A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

NOMINATED FOR

5 Golden Globes® & 11 Critics Choice Awards

including

BEST PICTURE

___

"Will be considered a classic for lifetimes to come."

- Esquire

[WATCH] Guillermo del Toro on Writing & Directing FRANKENSTEIN

Critics Choice and Golden Globe® Award-nominated Director Guillermo del Toro shares his lifelong passion for bringing FRANKENSTEIN to the screen. He describes the filmmaking process as a deeply personal, almost religious experience, as he delves into themes of grief and the longing for love and belonging, revealing how the heart of the story lies in what it means to become a father after being a son.

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For more on FRANKENSTEIN, visit film.netflixawards.com

Now, without further delay, after carefully reviewing qualified contenders from the worlds of politics, media, tech, and our own entertainment backyard, only one can be crowned Hollywood’s Villain of the Year…

I know… it’s hard to look back at what happened to Hollywood in 2025 and not be alarmed by the swift acceleration of its years-long decline. One of the original movie studios, Paramount, was finally offloaded to a Silicon Valley oligarch for just $8 billion, a fraction of its worth only five years ago. A second of the five remaining studios, Warner Bros., will either be ingested by its once-dismissed tech rival Netflix in one of the iciest revenge moves in media history—maybe since the ever-spiteful Barry Diller bought People magazine nearly 50 years after it threatened to out him as gay?—or sold to that same oligarch so he and his son can gleefully fire thousands of people, including many they just inherited from the first studio. With the vast majority of traditional content companies downsizing, signs of the now-familiar “secular decline” are all over town, from the dormant production facilities to the rolling talent agency layoffs to how easy it is to get a 1 p.m. reservation at Nerano or The Grill.

But this didn’t just happen, of course. The perilous position of Warner Bros. and HBO Max, and their vulnerability to being flipped like a duplex by late-stage cable TV robber barons John Malone and David Zaslav, can be traced all the way back to the failure of the AOL–Time Warner merger in 2001. Paramount’s fire sale came nearly two decades after its fruitless litigation with YouTube, the onetime copyright infringement machine that just bought the Oscars. In one decision after another, the Hollywood studios bungled, and then doubled down on bungling, the digital revolution.

It’s crazy to think that the studios actually came up with a Netflix killer, Hulu, in the late 2000s—the exact moment when teamwork could have starved the nascent interloper that would eventually grow large enough to swallow Warner Bros. But despite all the advantages, and a leader in Jason Kilar who literally screamed about the coming linear TV apocalypse until he was fired, the Hulu collaboration proved as doomed as MySpace, which a mid-2000s News Corp. was convinced would solve its digital problems. Instead, while Rupert Murdoch was spending $580 million for clout and posing for the cover of Wired’s print magazine—I just laughed while typing that—Facebook was stealing its users and positioning itself to buy up competitors, regulation-free, thus preventing Mark Zuckerberg from ever getting MySpace-d in the future.

All of which is to say… it’s happening again. We can all see it: The A.I. revolution is slowly, and now all at once, coming for the video industry. And this year OpenAI and its kinda creepy C.E.O., Sam Altman, took maybe the biggest step yet in that incursion. Not just by launching Sora 2, its A.I.-empowered text-to-video tool: OpenAI and its ChatGPT app, which were first developed with an altruistic mission statement only to be perverted—sorry, pivoted—into a for-profit media company, have already been the scourge of the professional content industry for years, facing mountains of litigation and the ire of everyone from news publishers to book authors to copyright and trademark holders. And not because OpenAI is particularly unique in its function; there are tons of similar A.I. video products out there, including Google’s Veo and Luma AI. In fact, Google is arguably the more sinister player here.

But Altman ascends to Villain of the Year status by launching Sora 2 with the backing of tens of billions of dollars from blue-chip investors but without copyright guardrails or effective name-image-likeness protections, and an attitude of dismissive arrogance unique even for a large tech company leader. Opt-out, bitches!, Altman all but screamed to content owners in late September. I added the bitches part, but the move was as brazen a piss-off gesture to the content industry as it has seen since Napster… or MegaUpload… or the early days of YouTube and “Lazy Sunday.”

