 Welcome back to What I’m Hearing...
Happy Sunday, a little later today thanks to my kid’s Ghostbusters-themed birthday party. A reminder as you’re watching the SAG Awards tonight (or, more likely, just following the tweets): Subscribers can gift Puck columns to friends or colleagues by clicking on the gift box icon in article pages. It’s fun, easy, and a great way to prove you’re a reasonably well-informed person.
Discussed in today’s email: Peter Rice, Timothy Hutton, Mekan Delrahim, Dawn Hudson, Jeff Zucker, Shari Redstone, Adam McKay, David Ellison, Dean Devlin, and, of course, the Oscars.
Who Won the Week: Chris Licht
My colleague Dylan Byers scooped yesterday that the Late Show with Stephen Colbert executive producer and veteran TV news exec will succeed Jeff Zucker at CNN. I like this pick: Licht has great news and entertainment judgment, knows everyone in media, and is super competitive.
Quote of the Week
“Would HBO be doing a lot better if it had three more really successful scripted series right now? It’s not clear.”
–David Zaslav, the incoming Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O., questioning, on an earnings call, the prevailing theory that more spending always equals more subscribers.
 Timothy Hutton was accused, investigated, cleared (sort of), but still lost a lucrative job. Now Hutton is suing, setting up a legal battle with no easy answers.
People sometimes ask me, as I’m sure they ask you, whether the #MeToo movement has actually changed Hollywood. I usually say it’s shifted nothing and everything, meaning the power structures that gave rise to all that awful behavior still exist, but a lot of the specifics—from casting decisions, to how people conduct themselves in personal and professional settings, even to the things people fight over—have definitely changed.
For instance, here’s a legal dispute that is playing out right now, in secret. The situation sounds generally familiar, as far as Hollywood fights go, but the framework and details would have been unimaginable five years ago...
FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT  Makan Delrahim, who led the D.O.J.’s antitrust division during the Trump administration, charts the future of media regulation. ERIQ GARDNER  Putin’s cynical invasion evidences his profound intellectual discontinuity: why start a new war when you want to fight the past? JULIA IOFFE  The former wunderkind producer Jeff Zucker will be succeeded by another wunderkind, Chris Licht. Welcome to the new CNN. DYLAN BYERS  The smart money has already pulled out of Trump’s SPAC circus, just as Chamath Palihapitiya dumped his stake in Virgin Galactic. WILLIAM D. COHAN
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