Welcome back to Dry Powder, I'm William D. Cohan.

Thanks as always for following my work here at Puck. As a reminder, you're receiving the free version of Dry Powder at . 

In today's email, I'm talking to my partner Matthew Belloni about a number of urgent industry questions at the intersection of Wall Street and Hollywood—including the future of Paramount Global's stock price and streaming strategy.

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Shari’s Choice, Zaslav’s CNN, & Hollywood’s Russia Problem

The inside conversation at the nexus of Hollywood and Wall Street.

It’s been a dramatic couple of weeks in the entertainment and media sphere as the soon-to-be Warner Bros. Discovery grappled with an abrupt leadership change atop CNN, ViacomCBS rebranded as Paramount Global, and Netflix and the other Hollywood studios pulled out of Russia amid Vladimir Putin’s escalating war on Ukraine. So, this weekend, I went back and forth with fellow Puck founding partner and Hollywood correspondent Matthew Belloni about what it all means for Wall Street and the future of entertainment in the post-Covid, post-streaming, post-everything era.

Matt Belloni: Bill, you floated in a column that the recently exited CNN president Jeff Zucker might be a good fit to run Paramount Global (the former ViacomCBS). Not sure I agree with that. Zucker had some stumbles as C.E.O. of NBC Universal from 2007-2011. I remember when he put the erratic Ben Silverman in charge of NBC, which everyone knew would be a disaster. (It was.) And he engineered the botched Tonight Show transition from Leno to Conan and then back to Leno, and he wasn’t exactly loved by his bosses at the end. What makes you think Shari Redstone needs Zucker? 

William D. Cohan: Well, Matt, Paramount needs to do something, anything to make it relevant to a potential acquirer. That’s got to be Shari’s main goal after years of financial engineering. She has to prove to her family that wresting the company away from her father Sumner and recombining CBS and Viacom—all pretty much against his previous wishes—was worth it. Her chosen leader, Bob Bakish, has done little, if anything, to improve the Paramount Global share price. Since he took over the combined company in December 2019, the stock is down nearly 14 percent (and that includes last week’s surprising 18 percent jump), at a time when the S&P 500 index increased 39 percent. Some say that Bakish deserves credit for merging these complex entities and refocusing on its streaming services, but these are simply the baseline requirements of the job. So Bakish is not exactly inspiring confidence. 

Belloni: But that’s Bakish. What makes you think Zucker could be the solution?

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