Altman backtracked days later, claiming he was “learning quickly” and “taking feedback.” Sure… He had demonstrated Sora 2 to various stakeholders in advance, so he knew exactly what he was doing. He offered no apology, no acknowledgement of the rights he was trampling, only an invitation—an opportunity, as he framed it—for content owners to partner on the new A.I. slop firehose and maybe even make some money on licensing. It was the classic “break things and beg forgiveness” strategy, an example for all the other OpenAI wannabes who constantly send press releases about their “next-generation” tools. And the depressing thing is how well it worked.

By the end of ’25, Bob Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney and self-styled Mayor of Hollywood, had jumped at the opportunity to partner with Altman, handing over more than 200 characters—everything from Frozen’s Anna and Elsa to Toy Story’s Woody and Buzz to Star Wars’s Yoda and Darth Vader—for Sora 2 users to manipulate and share as they please. A.I. is an “important moment for our industry,” Iger declared in a carefully worded statement, “and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works.” He then went on CNBC with Altman to claim the deal “does not in any way represent a threat to the creators at all.” Which, of course, is exactly how he knew it would be received around town. The whole thing sounded like a mix of wishful thinking on Iger’s part and a shrewd flex by Altman, with the balance of power tipped decidedly in OpenAI’s favor.

We can debate why Iger did this deal. My colleagues Ian Krietzberg and Julia Alexander have thoughts here. I think Iger, whose strength has never been his digital dealmaking (cough Maker Studios… cough cough Club Penguin), likely sees OpenAI as a chance to be perceived as tech-savvy—and maybe give the Disney stock a much-needed bounce—at a time when A.I. investments are driving the economy. Disney will at least gain a seat at the powerful player’s table as generative A.I. further develops over the next three years; if user-generated content takes off in popularity, Disney will be home to branded UGC, a potential differentiator, just like it’s home to other franchise content like Marvel or Hamilton or Taylor Swift. Sora 2 will also provide a curated stream of user-generated videos for Disney+, if that moves the needle (it likely doesn’t, at least not in the short term), and Disney gets to use ChatGPT for its internal chatbot, DisneyGPT, which is already in Beta use among some employees. Iger also has a relationship with Josh Kushner, whose Thrive Capital is a big OpenAI backer and who previously employed Iger as a venture partner. Read into that what you’d like. Disney invested $1 billion in OpenAI, acquiring a tiny stake in a company that could become the next Google. So there’s that, I guess.

But, man, what a dream scenario for Altman—and the worst kind of reward for a guy who has never shown much respect for creative rights, and whose definition of “fair use” would get him laughed out of a Copyright Society meeting. Now he’s gone from Enemy of Hollywood in September to an official partner of the biggest and most influential studio in Hollywood just three months later—with ammunition to go out and make favorable slop-ification deals with other major rightsholders, which I’m told is happening now. If Sora can leverage Mickey Mouse and the Minions and Charlie Brown to boost downloads and become a mainstream entertainment app, it gets a major leg up in the war for A.I. dominance. Maybe.

And what does Disney get? According to Bloomberg, the deal was done entirely in stock, so no big windfall licensing fee, at least not at first. (Despite what Iger touted on CNBC.) And the truth is that, despite all the supposed I.P. protections—no talent voices or likenesses, guardrails against inappropriate use, etcetera—Disney has no idea how its characters will be used and, likely, abused by the general public. I’d guess the chances are pretty high of Homer Simpson all of a sudden spouting Hitler propaganda… or Disney princesses appearing in various states of undress… or Yoda and Moana storming the U.S. Capitol alongside the QAnon Shaman on January 6.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

NOMINATED FOR

5 Golden Globes® & 11 Critics Choice Awards

including

BEST PICTURE

___

"Will be considered a classic for lifetimes to come."

- Esquire

[WATCH] Guillermo del Toro on Writing & Directing FRANKENSTEIN

Critics Choice and Golden Globe® Award-nominated Director Guillermo del Toro shares his lifelong passion for bringing FRANKENSTEIN to the screen. He describes the filmmaking process as a deeply personal, almost religious experience, as he delves into themes of grief and the longing for love and belonging, revealing how the heart of the story lies in what it means to become a father after being a son.

___

For more on FRANKENSTEIN, visit film.netflixawards.com

Yes, this already happens on the internet, but it’s never been sanctioned by Disney. In fact, the company has been next-level aggressive in protecting its characters, often through threats and litigation. (Just ask any middle school that has tried to stage an unlicensed production of The Little Mermaid.) Disney sued Midjourney earlier this year over similar misappropriation issues, the company recently went after Meta over Disney character A.I. bots, and it got the startup Character.AI to take down similar chatbots. The same day the OpenAI deal was announced, Disney threatened Google, which suggests the overall endgame here is to bring the world’s most powerful tech platform to the table. If so, great. But at what cost?

