “They don’t get rich by finding that money on the side of the road, brother!”

Strong runner-up: “You’re not bright enough. How’s that?” —Chevy Chase, when documentarian Marina Zenovich asks him why it will be tough to figure him out, in the CNN film I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, adding, “I know you’re not going to put that on the air. I hope not.” More: If you missed it, the Times Q&A with Chase and Zenovich is great. Chevy has officially secured his rotunda position in the Museum of Hollywood Assholes. Also…: By reader request, here’s Chelsea Handler’s full David Zaslav joke from her Critics Choice monologue:

And speaking of Critics Choice…: Is there a tackier awards show move than adding a whole bunch of new categories to guarantee a full room and collect additional submission and table fees, then handing out many of those new awards on the red carpet between questions about outfits and hairdos? Take a bow, Critics Choice C.E.O. Joey Berlin. This was a spectacle so awkward and money-grubbing I’m shocked the Golden Globes didn’t think of it first.

43 percent Year-over-year increase in U.S. streaming hours for free ad-supported streamers through August. [Comscore]

$8.6 billion Total domestic box office for 2025, about even with last year but off more than 20 percent from pre-Covid averages and well below the $9 billion forecast by most analysts for the year. [Screendollars]

48 million Views of EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami’s performance of “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the most-viewed late night clip of the year, besting Jimmy Kimmel’s return monologue (23 million views). [Late Nighter] 1.6 million Peacock sign-ups attributed to Love Island USA in its first 30 days, tops on the platform. [Antenna] Okay, now let’s consult my crystal ball…

It’s time for an early-January tradition as venerable as Gerard Butler movies getting dumped in theaters and stars feeling gross at the Golden Globes. As usual, I polled my sources for a preview of the issues both big and small that will dominate Hollywood in 2026. I’ve also included a few newsy bits that actually are happening, and I asked some celebrity Puck writers for their thoughts. Today I’ve got the first batch, with the rest coming on Thursday.

Here’s last year’s list… I did okay. The Murdochs didn’t sell Fox, Amazon didn’t get UFC, and The Sopranos didn’t appear on Netflix. But ESPN did opt out of its MLB rights, Joe Biden signed with CAA, Justin Bieber finally returned to work, and Rush Hour 4 did end up happening. And speaking of the president’s favorite action movie… 1. Rush Hour 4 Will Shoot in Saudi Arabia Here’s what I know: The deal for Paramount to distribute Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 4 isn’t done yet, but the studio has agreed to offer a domestic release in 3,000 theaters, which was required by Warner Bros., the rights-holder, and which triggers the international deals that made the financing possible. Producer Tarak Ben Ammar, along with Ratner’s guy Bahman Naraghi, have raised about $100 million from various sources and are communicating to all involved that a shoot in the spring or summer is likely. That budget might be tough to hit considering Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker both made more than $20 million for Rush Hour 3 (though they didn’t have salary parity), and while it is no longer 2007 and everyone involved in this project really really wants it to happen, the producers do not have deals with Chan or Tucker, giving them a little leverage now that the project has been revealed publicly. Trump also wants this to happen. Once the official green light comes, I’m told that producers plan to shoot the film in China, Africa (the story involves poaching), and yes, Saudi Arabia. That’s thanks to some strings attached to the financing, though it’s not clear if the Saudis’ Public Investment Fund will be contributing directly to the production. What a time. 2. Filoni and Brennan Become Jedi Masters at Lucasfilm In the next week or two, Disney will finally confirm what we’ve all known for months: Kathleen Kennedy is indeed stepping down as Lucasfilm president, and Dave Filoni, currently the chief creative officer of the Star Wars unit, will be elevated into the top job. (Simon Halls, Kennedy’s personal publicist, has already set up her cushy exit interview… I’m sure the Pulitzer committee is standing by for that piece of journalism.) Filoni has never really been a traditional executive, so they’re giving him a partner in Lynwen Brennan, currently president and general manager of Lucasfilm Business, but he’ll be the decider on the creative direction of the franchise in film, television, and any other platforms in the galaxy. 3. Avengers: Doomsday Won’t Be Number One It’s odd how many people assume the record-setting history of Disney’s Avengers movies (nearly $6.5 billion over four films, including $2.7 billion for Endgame in 2019) automatically means December’s Doomsday will perform similarly. No offense to Marvel’s Kevin Feige, who essentially threw up his hands and paid a fortune to bring back Robert Downey Jr. and the gang, but those days are over, the Marvel tent has become much smaller, and the storytelling during the past seven years hasn’t exactly generated excitement for a big Russos-directed team-up. We’re now left with a nostalgia play, which Asad Ayaz and his Disney marketing machine are already playing up in heartstring-tugging ads. That’s not nothing—I’d still bet this movie does somewhere between $1.25 billion and $1.5 billion worldwide—but post-Covid box office seems to coalesce around one or two outsize hits that bring casual moviegoers to theaters and end up grossing more than that. Maybe it will be another Disney contender, Toy Story 5, or Marvel’s Sony-released Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but box office records will not return in Avengers: Doomsday. 4. But Zendaya Will Be… Despite not appearing in Avengers: Doomsday (that we know; there’s still time, I suppose), Zendaya is poised for one of the all-time great years at the box office. In fact, with four movies (Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey, Dune: Part Three, and A24 rom-com The Drama), she could even approach Samuel L. Jackson, the current record-holder for box office in a single year. In 2019, Jackson grossed $5.25 billion (not adjusted for inflation) in five movies (Glass, Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Shaft, and Spider-Man: Far From Home); we will exclude Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker because he appeared only via a brief audio cameo, and the less said about that movie the better). Given the past performance of the Spider-Man and Dune sequels, and Nolan’s budget and aspirations for Odyssey, three movies alone could take Zendaya to around $4 billion. Not quite S.L.J. territory, but fewer films, and she’s also got another season of HBO’s Euphoria set for April, and she likely would have easily crushed Jackson if Shrek 5 had kept its original December 2026 release date. 5. Social Media Becomes Social Entertainment By Julia Alexander Shortform video’s existential threat to Hollywood is about to get much more, uh, Reel. Meta is preparing to bring Instagram Reels to the boob tube, just as TikTok is thinking more about the TV space and YouTube, which includes its Shorts product, already commands just under 13 percent of all viewing on connected TVs in the U.S., per Nielsen. Considering both viewer behavior and a projected double-digit percentage increase in connected TV ad spend this year, it’s clear why the three platforms are obsessing over the living room. Adam Mosseri, C.E.O. of Instagram, described Reels’s recent TV launch as an “experiment,” but the move wouldn’t be happening without evidence of YouTube’s success—and Instagram’s own ad business. Reels alone is projected to surpass $50 billion in revenue this year, which will likely be higher than YouTube’s total ad haul in 2025.

