Vote for your selection HERE, and I’ll reveal my pick next Monday. The nominees are:

Vote only once, please! Special prize: Who Lost the Year: Bill Ackman Remember when Ackman’s investment firm sold its entire stake in Netflix in April 2022, after the streamer’s stock crashed, losing about $400 million? Since then, the Netflix stock is up more than 333 percent. Now, finally, the Hero of the Year…

ANORA IS THE MOST AWARDED AND ACCLAIMED FILM OF THE YEAR. Awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, it was just crowned The Best Movie of 2024 in IndieWire’s poll of 177 critics. It is now nominated for 5 Golden Globe^® Awards and 7 Critics Choice Awards, including BEST PICTURE, BEST ACTRESS, AND BEST DIRECTOR. A culmination of twenty-five years of filmmaking from writer/director/editor Sean Baker, ANORA is a film that  ”reaffirms that movies are still capable of generating miracles." (Rolling Stone) Anchored by an electrifying Mikey Madison who delivers "the performance of the year" (Awards Radar), ANORA is a timeless and unforgettable cinematic experience.

I know. It’s not like Shari’s options were great. After years of claiming Paramount could compete in the streaming age, the walls of the cable TV business were finally collapsing in on her. In late 2019, when she re-merged CBS and Viacom after wresting control of her father’s empire from his scheming girlfriends and cronies, Shari probably should have pulled a Rupert Murdoch and sold immediately. Even when Sumner Redstone finally died, in August 2020, ViacomCBS, the precursor to Paramount Global, had an enterprise value of about $35 billion and a market valuation of about $16 billion, per CNBC. Certainly not among the biggest media companies in the world, as Viacom was just after it acquired CBS in 2000. (That, incidentally, was the same year that Reed Hastings offered to sell Netflix to Blockbuster Video for $50 million. Yes, Blockbuster was owned by Viacom at the time.) Viacom, with its youth-focused cable networks, soon struggled to compete for advertising with the tech giants that Sumner once scoffed at with his “content is king” mantra. Eventually, it became clear that on the internet, the real king was scale and algorithmic targeting. As of Friday, after a year in which Paramount wrote down those cable networks by $6 billion, the company’s enterprise value had fallen to less than $20 billion, with a market cap of just $7.4 billion, including a 28 percent decline in the share price this year. By comparison, the Netflix market cap is nearly $400 billion now, a truly stunning reversal of fortunes over 25 years. All the more reason for Shari to finally cash out. Every day she held on to the TV assets, they became less valuable. It was getting embarrassing. And as we learned from the recent proxy filing, none of Paramount’s other suitors were really that serious—or at least they divined Redstone’s preference for Ellison and never got serious. There was the sweaty flirtation from David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery, the Apollo-backed Sony overture that would have disassembled the company, even a pitch from Yellowstone producer Ron Burkle. Shari didn’t build this company, her father did, and he treated her terribly for much of her adult life. Selling it for parts would have not only been understandable but, in many ways, poetic justice. Yet from the beginning, it was clear Shari wanted this buyer: The 41-year-old Ellison actually likes the entertainment business, he’s got a strong chance of getting approved—and, yeah, as of Friday, his father is worth $217 billion,the third-richest man in the world. Ellison would make a meaningful difference not just for the price Redstone would get—about $2 billion in cash for her interests—but in providing a potential future for the company. A chance for Paramount to survive. Along the rocky path to the deal, Shari fired her handpicked C.E.O., Bob Bakish, who was pursuing alternative bidders. Several board members quit on her. The deal talks fell apart in June, only to be quickly resurrected by Ellison, and she’s been sued a few times by fellow shareholders who are skeptical of the economics. But the deal happened. Shari made the sharpest move of her entertainment career by getting the hell out of entertainment, even if it was years too late, and even if a source close to her says she’s feeling “bittersweet” about it now.

I wouldn’t expect Redstone to be involved much post-closing, despite her consulting arrangement and the fact that Skydance is paying for her Manhattan apartment for two additional years. And her current co-C.E.O trio, the guys we still aren’t calling the Pep Boys, will be broken up. As Bloomberg and the Journal reported, Brian Robbins will be replaced by Skydance’s Dana Goldberg at the Paramount film studio. And they’re planning to consolidate the TV networks group under George Cheeks, the current head of CBS, who is expected to stay on post-merger if he isn’t lured away by a better offer. Cindy Holland, the former Netflix TV executive, is consulting for Skydance and is already strategizing for Paramount+ and Pluto TV. Among Holland’s first projects, I’m told, will likely be The Best of Us, a Jeremy Strong-led series about 9/11 first responders from writer Tobias Lindholm and journalist Chris Smith. (That project was set up at Holland’s previous company, Liz Murdoch’s Sister, and there’s a pending deal with Skydance to acquire it with the expectation that it could go to Paramount when the Ellison transaction closes.)

“These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.” —Tony Vinciquerra, the departing Sony Pictures C.E.O., ruining a perfectly benign exit interview with the L.A. Times by blaming the media for the failures of Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter. Runners-up, Chevy Chase-being-an-asshole-to-filmmakers edition: “Well, you should be embarrassed.” —Chevy, to director Jason Reitman after an early screening of Saturday Night, according to Reitman on the Fly on the Wall podcast. “Wait a second. You’re the director? … I thought you were a drummer.” —Also Chevy, 40 minutes into a dinner meeting in the late ’80s with Chris Columbus, who was hired to direct Christmas Vacation. Columbus quit the movie and made Home Alone instead, he told Vanity Fair while promoting Nosferatu.

A couple year-end long reads: Ted Sarandos definitely doesn’t want you to read “Casual Viewing” by Will Tavlin, as searing an indictment as I’ve ever read of how the Netflix business model and its style of movies killed Hollywood: “A pyramid scheme of attention, with no end in sight.” [N+1] Joe Adalian argues that the broadcast networks have stayed semi-relevant by tweaking the shows and tailoring them for a linear and streaming audience. [Vulture] Can someone translate this Justin Baldoni speech, “What If Birth and Death Are Actually the Same?” that he recorded for his church? [Baha’i Teachings]

No surprise, Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni vs. Steph Jones vs. Melissa Nathan and Jen Abel dominated my emails this week. Some examples… “[This situation] makes me crazy for two reasons: One, it makes people who do this work honestly and ethically look bad. It’s also now what half the town will be saying they think people should be doing. How many execs are reading this thinking, ‘I wish my people thought that way’?” —A communications strategist “The P.R. world has enough problems with credibility, we don’t need these scumbags ruining what’s actually an important discipline for surfacing facts in a world of misinformation gone wild.” —A crisis P.R. person  “I quibble slightly with your [headline] in that it seemingly places all the blame on the publicists. Everyone in this business knows that every actor is the captain of his/her own team. This kind of shit is exactly why I left L.A. and it is an example of why you, I, or anyone can walk into the movieplex and deduce how every movie will end based on the poster: the mediocrity that comes from a city of navel-gazing assholes.” —An actor  “What incentive is there for male talent to remain on the left?  If you stick with MAGA thugs, you can say and do whatever you want and your agents at WME will celebrate you. It’s the liberal male celebrities who transgress who get destroyed. The ‘male feminist’ brand never ends well.” —A producer “Curious who the Villain of the Year was going to be prior to this past week.” —Another producer If you must know, here were my Villain of the Year runners-up:

Are superheroes back? Captain America: Brave New World (February 14) is comparing favorably to previous MCU titles, according to the new early tracking chart from The Quorum…

Have a restful week, Matt Got a question, comment, complaint, or your own personal hero of the year? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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