What I’m Hearing: Barbenheimer’s Fluke; AMPTP’S $1 Billion Fallacy & Iger’s Rep

Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, coming at you today and Thursday from another secret summer hideaway. While I’m traveling, I’ll have a couple items and then Jonathan Handel (today) and Julia Alexander (Thursday) will take over.
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Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, coming at you today and Thursday from another secret summer hideaway. While I’m traveling, I’ll have a couple items and then Jonathan Handel (today) and Julia Alexander (Thursday) will take over.

Programming note: This week on The Town: Lucas Shaw and I pondered who might buy into ESPN, David Herrin estimated what Warner Bros. spent to market Barbie, and Michael Pachter explained why Netflix should split from the AMPTP, not the other way around. Subscribe here.

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Discussed in this issue: Greta Gerwig, Chris Nolan, Bob Iger, Rich Gelfond, Tom Cruise, Jerry Jones, Karen Bass, Fran Drescher, Donna Langley, and Kathryn Murdoch’s futurific protopia.

But first…

Who Won the Week: Movies?!?

Here’s a fun and telling stat: 6 percent of people who saw Oppenheimer this weekend did so because Barbie was sold out, according to a poll by The Quorum. That might not be a huge number, but...

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Hollywood’s Billion Dollar Math War

The studios say that they offered the actors a billion-dollar package. The actors say it was less than $800 million, and not good enough anyway. But the truth is that the AMPTP may have as many deal insecurities as SAG-AFTRA, itself.

JONATHAN HANDEL

This tortured season of Hollywood strife has now reached a new and entirely predictable milestone: it has devolved into studio spin. In recent days, for instance, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) has blasted the striking actors (SAG-AFTRA) by saying that their own most recent offer to the union was generous, even exceedingly generous—worth at least a very headline-friendly $1 billion cumulatively in...

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FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT

ESPN Crunch Time

Is Disney gearing up for a deal with Comcast?

WILLIAM D. COHAN

Khan’s Achilles Heel

There’s a new playbook for challenging the F.T.C.

ERIQ GARDNER

Gucci Succession Season

A close look at the latest C-suite shuffle.

LAUREN SHERMAN

S.B.F.’s Arm Twist

A scandalous legal subplot to the FTX drama.

TEDDY SCHLEIFER

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