A Parks Associates report from August found that social video accounted for approximately five hours of TV usage per week in U.S. households. That’s basically all YouTube—a fact that Mosseri clearly wants to change. It’s the same reason that David Kaufman, TikTok’s head of product operations, said in June that “the living room is definitely a new frontier for us that we’re taking very seriously.”

All of which creates a bigger problem for the premium streamers, whose executives are watching audiences spend more time with free ad-supported television (FAST) and social video. It’s a critical challenge, as subscriber growth stagnates, engagement slips, and advertising becomes a bigger part of their own businesses. If 2025 was the year that YouTube terrified traditional Hollywood, 2026 will be the year that the rest of Big Tech follows suit. 6. Comcast and Disney Pull Way Back on Entertainment Spending It’s just math, right? The NBA’s new 11-year, $77 billion rights deal saddles Disney’s ESPN, Comcast’s NBC and Peacock, and Amazon Prime Video with huge—and, in Comcast’s and Amazon’s cases, entirely new—expenses. Amazon has unlimited money, but Comcast and Disney do not. They also haven’t indicated that their overall content spend will increase dramatically, hence what will likely be a further pullback in entertainment programming from their Peak TV heights. Not great for Hollywood creators. And that’s before the NFL rights bomb drops. Existing football deals are supposed to be in place until at least the end of the 2029 season, but in the wake of the NBA’s huge increases and as NFL games have become even more dominant, commissioner Roger Goodell wants to extract even more money—and sooner. “Obviously it’s not going to happen this year,” Goodell told CNBC in September. “But it could happen as early as next year. That could happen.” What the NFL wants, it usually gets, which should terrify its broadcast partners—and everyone in Hollywood. 7. Sydney Sweeney Endorses Male Enhancements From “good jeans” for American Eagle to selling her bathwater for the men’s soap brand Dr. Squatch to… what’s next? There’s really only one attention-grabbing place left to go for the queen of provocative endorsements. Whether it’s Ro, or Hims, or plain old Viagra or Cialis, Sweeney and her team likely won’t be able to resist the millions of dollars and clicks they can generate with a savvy ad for erectile dysfunction medication. 8. A.I. Disclosures Blow Up Studio-Guild Relations By Eriq Gardner In 2026, some Hollywood studio will be forced—whether through discovery in a random lawsuit or as collateral damage from a regulatory review—to lay its A.I. cards on the table. Not marketing fluff or ethics-deck platitudes, but a real accounting of how models are being trained, what materials are in play, and how much of its library is already implicated. When that disclosure lands, it’ll lead the guilds to freak out. Because here will be proof that A.I. isn’t a speculative future threat but an operational present tense—one that repurposes past performances, scripts, and creative labor in ways no collective bargaining agreement fully contemplated. The result will then detonate into the next round of collective bargaining, which will turn into a fight over data (including early drafts of scripts, abandoned pitches, coverage and development memos), reuse, and ownership. It’ll be far more contentious, and perhaps existential, than anyone is currently anticipating. 9. Sundance’s Biggest Movie Goes to… Warner Bros. Lost in the late-year announcement of Warner Bros.’ new “contemporary specialty film” label was a line noting the unnamed unit would pursue “independently made and acquired projects,” as well as in-house productions. That means film festival titles—about two or three a year, I’m told—until Christian Parkes and his team of Neon defectors can build out their own small-budget slate (assuming Netflix or Paramount doesn’t shut the whole thing down when they acquire Warners). Often, the best way to declare a company a legit indie player is to make headlines via a splashy Sundance or Cannes deal, and Parkes & Co. will indeed be trolling the Eccles for the