Bill Cohan: Kim, it’s been accepted wisdom for a while that there’s going to be a massive realignment of the big players in Hollywood, which is underway, and not every legacy studio will survive…  Kim Masters: We’ve already seen Fox disappear into the Disney maw. Paramount was a melting ice cube before David Ellison stepped in. What can he do with it? We’ll have to wait and see. But the ones that look most likely to survive are Comcast and Disney. Warners being vulnerable would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. That Warners could become subsumed like Fox is now—I’m not talking about their Lachlan-controlled businesses, I’m talking about the studio operations, which are a label at Disney now—would have been unthinkable. But a lot of people in Hollywood have been speculating for quite a while that, ultimately, Zaslav does make a deal with someone, maybe Comcast. Whenever I write that a deal between WBD and NBCU is a real possibility, the folks at Comcast tell me I’m crazy. Well, you may be nuts, but that doesn’t stop Hollywood from thinking about it. What that reveals is they’re sensing a deal of some kind. That both parties could benefit from, frankly. Which marriage would make the most beautiful couple? Clearly, we have Comcast’s SpinCo awaiting a partner. Paramount+ maybe? David Ellison has a spinco problem too—his own albatross to deal with. On the one hand, he has the bottomless pockets of his father. On the other, we have seen many times how quickly Hollywood can burn money. Nobody would be surprised to see the troubled cable parts of Paramount get spun off and partnered up somewhere. We know that Zaslav went and talked to Bob Bakish before the Ellison deal got stitched up, and obviously before Bakish got fired. So, he was eyeballing that place. You’ve got a Paramount cable spinoff that probably has to happen. You’ve got the WBD cable spinoff underway. The Comcast SpinCo has already been announced. Who’s going to take up all these spincos? Is it going to be, what, one big spinco?  Who knows? Maybe you ball them all together and milk them until they die. I don’t know what they’re going to do with those things. They do still throw off money. That’s been the confounding element for all these people. Like, for Zaslav, he has to keep that cable money coming while simultaneously transforming the company into one that doesn’t rely on the cable-channel money. He’s walking a tightrope. They all are.

You’ve said things in Hollywood are as bad as you’ve ever seen them. Thousands and thousands of people have been laid off, and many have simply left L.A. because there are no jobs. There are so many people who aren’t working. It’s just been devastating and demoralizing. The studios are cutting and cutting, and CBS, as you anticipate, probably will too. It’s been pretty brutal. Now the question is, who lives and who dies? Paramount has been seen as too small to survive on its own. So where does that leave David Ellison? David, you know, was kissed into Mission: Impossible, and he got to be a partner on Top Gun: Maverick. But what has he done on his own? Bloomberg just did an analysis of it—he’s not exactly minting money, but with the ability to invest in the franchises at Paramount he’s gotten a better look. It was kind of funny to me that when they were trying to make that deal happen, his P.R. people were saying, “He’s part of Skydance, which has amazing franchises.” And I called and said, “What are the amazing franchises that he has?” And the answer was, “Oh, you know, Mission: Impossible, Top Gun…” Well, Top Gun was around when David Ellison was a baby in diapers, and he was probably wearing braces when Mission: Impossible launched. To be fair, he was the one who pushed the hardest to do a Top Gun update, and obviously, it was wildly successful. But you don’t get to say I have won the game in Hollywood when you come in with a bag of money that is then put into existing franchises. (The eighth Mission: Impossible movie is a potential problem, actually, since they are wildly expensive and the seventh one fell short at the box office.) For what it’s worth, David has been the more responsible Ellison sibling. Megan burned a lot of money at Annapurna, although she was like a patron of the arts, and people really appreciated that, because she was doing more independent types of movies, more art-house movies. But you can lose money very fast. I reported this a couple of years ago, that Larry Ellison got fed up with his daughter’s losses and sent a guy with a green eyeshade to stop the bleeding. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief when David took over Paramount Global, because they didn’t want to see another buyer disappear. But we’ve seen so many wealthy people come and go in this business, often much the poorer. They made a big point about Larry not being involved in running it, and that it’s David’s show. But unless it can turn into a thriving company, how much is Larry Ellison going to want to throw at it? I heard early on from people who should know that he didn’t want to do it in the first place. Then he obviously changed his mind and backed his only boy. Obviously, it’s all just change from the sofa cushions for him. But how patient is he? That’s the question. And what can David even do in this environment? He talks a lot about technology. Okay, but we don’t know where that gets you. Paramount isn’t getting evicted from the club yet, but, boy, it was on the edge of the edge. And I’ve heard that, even now, Shari regrets selling. She just couldn’t make up her mind. I think it was reality versus Freudian stuff with her father that I can’t address. I mean, it couldn’t have been easy with his constant doubting that she could run his empire.

