Cynthia Littleton: Last News

William Earl Who’s up, who’s down and who is really in deep trouble on Wall Street? Media stocks have been on a wild ride in the first half of 2023. On the latest episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business,” Variety Intelligence Platform media analyst Heidi Chung breaks down how Disney, Netflix, Comcast and other leading lights of media and entertainment have performed so far this year. “The best performing sector in the first half of the year was technology. And a lot of that was driven by the interest by investors in the generative AI boom, specifically,” Chung says in conversation with “Strictly Business” hosts Andrew Wallenstein and Cynthia Littleton.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor “Succession” planning paid off big time for HBO once again on Emmy nominations day. The family dynasty drama led the Emmy field pack for the second consecutive year. The series was the cornerstone of HBO’s total tally of 127 nominations, including shows that also ran on the streamer previously known as HBO Max (now just Max). Netflix weighed in with 103 mentions. “Succession” raked in 27 bids, including a history-making troika of noms in the lead actor drama category for Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong. Last year the series grabbed 25 nominations and went all the way to take the top prize for drama series. Also adding heft to HBO’s tally this year was the acclaimed freshman drama “The Last of Us,” with 24,” and “The White Lotus” at 23.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Buckle up for a busy 72 hours. SAG-AFTRA’s already-extended contract talks will come to a head one way or another by the July 12 midnight PT expiration deadline. And as goes SAG-AFTRA’s negotiations with the major studios and streamers goes the rest of Hollywood’s year. By multiple accounts, progress in the negotiating room has been negligible since SAG-AFTRA granted a 12-day extension of talks hours before the contract expired June 30. The mood across town is grim with the expectation that Hollywood will soon endure its first “double strike” in more than 60 years. The Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since May 2, stands ready to help SAG-AFTRA execute its first industry-wide work stoppage since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. SAG-AFTRA’s move would bring a burst of energy to the WGA’s public efforts at a time when union members privately acknowledge that strike fatigue is setting in. With little diminution in the resolve of WGA members to back their union, polite discussions of “what’s the endgame” are nonetheless rising among writers and showrunners who were busy juggling multiple projects for 2023 and 2024 before scribes went pencils down.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor SAG-AFTRA has taken to the medium of the moment — TikTok — to send the message that it is ready to begin a work stoppage as soon as next week. The union that is in the midst of tense contract negotiations with Hollywood’s major studios published a 42-second video on the social media platform that showed members wielding staplers and duct tape in the grunt work of making dozens of picket signs. Among the notable SAG-AFTRA members seen in the video, titled “If a strike becomes necessary” is Yvette Nicole Brown, who is active in the union and a member of its national board. If a strike becomes necessary, we're ready. pic.twitter.com/62kUzNId4e SAG-AFTRA faces a deadline of midnight PT on July 12 in its latest round of talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Renowned alumni of the Jeffersonian Institute pulled out their security badges and patches to assemble Friday morning for a lively “Bones” writers strike reunion picket outside Fox Studios. The gathering of writers, actors, directors and crew members from the Fox drama series proved once again that “Bones” was one of TV’s happiest sets during its 12-season run from 2005-2017. Star Emily Deschanel, who played forensic anthropologist Temperence “Bones” Brennan on the procedural, was in attendance at the picket held on Day 67 of Writers Guild of America striket. So were series showrunners Hart Hanson, Stephen Nathan, Jonathan Collier and Michael Peterson and writer-producers including Liz Benjamin, Dean Lopata, Janet Lin and Karine Rosenthal.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor It’s a social media app that blends TikTok-esque user videos, mobile gaming and donations to charitable causes. Robert Weiss, a TV producer-turned-executive-turned digital entrepreneur, calls it Roar Social, and he’s spent the past three years fine-tuning the app experience that he has dubbbed “gamified giving.” Backed by $10 million in seed funding, Roar Social is set to launch beta form later this year on Apple’s App Store. Weiss has been nurturing the big idea behind Roar Social for more than 10 years. But it was during the hard early months of the pandemic, in August 2020, when he felt the time was right to dig in to developing an platform designed to bring one-swipe ease to making charitable donations via an entertaining digital media experience. The emergence of the TikTok video format changed everything.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor More than 150 local TV stations owned by Nexstar Media Group went dark on DirecTV’s platform as of 4 p.m. PT Sunday after the sides failed to come to terms on a new retransmission consent agreement. The blackout includes Nexstar stations in New York (WPIX), Los Angeles (KTLA) and Chicago (WGN) and also Nexstar’s NewsNation channel. In total, 159 station serving 113 markets went dark after a last push of negotiations in late June. DirecTV serves about 12.7 million subscribers across the U.S. Nexstar said it offered to extend the current deal to Oct. 31 to allow contract talks to continue. Nexstar indicated that the blackout affects at least 10 million subscribers across DirecTV’s footprint.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor The days of elastic budgets are over. The documentary arena is feeling the great contraction in the volume of content ordered by the largest networks and streamers as the entertainment industry reckons with its spending binge of the past decade. The high-end nonfiction and documentary production community benefited enormously from the spike in demand for episodic series and evergreen films. In recent months, filmmakers, producers and buyers say strictures have tightened on producers to deliver highly accessible, easily promotable documentary content. “Crime, food, music sports”: that’s how director and cinematographer Nicola Marsh describes the hot subject areas for docu makers in the present writers strike-disrupted marketplace.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor How do you make money in the emerging creator economy? Who better to answer this question than street-level entrepreneurs who were on duty working the show floor and environs on June 22 at Vidcon, fan convention for creators and influencers held annually in Anaheim, Calif. If you’re going to hawk a product or service all day at a convention, you’d better master the 60-second pitch. The seven street-level entrepreneurs who spoke to Variety‘s for this week’s “Strictly Business” podcast offered insights into where the opportunity is and where the market is heading for creators and influencers who aim to ply their trade largely virtually via social, streaming and e-commerce platforms. The companies represented are involved in distribution, technology and visual effects, e-commerce, marketing and promotion and matchmaking between brands and influencers.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Go big and go broad – that is Paramount Global’s strategy as it formally raises the curtain Tuesday on the Paramount+ With Showtime premium tier on the company’s primary streaming platform. Paramount+ will begin offering its new top tier of service that now encompasses Showtime’s large library of content for $11.99 per month. That’s up $2 from the previous top-end Paramount+ package. But it’s less than the cost to consumers today for both services, even with Paramount’s previous discounts for those who subscribed to both services. The company’s ad-supported Paramount+ Essential Plan (without Showtime) is going up from $4.99 to $5.99 per month.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor A federal judge in Florida has granted a preliminary injunction that bars the state from implementing a new law that seeks to severely restrict drag performances, a move that has alarmed the entertainment industry. U.S. District Court Judge Gregory Presnell issued the order on Friday that bars state officials from implementing the law passed last month that restricts the ability of businesses to offer drag performances if the venues are open to minors. The case was brought by the Orlando, Fla. outpost of the restaurant chain Hamburger Mary’s, which launched in San Francisco in 1972. “This statute is specifically designed to suppress the speech of drag queen performers,” Presnell wrote in his 24-page order. Given that factor, the legislation is “not sufficiently narrowly tailored to survive strict scrutiny.” Presnell notes in his opinion that Florida already has laws on the books that help restrict children from being exposed to lewd or obscene material, even with parental consent.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Jim Osborne is a product of the mailroom. The veteran talent agent, who has been named CEO of the newly christened Independent Artist Group, got his start in the representation field the old-fashioned way — by working his way of out of the ICM mailroom and assistant pool. Osborne has spent the past dozen years at APA, rising to partner in 2015 and to president in 2020. As of today, he advances to the top post, as APA combines into a new entity with Dennis Arfa’s music touring powerhouse Artist Group International. The deal brings such superstars into the fold as Billy Joel, Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, Linkin Park and the Strokes, and was orchestrated in part by investor Ron Burkle and his Yucaipa Co. (which owned Artist Intl. and invested in APA in 2020).

