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ScarJo’s A.I. Endgame & Zaz’s NBA Air Ball

A grab bag of the latest Hollywood chatter: David Zaslav’s NBA imbroglio, the D.O.J.’s Live Nation legal hammer, Chris Winfrey’s eye-popping windfall, the best Cannes sighting, and so much more.

Scarlett Johansson
As much as ScarJo has now become the face of resistance to the Silicon Valley boogeymen sucking up all of humanity to train their vampiric A.I. models, this is actually a garden-variety soundalike case. Photo: Mike Marsland/WireImage
Matthew Belloni
&
Eriq Gardner
May 24, 2024
Zaz’s NBA Air Ball

Man, is Adam Silver annoyed with David Zaslav and the Warner Bros. Discovery team, per two sources familiar with his thinking. At this point, the NBA commissioner is basically Ferris Bueller after the credits roll: Go home, David… it’s over. As my colleague John Ourand reported, the league has selected its preferred broadcast partners, and they’re not Warner Discovery/Turner. Disney/ESPN gets the A package for $2.8 billion a year, Comcast/NBC swipes the B package for about $2.5 billion—a big increase from the $1.2 billion that Turner is paying, and for far fewer games—and Amazon Prime Video lands a new C package for just under $2 billion. That’s about $7 billion a year for the NBA, waaay up from $2.6 billion in the current deals, and it allows the league to escape the cable TV quicksand for more broadcast, with the favorable demos of streaming and the financial heft of Amazon. Not bad.