Good morning,

It was yet another fabulous week: Matt Belloni talked with James Cameron about Hollywood’s evolution and the Avatar arc; Eriq Gardner contemplated David Zaslav’s “Revlon mode” conundrum; Dylan Byers examined Alison Roman’s culinary media empire; Julia Alexander detailed the Substack evacuation fallacy; Bill Cohan delved into the “cockroach”-infested credit market debate; Ian Krietzberg catalogued an A.I. breakthrough; Lauren Sherman previewed retail’s dark Q4; Rachel Strugatz offered a requiem for an O.G. fashion influencer; Sarah Shapiro unearthed the season’s top gift guides; John Ourand inspected LIV’s new deal; Marion Maneker got to the bottom of a uniquely D.C. art scandal; and Julie Brener Davich cracked the Fabergé egg market.

Meanwhile, Leigh Ann Caldwell captured Trump’s manosphere problems; Abby Livingston evaluated his lame duck status; Peter Hamby spotlighted the Newsom successionscape; and Julia Ioffe documented the latest Kushner–Witkoff escapades.

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Lauren Sherman uncovers early clues about retail’s Q4 performance.
and…
Rachel Strugatz charts the rise and fall of a fashion influencer.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro captures Erin Webb’s twin successes and provides a guide to holiday gift guides.

Marion Maneker investigates a very swampy museum scandal.
and…
Julie Davich cracks the Fabergé egg market.

Matt Belloni chats up James Cameron about the state of the business and gets to the bottom of the Trump–Ellison Rush Hour 4 saga.
and…
Eriq Gardner recounts David Zaslav’s “Revlon mode” obligations.

Ian Krietzberg has an A.I. feel-good story for the holidays.

Dylan Byers asks Alison Roman about her creator journey.
and…
Julia Alexander outlines the new theory of Substack.

John Ourand details an NFL strategy switcheroo and a new LIV Golf deal.

Bill Cohan wades into the contradictions of the private credit markets.

Leigh Ann Caldwell spotlights a vibe shift within the manosphere.
and…
Peter Hamby surveys the field of Gavin Newsom wannabes.
and…
Julia Ioffe inspects Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff’s misadventures in Eastern Europe.
and…
Abby Livingston contemplates Trump’s impending lame duck status.

Andy Webb recounts the ultimate Princess Diana deception.
and…
Matt Kapp reviews the Trump legal scorecard.
meanwhile…
Victoria Bekiempis takes us inside Ghislaine Maxwell’s posh prison existence.

Dylan and media guys Troy Young and Brian Morrissey turn over the ongoing Nuzzi scandal.
and…
Ourand welcomes Marchand (!!) for a reunion tour on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren and podcaster Avery Trufelman discuss the rise of gorpcoremania on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and longtime G.O.P. strategist Stuart Stevens play ’28 games on Impolitic.
and…
Listen to Matt’s two-part interview with James Cameron here and here on The Town.
and…
Peter and Julia Alexander break down Apple’s withdrawal from its MLS deal on The Powers That Be.

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Last Friday, my partner Matt Belloni sent a D.M. on Slack with an exciting update: He was going to have to peel away from our weekly What I’m Hearing+ meeting with our colleague Eriq Gardner to interview James Cameron, perhaps the most successful director of our time (at least this side of Spielberg), at his studio across from Erewhon in advance of the media tour for Avatar: Fire and Ash. It sounded like a pretty reasonable excuse to Eriq and me.

From Terminator and True Lies to Titanic and the Avatar franchise, Cameron has forged a singular career, spanning the superstar era to the superhero and super-I.P. age—from the box office battles to the streaming wars to, well, the contemporary and often confusing hybrid moment. His hard-earned observations, searing industry insights, and inimitable honesty are self-evident in a pair of excellent episodes of Matt’s podcast, The Town. And Matt compiled Cameron’s most scintillating perspectives—on David Zaslav, Netflix, and the shrinking studio system—in the provocative Candid Cameron. I can’t recommend it more, especially to those looking for clues to the industry’s future amid a multidimensional platform and paradigm shift whose endpoint may just be coming into focus.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies are laser-focused on lowering health care costs by taking on the drivers of higher premiums. 

Our affordability solutions are a roadmap to reducing costs by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years. 

Learn how we can work together to deliver real savings for hardworking taxpayers. 

Matt’s interview serves as an excellent complement to our partner Julia Alexander’s adjacent discourse on the digital media business. After all, different parts of the media industry have been surfing waves of disruption, with varying degrees of success, for the last quarter-century-plus. It took the music industry a couple decades to recover from the Napster earthquake before it reorganized itself into three conglomerates, largely platformed by Spotify—albeit with less pomp and decadence and a smaller employee population. The book business took approximately the same time to respond to the Amazon upheaval, and the film and TV business seems to be on the same timeline following Netflix. But traditional text-based media faces an even rockier course.

Even within the span of my own career, publishers have lived through multiple Gutenberg-level supernovas—Google, Facebook, Twitter, the pivot to video, the pivot back, YouTube, etcetera. In Substack Entrapment Theory, Julia explains how many might be misinterpreting the latest creator-centric micro-flight to Substack as a chance to reinvent themselves rather than another audience sandcastle. It’s an undeniably brilliant dissertation on the space, and a reminder that the carnage of the past is a prelude to the next era of disruption.

And yet, there’s a silver lining in all this, if not quite a Thanksgiving fable. Sure, it may be harder than ever to produce a theatrical breakthrough in Hollywood—but rather than rehash a comic book that Baby Boomers read as children, Cameron is on the third iteration of a blockbuster story of his own invention. Similarly, the world that Julia describes is filled with unprecedented choice and value for consumers. Without being dramatic or facile, there’s something heartening about the constant innovation cycle for industries in need of reinvention. That’s the story of our age, and precisely what you can always expect to read about in Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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