The new-ish Sony Pictures C.E.O. gambled on suing longtime Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!
partner CBS and was rewarded this week with a ruling freeing Sony to distribute the cash cow game shows itself. (Eriq Gardner will have more on the appeal tomorrow in WIH+.)

Runner-up: David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O., whose pay package rose to a whopping $52 million in 2024, while the company’s share price dropped 9 percent during that period. With the stock now down 55 percent since launch, has anyone made money on Warner
Discovery besides Zaslav?

“They should lose their license!”
—Donald Trump, teeing off on CBS via Truth Social after
apparently watching Sunday’s 60 Minutes featuring two segments critical of the president.

A little more: Yes, it’s all to extract more money from Shari Redstone to settle Trump’s B.S. $20 billion lawsuit. But David Ellison, the guy hopefully buying CBS, was sitting four seats away from the president at a UFC event on Saturday (see screenshot below), the night before Trump’s latest outburst. Ellison was a guest of UFC owner Ari
Emanuel (third from right), and it’s safe to assume Trump and Ellison spoke during the event. About Paramount? (An Ellison rep declined to comment.)

Now more on the Paramount situation, plus Disney and Warners, from Kim…

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But the next test comes in just days with Sinners, from Ryan Coogler, starring
Michael B. Jordan as twins in a period vampire movie. “Sinners is a pure Mike De Luca play,” noted an insider, meaning it’s an expensive, original swing with an auteur director, as Coogler is proving to be. “Sinners is the movie [Mike] stuck his neck out for.” This is the type of film that many in the industry had claimed to want, but the rich deal angered competitors and even some insiders.

Not only did Coogler get a $90 million budget (it’s believed
the film wound up costing more) and first-dollar gross, but ownership will revert to him in 25 years. (Coogler has said this was a one-off and he won’t seek to own future films.) The project was a WME package that was auctioned with multiple studios bidding. “Everybody thought $60 million” was a reasonable bid for the film, as one prominent producer told me. “Then it went to $65 [million]. Then [Warners] paid a premium and gave away ownership.”

At that $90 million budget, the producer
continued, the film probably won’t turn a profit—it will need to do around $300 million in box office—and the lavish deal terms will “hurt the ecosystem of a business that’s already hurting.” This producer is hardly the only one who thinks the movie will lose money. And that’s too bad, because the reviews have been rapturous. Sinners sits at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and is now tracking for a $40 million opening. (Of course, tracking can be way off, and totally failed to predict
the success of Minecraft, among other recent misses.)

Even if Sinners turns into a sleeper hit, what happens with De Luca and Abdy? More uncertainty at a company that’s shot through with anxiety. Asked for comment on the state of play, spokesman Gibbs responded with this text, which sounded like a bet being hedged: “We are thrilled with the record-breaking global success of Minecraft that was driven by the incredible creativity and dedication of Pam, Mike and
the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group and are excited for the upcoming schedule of releases.”

If a hit buys them more time, the town will await the September launch of the big one: Paul Thomas Anderson’s $150 million One Battle After Another, with Leo DiCaprio. That budget presents a very high hurdle. But the biggest test for Warners will come with the July release of James Gunn’s Superman—a project that was
not overseen by De Luca and Abdy, to be clear, but bears the megaton weight of Warners’ hopes for DC, and has become a harbinger for whether there is still life in the superhero genre. Meanwhile, many Warners observers think that Peter Safran, Gunn’s co-chairman and C.E.O. at DC Studios, is a contender for the Mike-and-Pam job. If Superman disappoints, what then?

Right now, there may be more suspense offscreen for Warners than on-. There are also jitters
on the television side. “People are nervous and anxious,” said one source. “There’s some sort of discussion going on with [Comcast C.E.O.] Brian Roberts about spinoffs and the cable group. It was so obvious when David restructured, [creating] two distinct operating divisions.” This person was referring to Zaslav’s decision to restructure WBD into two units—one that holds linear TV networks—just a few weeks after NBCU announced that it would be spinning off its cable networks
into “SpinCo,” led by Mark Lazarus. (Comcast, which is keeping Bravo and NBC, along with Peacock, declined to comment about any potential deal.)

