Happy Friday and welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to Puck’s best new reporting. Here’s what you need to know… and stick around for Matt’s Hollywood gluttony index.

Meanwhile, on the pods…

And now, a little more on the C.E.O. gluttony index…

HOLLYWOOD

How the hell do these guys make so much money? It’s among the first questions in any conversation about the executive class running Hollywood, and the answer is usually a shoulder shrug. Of course, C.E.O. gluttony is a baked-in industry custom, but as Matt reports, this earnings season made the question impossible to ignore: Media and entertainment C.E.O. pay at large S&P 500 companies rose a median 117 percent in 2025, while median total shareholder returns fell 28.6 percent. Bob Iger, who didn’t grow Disney’s share price at all last year, got an 11 percent raise to $45.8 million. Makan Delrahim, Paramount Skydance’s lawyer, pulled in nearly $64 million for three months of work. And David Zaslav, whose Warner Bros. Discovery is being off-loaded to Paramount, tripled his pay package to $165 million.

However, an eye-popping new study argues the rot runs deeper. After reviewing public proxy filings from the last three decades, researcher Stephen Follows found that pay packages have compounded upward regardless of whether the underlying business is shrinking or losing money, while inflation-adjusted wage growth across the rest of the industry was just 6 percent over the same period. “The cost of running the studio C-suite has fallen sharply, while the pay of the people running it has more than doubled in real terms,” Follows wrote. Depressed yet?

Click here to read Matt’s full story.

WASHINGTON

Spencer Pratt, the former MTV reality villain, is surging in the final sprint of the L.A. mayoral race as an unlikely coalition of Republicans and bashful Democrats gravitate toward his rants about drugs and homelessness—and the failure of polite progressivism to do anything about it.

A.I.

A surprising deal with Anthropic is raising questions about whether Musk’s xAI is abandoning the frontier model arms race to focus on neocloud services instead—including launching G.P.U.s into space.

SPORTS

The World Cup’s descent on North America has been greeted by the typical grab bag of micro-scandals and preemptive complaints. In their private group chats, though, top industry executives don’t really care—they’ve seen this film before, and they’re convinced they are about to make stacks of cash.

FASHION

Despite the industry’s love-hate relationship with licensing firm ABG, Jamie Salter’s company is an essential lifeline for certain middling, too-big-to-fail brands. But at what cost?

MEDIA

Dylan and Julia dive right into Byron Allen’s eye-popping $120 million purchase of BuzzFeed, a legacy media brand that has seen better days. They also look into The New York Times’s decision to license Wordle to NBC, and analyze how the outlet has made use of its growing I.P. The conversation also covers CNN’s new weather app and culminates in some well-earned optimism about the New York Knicks’ chances in the NBA playoffs.

HOLLYWOOD

Matt Belloni joins Peter to discuss the stakes for next weekend’s debut of The Mandalorian and Grogu—Disney’s first Star Wars movie in seven years—which is tracking at a middling $80 million for the four-day open and leaning on TV I.P. rather than starpower. Then they discuss all the chatter surrounding Cannes and why Hollywood has largely ghosted the red carpet.

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