We talked about Warners, we talked about Paramount. What about Disney and NBCU? At Disney, succession is obviously a huge question. I feel like Bob Iger has, in fact, taken some steps to help him reclaim some of the reputation that became a bit battered with the Bob Chapek situation. They’ve had some gigantic hits this year at the box office, and I think there are signs of life overall. Disney is Disney and has incredible assets, and nothing is going to change that, as far as I can tell, in the near future. I remember reading a former Disney vice chairman Frank Wells quote that “Every time we open a door, there’s money behind it.” It’s not that simple now, of course, but they found so many unexploited assets when he and Michael Eisner took over the company in 1984. Disney had been kind of adrift. But still, they have so many ways to monetize something. Yes, there’s been a bit of bump on the theme parks. But are people just going to stop going to Disneyland? I don’t think so. I’m pretty confident that if Steve Jobs were alive, Disney would belong to Apple right now, or be in the process of being bought by Apple. Apparently, Tim Cook doesn’t want to do it. That doesn’t mean that Bob Iger doesn’t want to do it. And obviously, they could buy Disney. To me, if they’re ever going to buy a studio, Disney is the only one that makes sense. But as things stand now, Iger’s motivation is clear: He wants to go out as the greatest C.E.O. in the industry. Bob wants to reclaim his mantle, and he’s made progress. They have some things they need to do. Then there’s a whole bake-off right now as to who’s going to get to be the C.E.O., and I think Iger has been relieved of the duty of figuring that out. The board is now involved. Okay, so who do you think it will be? I think the C.E.O. at Disney has got to be a company insider. The Disney culture is very specific and very deeply ingrained. You saw what happened to Peter Rice, who had been groomed by running TV and film and all kinds of things at Fox. Years ago, long before there was even a concept that Disney would buy Fox, I had said to Peter that he could be a future C.E.O. of Disney. The only question I had was that he is British, and I wasn’t sure whether a company as American as Disney would want a C.E.O. with an English accent. But otherwise he was the best groomed, at least on paper, to run Disney. But when Disney bought Fox, the culture rejected him—old-school Disney people, like C.F.O. Christine McCarthy, said, He’s not one of us. I mean, he’s British. He’s cool. He’s a little distant. He can be funny, but he’s not this kind of glad-handing guy. And Bob Chapek fired him with no notice. It was really a shocker, and a lot of people in the industry were upset, just because it was so abrupt and seemingly unmerited. Chapek probably thought Peter was conspiring against him and leaking things. I don’t discuss sourcing much, but I will say if he was doing that, it wasn’t to me. I think McCarthy was very engaged in the anti-Peter campaign. Of course, she also ended up getting a little too close to Chapek before she pivoted back to Iger. A lot of people portrayed her in a way that was not correct, but I knew she had made that mistake. But getting back to the succession of it all: Dana Walden, I think, has done a better job of integrating herself into the Disney fabric. Does it hurt her that she is besties with Kamala? Probably. We just saw Disney pay $16 million to Donald Trump to get rid of what seemed like a winnable lawsuit. And then there’s Josh D’Amaro. He’s a very appealing guy. He runs the theme parks, which have some problems, but is that his fault? Can we blame it all on Chapek? Probably not really all of it. So there are these candidates. They’re obviously going to look outside, but I have to believe that they go with an insider. Well, my theory of the case is that with former Morgan Stanley C.E.O. James Gorman running the process, Disney will find an outsider, sort of like an orchestra conductor to run the organization while letting the four division heads—Walden and D’Amaro, as you mentioned, but also movie chief Alan Bergman and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro—continue to run their businesses. Maybe, or it could be Dana Walden with Josh D’Amaro as C.O.O. or something. Because when Bob Iger was pulling the strings, I thought that putting the first female C.E.O. at Disney in place would be a very appealing thing for him. But it depends on how much Gorman believes that an outsider is the right answer. It’s a dicey thing. Who is this outsider who understands all these Disney elements? Eisner was an outsider, sure. He came from Paramount. He had been at ABC television. But those were very different times. Isn’t there anyone like Eisner out there? I can’t think of anybody