right fit. Lots of new film distributors this year, from Black Bear to Row K, but only one with big-studio resources behind the small-studio play. 10. Lionsgate’s Longtime Leader Steps Down For more than 25 years, Jon Feltheimer has had one of the best jobs in Hollywood. He’s made as much as $35 million a year (recently around $20 million) as C.E.O. of Lionsgate, a secondary studio with a languishing stock price that has engaged in all sorts of financial gymnastics, including acquisitions (Starz! eOne! Various film libraries!) and divestments (again Starz!) in an attempt to get someone to buy the company. Sadly, that hasn’t happened, and Feltheimer, now 74, suffered the indignity of just $9.8 million in compensation last year, post-Starz split. The hope is that one of the jilted Warner Bros. suitors might consider Lionsgate and its robust yet much schlockier library an acceptable consolation prize—and, indeed, the stock has been up lately on those hopes. But that seems unlikely, despite the current dealmaking froth. And at this point, Felt may be out of levers to pull. Plus, with the Michael Jackson movie and another Hunger Games coming this year, on the heels of the current surprise hit The Housemaid, he can feel like he’s going out a winner—even without the splashy acquisition he so desperately wanted. 11. Movie Theaters Rush to Book TV Events These days, the major theater chains would probably screen dark web torture videos or The Tucker Carlson Show if they thought they could sell some tickets and popcorn. But the fact that the Stranger Things finale generated about $25 million in concession sales in just a day and a half (tickets were free) has caused my friend Adam Aron at AMC and the other exhibition leaders to immediately ask what’s next. “I have every confidence that more enticing joint projects will emerge for Netflix and AMC in 2026 and beyond,” Aron tweeted last week. I know… he said something similar when Taylor Swift was huge in theaters, and then… nobody else is Taylor Swift. But the barrier to entry for TV events is much lower, and the appetite among streamers and traditional networks for these marketing stunts will likely be higher, even if none ultimately replicates the Stranger Things fever. 12. Talent Managers Consolidate This is kinda already happening, with private equity firm TPG’s Initial Group rolling up the management shops Untitled, Grandview, and Silver Tribe Media, and looking for more. But after years of major agency mergers (CAA buying ICM Partners, Gersh taking most of A3, UTA snapping up Curtis Brown in the U.K., and whatever ends up happening to Verve), the management firms will now follow suit. Smart? Unclear. Talent managers are often less formal in their business practices than agencies, though that divide has become less pronounced in recent years. Part of this is the ongoing content recession, of course, which has perhaps hit the management firms hardest. They aren’t as diversified into sports and corporate branding and other revenue streams that have floated the bigger agencies, so combinations start to make more sense. But these companies continue to field interest from big-money investors, a recognition that even in a declining entertainment economy, there’s value in representatives that can also produce with clients. Plus, rich guys still like to hang out with movie stars. Carlyle invested in Entertainment 360, home of Margot Robbie and Jeremy Allen White, and Wasserman, primarily a sports and music agency, branched into management with Brillstein, which just added Sydney Sweeney. That’s only gonna accelerate as the deal market shakes loose. (Disclosure: My wife is a manager; WME represents Puck but not me personally; TPG is an investor in Puck.) To be continued…

Warners’ smutty Wuthering Heights remake is currently trailing Sony’s animated animals playing basketball comedy GOAT in both awareness and interest, according to the latest tracking chart from The Quorum…

Have a great week, Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or pitches for Sydney Sweeney’s E.D. ad? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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