Observing all this, one Hollywood veteran recently told me he expected that John Malone, the powerful 84-year-old mogul who engineered the WarnerMedia–Discovery merger and backed Zaslav to run the combined company, would finally run out of patience with his protégé of many years. Instead, the opposite just
happened. Late last week, Malone announced that he would give up his WBD board seat to become chairman emeritus, and praised Zaslav’s “powerful combination of operational excellence and decisive leadership.”

Zaslav may not be loved around town, but he has his fans on Wall Street—as my partner Bill Cohan has chronicled—thanks to his relentless focus on increasing free cash flow and paying down the WBD debt. “John Malone will never get tired of [Zaslav],” a Warners exec
told me. “I don’t understand it, but they have each other’s backs.” As for Zaslav, he got yet another raise, with a pay package worth nearly $52 million—far more than Bob Iger’s lousy $41 million in 2024. With the stock down 55 percent since the merger—and down 25 percent so far this year—the response around town was, as usual, stunned jealousy. “He’s like a robber baron from the ’20s!” one agent marvelled.

And then there’s the uncertainty hanging over Paramount, where the Skydance acquisition continues to await
federal approval after the deadline for locking it up was extended by 90 days, to July 6. I’ve picked up some surprising news about the reporting structure when—or if—the deal goes through.

The assumption is that nothing will happen until Paramount settles Donald Trump’s frivolous $20 billion lawsuit alleging that CBS News did something nefarious with last October’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. This past week, the parties
selected a mediator to work out their differences, which means a retired judge will lend his dignity to a negotiation over how much Trump will try to extort from his old friend Shari Redstone’s company. On Sunday, Trump fired off a rant about two stories on that night’s broadcast—clearly, 60 Minutes is not backing down from Trump coverage—and said CBS should be fined and lose its broadcast license. I wouldn’t call that an auspicious sign, though maybe he was just trying
to rattle Redstone as the parties head into mediation.

Shari has lots of company. Disney paid up with a $16 million settlement of Trump’s suit against ABC News. Amazon coughed up an astonishing $40 million for the Melania documentary. And now, per reporting today in New York, a WBD representative recently asked a
person in the Trump orbit for advice on how to curry favor with the administration. The response was to look at what the others had forked over—and oh, Don Jr. might like a fishing show on Discovery. Imagine how many viewers he’ll hook! (Sorry.) And CNN needs more pro-Trump voices, presumably because Scott Jennings isn’t irritating enough.

Everyone, except maybe avid Fox News watchers, believes the Trump lawsuit against CBS News to be a very beatable
claim, unless the Supremes get involved, in which case, who can say? Since this involves a mediator and not an arbitrator, nothing is binding, and there’s no guarantee that a settlement will get the Paramount deal cleared. If it does, you might think it looks like the administration is selling regulatory approval of the deal. You’ll get no argument here. But if the mediator gets the parties to a number, Redstone will have betrayed her company’s news operation in a way that is likely to be
mentioned in her eventual obituary. For the staff, one insider told me, any such settlement would be “a really odious pill to swallow.” Another suggested that Trump may insist on an apology, which would only add to that odiousness. As one industry veteran put it, “I think he hates CBS and 60 Minutes more than he likes [MAGA supporter] Larry Ellison. I’m not sure this deal can close.”

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Asked for comment, a Paramount spokesman told me, “This lawsuit is completely separate from, and unrelated
to, the Skydance transaction and the F.C.C. approval process. We will abide by the legal process to defend our case.” A rep for Redstone declined to comment, as did Skydance. But it looks like David Ellison may be doing his part to buddy up. Though he has put out the word that unlike his father, he’s not a Trump guy, he was ringside at a U.F.C. fight in Miami on Saturday, sitting next to Ari Emanuel, who was seated next to Elon
Musk (accompanied by his child), who was seated next to Trump. A source said Ellison was Ari’s guest. Ellison declined to comment.