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Warner Bros. Discovery has begun implementing layoffs in its domestic cable group, cuts that will affect about 100 employees across legacy Discovery and Turner outlets. Amid the shuffle, TCM general manager Pola Changnon is leaving the classic movie channel after more than 25 years with TCM and Turner. Michael Ouweleen, president of Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Discovery Family and Boomerang, will oversee TCM, as he did prior to the Warner Bros.-Discovery merger in 2022. The plan for layoffs across Warner Bros. Discovery’s major divisions were signaled late last year when the company faced extreme financial pressure amid rising losses from its streaming operations and the weakening macroeconomy. WBD’s domestic cable channels — including Discovery, TNT, TBS, TLC, HGTV, Food Network and CNN — were once the envy of the industry in terms of viewership and profitability. But the fast-changing pay TV marketplace and the rise of on-demand streaming has upended the reliable cable TV earnings power that made the former Time Warner a dynamo in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor In another shocker for the Walt Disney Co., Christine McCarthy is stepping down from her role as executive VP and chief financial officer and will take a family medical leave, Disney said Thursday. Kevin Lansberry has been named interim CFO for the media giant as of July 1. “Christine McCarthy is one of the most admired financial executives in America, and her impact on The Walt Disney Company during 23 years of dedicated service cannot be overstated,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said. “Christine has served as a key strategic anchor during a period of great transformation, and she and I have discussed her desire to ensure an orderly and successful CFO succession in advance of the company’s transition to its next chief executive officer. She is stepping down from her CFO role as she takes family medical leave, but has graciously offered to move into an advisory position to assist her successor in assuming the duties she has so expertly handled these many years.”