off the top of my head. It was such a different era. Disney had so much unexploited wealth, and then Michael had Frank Wells. That was a killer combo, because Frank Wells was literally a Rhodes Scholar. What did Don Simpson call him? “The highest of the high goyim.” Bob Iger reminds me a bit of Jamie Dimon, one of these larger-than-life C.E.O.s, who then eliminates anyone who comes along and tries to succeed him. Eisner did the same thing. Getting too close to him was death. Everyone, including Michael, knew that Frank could have had the job and could have the job if Michael went too far in any direction. So that kept Michael in check. And that’s what my second book was about: Frank died in a helicopter crash, and the whole flipping thing went to hell. Michael was, at that point, a Nixonian character, not trusting anybody. But he had his run. But my point is that they weren’t newbies. Looking around, who has the stature of a Frank Wells? No one who’s young enough to be considered as a possibility to do the job. I wrote a piece years ago at The Hollywood Reporter about how there was no rising generation, and the Olds were really hanging on. I’m on Team Olds, let me be clear. But at a certain point, the Olds can’t hold on anymore. And when you haven’t groomed successors, well, you get a mess, as we saw, as we see. What about Donna Langley, over at NBCU, for Disney C.E.O.? There has been some chatter about Donna Langley. She hasn’t run the theme parks, of course. But she’s had film, and then they added TV, and now she’s queen of all content. She’s very talented. She’s ambitious. But would she want to go to Disney? She’s also British, and does Disney have to have an American C.E.O.? Is Comcast going to give her everything she wants? If I were Disney and I had a shot at Donna, I would take it. Donna’s the only one I can think of. She has thrown the dice more than anybody else, more successfully. But she’ll tell you right now she’s very happy where she is.

Last topic: Can streaming and theater exhibition ever co-exist again? When have we seen a movie that launched on a streamer become a cultural event? Take, for instance, Harry Potter, and all that flowed from it. It was an event as a book, but there was also an event with multiple movies and theme park attractions. Does that come out of a streamer? At one point, Chapek was putting a lot of the movies on the streamer, and people were getting mad. I asked him what movie succeeded there enough to really activate the Disney I.P. machine: to give you the theme park attraction, lunch boxes, all of that cultural-impact stuff that makes your kid want to buy this, that, and the other. And he said Encanto. But it had opened in theaters… That’s one of the smart things that Zaslav said, “We’re not doing movies for the streamer.” And I thought, No shit—unless it’s a very small movie. Netflix is still spending, though it’s dialed back. But even if people don’t run to the theater to see a movie, when it later comes on the streamer, they think, “Oh, yeah, I wanted to see that.” It creates a profile for it, and then, with luck, there’s excitement. You can’t replace that. So, are you sanguine or concerned about the future of Hollywood? You start from the premise that stories want to be told and will be told, in my opinion, and that’s a constant. We’re going through this incredible transformation, and it hasn’t even begun to take effect. A.I. is moving along at the speed of light or faster, and we don’t fully get what it’s going to do in terms of entertainment. So everything is changing, and we can’t really foresee how. I mean, it’s conventional wisdom to say you’ll have Amazon, the Big Tech companies, plus Disney and Comcast. You know, those will be the survivors. That’s something a lot of people will tell you. Zaz, of course, includes Warners in that mix. Maybe, but the conventional wisdom is that he’s looking for a deal, which may or may not ensure the survival of Warners. Hollywood is not like it used to be. This is a conversation I have with the old-guard Hollywood people every other day. They say, We were here for the fun part. And it’s true. It wasn’t necessarily fun if you were a woman, but we lived in an era where David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg and Barry Diller, none of whom had the patience for college, became kings. That can’t happen today. You have to have some kind of advanced degree to work in the CAA mailroom. It’s just a completely different environment. The independents are going to have their hands full, but they are always fighting against all odds to make independent films. So Hollywood, in some shape or form, I think, endures. But I don’t know if it’s the same or if it ever gets back to being fun.

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