Meanwhile, you have the three Paramount co-C.E.O.s—George Cheeks, Brian Robbins, and Chris McCarthy—trying to run a company that depends in large part on attracting talent, when both the talent and their reps know the guys in charge could be out the door in a matter of weeks. Robbins and McCarthy are
not expected to remain when (or if) Skydance takes over, but Cheeks is expected to stick around. Jeff Shell, the former C.E.O. of NBCUniversal, would assume the role of president, but exactly what he will oversee isn’t clear. It appears that none of the top creative execs will report to Shell.

Sources with knowledge of various aspects of the plans suggest that Dana Goldberg, Skydance’s chief creative officer, would oversee a broad swath of content and
report to Skydance Media C.E.O. David Ellison. Other sources have said that Cindy Holland, the former Netflix exec who is currently advising Skydance on streaming, is expected to run the company’s streaming service, reporting to Ellison. If Cheeks ends up staying, I’m told his remit would be expanded to include other Paramount television networks—and that he, too, would report to Ellison.

So that’s a pretty powerful trio that would not be reporting to
Shell. But recall that NBCU fired him for improper conduct two years ago, which means that getting this job is a big break, and he doesn’t have a lot of leverage. It appears he’ll be more of a sounding board for Ellison, and that might be a good thing given that Ellison’s experience in management has been confined to his own company. A source with knowledge of the planning for the integration says Shell has won Ellison’s confidence by “keeping his head down” and is “more of an advisor on cost
savings and the new Paramount’s business model.”

One source involved in the situation compared Shell’s role to that of the late Frank Wells, the president and C.O.O. of Disney during a decade of explosive success. Wells’s direct reports included the operating officers—such as the C.F.O. and the general counsel—but none of the creative execs. Wells, a Rhodes scholar who could trace his ancestry to the Mayflower, was “the highest of the high goyim,” as the late
producer Don Simpson put it. If Wells had insisted on being Disney’s C.E.O., the title would have been his. (He was also quite a ladies’ man, and is said to have put one of his mistresses through law school.) However, Wells agreed to let Michael Eisner have the C.E.O. title, which worked out very well. But it’s fair to say the analogy is not quite perfect.

Of course, the other parlor game in town is predicting who will run Disney after Bob Iger
departs, for the second time, theoretically at the end of 2026. The selection process remains pretty opaque. No one knows who has the inside track among the four internal candidates whose names have been floated—or whether the job will go to an internal candidate at all.

Still, many observers have been leaning toward Dana Walden as the likeliest choice. But something seems to have shifted in the past few days, and the latest betting favors theme-park guy
Josh D’Amaro as Disney’s future C.E.O. The handicappers have noted that he lacks creative relationships and has no film or TV experience. And it has definitely not been counted as a point in his favor that Bob Chapek was also the theme-park guy before his short and unhappy stint as C.E.O. But D’Amaro seems to be more popular, more at ease in his own skin, and he’s quite Iger-like in everything from his demeanor to his wardrobe.

It’s widely
believed that Iger prefers Walden, but this time he is not steering the process, which is being overseen by board chairman James Gorman. So while Iger might respect Walden and want to cement his legacy—after the damage inflicted by the Chapek fiasco—by naming the first female C.E.O. at Disney, there are also reasonable questions about Walden as a candidate. No one denies her talent (or ambition), but her operating experience is lacking. (One insider said, with a meow, that a
great relationship with Ryan Murphy doesn’t actually prepare a person to run The Walt Disney Co.) There is also the matter of timing, as Walden has been very close to Kamala Harris and Disney has already suffered through a very unpleasant bout of right-wing wrath. What are the chances that Trump would mock Walden as “a D.E.I. hire” and look for any excuse to make life harder for Disney?