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Big changes are afoot for the Golden Globe Awards now that Dick Clark Productions and Todd Boehly’s Eldridge have acquired the assets of the nonprofit Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which will shutter as the awards franchise moves into a new era. The new owners will use the assets and the cash on hand from the HFPA to establish the Golden Globe Foundation, which will continue on the HFPA’s tradition of charitable giving. The awards show itself and related assets will now be part of the for-profit operations of Dick Clark Productions, which has long been allied with the HFPA for the awards show. The move out of the HFPA’s nonprofit status will allow the Globes to pursue many more commercial opportunities than were possible under the HFPA regime.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor “The Simpsons” occupies a unique perch in the history of global television. At 36 seasons and 750-plus episodes and counting, the Fox animated franchise been a steady engine of employment for writers, producers, directors, actors and other Hollywood artisans for more than a generation. The show’s legacy was saluted Friday morning with a “Simpsons”-themed Writers Guild of America picket gathering outside Fox Studios that drew dozens of staffers past and present. In the context of labor battles over the future of TV, “The Simpsons” is seen as an example of the kind of employment and the kind of series that is disappearing in the new era.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria used the platform of her keynote address Friday at the UCLA Entertainment Symposium to dispel a few myths that persist around the streamer that has transformed television viewing during the past decade. During an hourlong, wide-ranging Q&A with veteran entertainment attorney Ken Ziffren, Bajaria made the forceful case that “algorithms don’t decide what we make” when it comes to how Netflix uses data to inform programming and strategic decisions. “There’s not an algorithm that would probably say, you know what’s a great idea? A period show about a woman playing chess,” Bajaria said, pointing to 2021’s “The Queen’s Gambit,” which raked in 11 Emmys for the streamer including the trophy for best limited series. Nor would data analytics ever deliver a report instructing them to “do something thematically about connection and lonliness, and maybe throw in road rage for the inciting incident,” Bajaria added, pointing to this year’s Ali Wong-Steven Yeun starrer “Beef.”

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer HBO and Max chief Casey Bloys thinks AI has no place in the creative process at his brands. “Two things to keep in mind when I say this: One is, remember I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which is Steel Town,” Bloys, the chairman and CEO of HBO and Max content, told Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton during a keynote conversation Wednesday at the Variety TV FYC Fest. “So I am very, very aware of what happens when a company does not think about the future or is not aware of the future. But also, I’ve been at HBO for 19 years and I have never tested a pilot to decide whether to pick it up or not. We just don’t use all of the things other places do, it’s just not something we do. So my take on AI, the idea that AI would be involved in any sort of development or the creative process in the kinds of shows that I do, or we do, at HBO, that’s not something I want to be a part of.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Producer DeVon Franklin has been cutting his own path through Hollywood for more than two decades. He’s made a career as a producer out of pursuing inspirational and faith-infused movies and now TV shows. On the latest episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business,” Franklin explains that he is unabashedly on a mission to use movies and now TV shows to provide inspiration and uplift to the audience. He feels the faith-based genre is broadly defined enough to include his latest project, the spicy Cheetos origin story “Flamin’ Hot,” directed by Eva Longoria. The by-the-bootstraps business story from Searchlight premieres June 9 on Hulu. Franklin notes that the film’s business trajectory began as a theatrical film. When Hulu came into the picture for a streaming debut, Franklin didn’t balk.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Longtime WME partner Sean Perry is preparing to exit the agency after 25 years to launch a production company, 2500 Media. Perry’s banner will focus on unscripted series as well as documentaries and some scripted projects. Perry has quietly been working with WME leaders on the transition for several months. Ever the dealmaker, Perry has already lined up commitments for projects from cable, broadcast and streaming platforms. He will also stay close to his longtime colleagues, albeit as a client, as WME will represent 2500 Media. “While there’s sadness in leaving WME after 25 amazing years, this has been a dream that went from something I’d like to do to something I have to do. It’s time to roll up my sleeves and actually make what I’ve been selling for years,” Perry said. “I want to thank all of my friends, colleagues and partners at Endeavor and WME. WME will forever be my family, I am just switching seats at the table from partner to client.“

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor From Paul Lee’s perspective, the streaming boom that led Hollywood to binge on original content has evolved significantly during his half-dozen years as CEO of production company Wiip. Over the past year, the industry has been through “a moment where the streaming revolution went from a land grab to ‘This land needs to be fertile,’ ” Lee says on the latest episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business.” Lee spent a dozen years at Disney, rising to become head of ABC Family and later head of ABC Entertainment and ABC Studios. He’s mostly kept a low profile since launching Wiip in partnership with CAA in 2016.