Regardless, the big winner here is Altman, who starts 2026 with major challenges in the A.I. arms race but the surprise backing of the world’s premier content owner. The generative A.I. revolution is here, and while the outputs of Sora 2 and other tools are currently very short and minimally competitive with traditional media, it’s still early. The Trump administration seems to want to give A.I. companies carte blanche. A.I. songs are gaining traction, just like Napster hit before YouTube.

This summer I read the script for Artificial, the Luca Guadagnino film that has finished shooting with Andrew Garfield as Altman and is aiming for release next year via Amazon-MGM—amusing because Amazon invests in Anthropic, an OpenAI rival. If Artificial hits, it could represent a full-on Social Network moment for Altman, who is depicted as a master schemer who manipulates his reluctant colleagues into deploying A.I. for profit and personal benefit at the expense of safety and human civilization. The fact that Disney felt it should jump into bed with this guy while it chooses to fight with so many other smaller A.I. companies says everything about the current power dynamic in media and technology—and about the diminished state of Hollywood in 2025.

Previous Villains of the Year…
2024: The It Ends With Us publicists
2023: Nelson Peltz, Ike Perlmutter, and Jay Rasulo
2022: Gunnar Wiedenfels, Warner Bros. Discovery
2021: Adam Aron, AMC Theatres

And now, the other nominees for Villain of the Year…

Brendan Carr—Trump’s loose-jawed F.C.C. marionette ranks a close second, thanks to his general media trolling… and that time when he successfully pressured two TV station groups and, ultimately, The Walt Disney Co. into temporarily dropping Jimmy Kimmel over some fairly benign Charlie Kirk comments. And… also for later backtracking and insisting with a straight face that the stations “made these business decisions on their own” when MAGA influencers and even Ted F-ing Cruz freaked out over the First Amendment implications.

Bari Weiss—This nomination is less for Weiss’s particular acts as head of CBS News—of course she’s intervening at 60 Minutes to placate Trump; the perception of “balance” is kinda the only reason she’s there. It’s more for Weiss as an empty-vessel avatar of the entire Ellison business strategy: Media M&A via presidential backscratching, all dressed up in thought-leader drag. The amusing thing is that Weiss seems to believe she and her Free Press are something more than a $150 million lamb shank thrown to a snarling president. Another town hall? Sure, Bari. In a way, it’s adorable.

Allen Grubman—For some reason, David Zaslav’s longtime deal lawyer refuses to sit his client down and explain that he’s already very rich, so maybe it’s a terrible, terrible look to engineer a Warner Bros. Discovery compensation package that delivers a fake-sounding $600 million payday upon the sale of shrinking media assets—the kind of grotesque profiteering off the work of the creative class that might even cause whispers and side-eyes from the celebrity dinner party crowd he so desperately covets.

The Price Hikes—What is this, cable TV? At some point, the streaming service price increases will backfire. Unless, of course, the services all consolidate and consumers don’t have a choice…

Tim Leiweke—Remember when the Trump administration promised some accountability in the, uh, legally ambiguous live events business? Instead, the former AEG leader and Irving Azoff partner scored a surprise Trump pardon—bigfooting his own Justice department—for allegedly rigging bids for an arena in Texas. We quickly learned it was only after the pardon was suggested to the president by a former Republican lawmaker following a round of golf.

Simon Halls—The talent publicist probably should have been on the naughty list last year for advising George Clooney to deny a Times report that he and Brad Pitt were paid $35 million each for Wolfs, a fee that I’ve since confirmed is accurate. Not a good look for Clooney, son of a journalist and arch defender of press freedom, to have one of the shiftiest flacks in town doing his press. But this year, Halls also had client Kathleen Kennedy deny that she’s exiting her role at Lucasfilm, even though a plan has been in place since last year. And Halls consistently comes up in my conversations with media people as the most awful P.R. person to deal with these days. Villainous, even.

A24’s Marty Supreme marketing may be very online, but awareness for Sony’s rival Anaconda is much higher, according to the latest tracking chart from The Quorum…

Have a great holiday,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or one wish you would wish this holiday season? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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