The C.E.O. choice is expected to be revealed early in 2026, and Iger’s last day in the
job is supposedly at the end of that year. But it’s not crazy to wonder whether it’s necessary to wait that long. One of my favorite Disney whisperers said that the vetting is already well underway. “Candidates have had multiple interviews and multiple opportunities on big stages to demonstrate leadership,” he added. In that case, might it make sense to resolve this situation sooner rather than later? (There hasn’t been a credible murmur about outside candidates, which may mean nothing. But no,
Matt, I don’t think Ted Sarandos is in the mix.)

My whisperer dismisses the chatter that D’Amaro is the victor. “Unless your source is James Gorman, I wouldn’t believe much of what you hear,” he cautioned. “There are only 12 people who matter”—that is, the members of the Disney board—“and everything else is coming from rival camps and employees and spinners and competitors and troublemakers.” Given the uncertainty and instability around town, however,
putting an end to the drama would be better than having it drag on for months. We’ll see whether the Disney board is having such thoughts.

Michael Wolff’s long-awaited profile of David Zaslav dropped today. The willingness of CNN’s
owner to be bent over by Trump is getting the headlines, but my takeaway is of a craven and insecure media executive stuck in an era when media executives don’t actually matter. Still, nothing too incendiary, so P.R. guy Robert Gibbs can keep his job. [New York]

More: Wolff will be on The Town tomorrow
to discuss Zaz and the article.

As usual, Jim Cameron has the most thoughtful comments on A.I. and big-budget filmmaking. “We’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half.” [Boz to the Future]

Netflix wants to be a trillion-dollar company with 410 million subscribers by 2030.
[WSJ]

Finally, an article that calls bullshit on the style with which the execs on The Studio dress. [NY Times]

Big congrats to Ari Emanuel, who managed to win some tennis assets in an auction
conducted by… Ari Emanuel. [Bloomberg]

Nestle launched a White Lotus–branded piña colada creamer without knowing the flavor would soon be associated with poisoning. Oops.
[WSJ]

A mix of responses to my items on Warners politics, Disney and Ted Sarandos, CAA’s 1.2 percent buyback,
and Steve Asbell and Seth Rogen…

“While it’s great that WB has a new near-billion-dollar franchise in Minecraft, it’s probably worth mentioning that they sat on this I.P. for YEARS and only finally agreed to make it when they were at risk of losing the I.P. While we are now talking about this movie potentially saving Mike and Pam’s jobs, another question worth asking is, Had Toby [Emmerich] greenlit the movie two years earlier, would he
still have his job?” —A producer

“The math on the current CAA stock redemption program, if it holds steady at 1.2 percent, means after 20 years, only 21.4 percent of total holdings have been redeemed (not 25 percent). After 30 years, it’s only 29.7 percent (not 36 percent), and so on. I am using these numbers as the longest periods for holding U.S. Treasuries. More to the point though, assuming the value of the shares stays flat over that time, it would be equivalent to holding
Treasury bonds at an interest rate of .63 percent. Hardly keeping up with the targeted 2 percent rate of inflation.” —A lawyer

“How about Adam Sussman [president of] Epic Games as an alternative for the Disney [C.E.O.] role? He’s already under the Disney hood due to the investment, and Fortnite has stayed relevant longer than any video game ever. At the very least, he’s now holding a winning lottery ticket with those movie rights!” —An
executive

“Why not [other Netflix co-C.E.O. Greg] Peters instead of Sarandos for the Disney job?” —Another executive

“I have zero doubt that, out of frustration, Steve said some version of the ‘ruin’ quote to Seth Rogen years ago. But to his credit, Steve tirelessly championed Seth and Evan [Goldberg]’s talents on their Fox project Gen CCX, well before
Superbad broke out as a hit.” —A former Asbell colleague at 20th Century Fox

Disney’s Lilo & Stitch remake has higher awareness than a Mission: Impossible movie,
suggesting a Memorial Day trouncing, according to the latest early film tracking chart from The Quorum…

Have a great week,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or nominations for best-dressed
studio executive? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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