What I’m Hearing: Amazon’s MrBeast Headache, August’s Movie Dump & The Box Office Bounce

Welcome back to What I’m Hearing. I’m home in L.A. and catching up after a great week (mostly) off the grid and blissfully unaware of what R.F.K. Jr. did to a dead bear. Big thanks to Eriq Gardner for filling in for me on Thursday; he’s now back to his usual WIH+ perch on Tuesdays. 🚨🚨Emmys event: I’m moderating a True Detective: Night Country panel at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica next Monday with Jodie Foster, Kali Reis, and creator Issa López. Puck members interested in attending can RSVP here. Programming note: This week on The Town, Lucas Shaw and I delved into the music industry’s growth problem, and our 2024 teams are now set thanks to the Intellectual Property Draft. Subscribe here and here. Also, I’m in this week’s episode of the Land of the Giants podcast about Disney. Not a Puck member yet? Click here to fix that problem. Got a news tip or an idea for me? Just reply to this email or message me anonymously on Signal at 310-804-3198. Discussed in this issue: Bob Iger, Jen Salke, Adam Fogelson, David Zaslav, Jeffrey Housenbold, Jimmy Kimmel, MrBeast, Cate Blanchett, Sammy Davis Jr., and… Statler and Waldorf. But first…

Who Won the Week: Snoop Dogg

NBC probably thought bringing the 52-year-old rapper turned corporate pitchman to Paris would be a nice little promo for The Voice. He’s now the viral star of an Olympics that, nine days in and counting on daytime and primetime, is doubling the numbers of the previous Summer Games, with 32.6 million viewers per day.Olympics question: Is Universal running nonstop Wicked ads because they know they’ve got a winner, or because they’re terrified of early data showing lower-than-expected interest? Discuss… Another Universal question: Is Twisters tanking overseas because Uni’s production leaned too heavily into the heartland thing, or is it because Warner Bros., which is handling foreign, isn’t as good at marketing? Talk amongst yourselves…

Quote of the Week

“We signed up for the show, but we didn’t sign up for not being fed or watered or treated like human beings.” —An anonymous contestant on Beast Games, telling the Times about substandard conditions during a precursor event for the Amazon series starring and produced by YouTuber MrBeast.A little more on this project…

Amazon’s MrBeast Cautionary Tale

Amazon Studios head Jen Salke has a meeting set for tomorrow with the president of MrBeast’s company, and while the call was scheduled a while ago, we can all pretty much guess what’s gonna be discussed. When I first revealed in January that Amazon would pay nearly $100 million to air Beast Games, a reality-competition show produced by and starring the world’s most popular YouTuber, I noted the risk inherent in an established entertainment studio (not to mention one of the world’s largest companies) getting into business with a 26-year-old digital prankster/philanthropist who has never produced anything outside of YouTube.MrBeast (né Jimmy Donaldson) negotiated total control of the project. And when he was presented with a list of established unscripted production companies with which to collaborate, I’m told, he passed, choosing instead to surround himself with his own people. Now, Amazon has been dragged into an unpleasant situation after a local Vegas website and then the Times reported on hospitalizations, dangerous conditions, and a lack of food and water at a preliminary contestant screening that drew more than 2,000 people to a Nevada arena last month. I won’t get into the details, but it sounds pretty bad, though sources close to Team Beast, which has hired crisis P.R. veteran Matthew Hiltzik, claim the complaints mostly came from people who didn’t make the cut for the next round of the game. If anything, they argue, there were very few injuries, it was local staff hired in Vegas who screwed up managing the situation, and producers have reached out to everyone involved and even paid them $1,000 for their troubles. Large-crowd reality games are a difficult genre, as evidenced by the claims of abuse against Netflix by participants in its Squid Game competition. Plus, the video of the Vegas event did huge numbers, and MrBeast’s young fans certainly don’t care what the Times writes—especially if there’s a $5 million cash prize involved. Still, Amazon is not YouTube, a fact that MrBeast knew when he left the friendly confines of user-generated content for a shot at Television with a capital T. He was making plenty of money on YouTube and via his chocolate business, but digital talent often still craves the Hollywood spotlight, even if Mike Cruz, Beast’s lead producer and a key figure in pitching the Amazon show, has little to no experience in traditional television production. Can they save this show? Probably, but complicating matters, Beast has shaken up his team lately, splitting with longtime manager Reed Duchscher, consolidating his team in Greenville, North Carolina, and bringing in former Shutterfly C.E.O. Jeffrey Housenbold as president and C.O.O.—another guy with no traditional television experience. So let’s see if this show actually happens. Production is set to pick up soon in Toronto, and at this point it seems as if Amazon and Beast’s many brand partners are still on board and willing to make it work. If they pull off what they’re calling the world’s biggest game show, it could be a major hit. But there’s a reason Netflix’s Ted Sarandos seemed so nervous about this project in the pitch meeting before Amazon outbid him, per one source in that meeting. There hasn’t been a microscope on this guy until now, and it might find unpleasant things. And if MrBeast can’t make this kind of show work, few other YouTubers will get the chance.

My Reading List…

This account of Sammy Davis Jr.’s two-decade dalliance with the Church of Satan (yes) demands a six-episode Apple TV+ treatment. [Rolling Stone]With shades of Bob Iger acknowledging cord-cutting back in 2015, Universal Music’s stock tanked after its C.F.O. admitted “subscription revenue saw a deceleration in growth.” [Bloomberg] Speaking of UMG: C.E.O. Lucian Grainge’s 30-year-old son, Elliot, was just put in charge of Warner’s storied Atlantic label. And who says the music industry is still a Mafia boys club?? [Billboard] The L.A. Times has now done about 30 articles with the same basic premise: There was a production bubble. It burst. Now there’s far fewer jobs, reality TV included. [L.A. Times] The A.I. reckoning is upon us! [NY Mag]

Return of the August Burn-Off…

Who doesn’t love an old-fashioned August movie dump? It’s actually a nice sign of relative normalcy in the film business that Lionsgate is plopping Borderlands, its long-delayed, $120 million-budgeted video game adaptation into theaters this weekend with a muted marketing spend and limited press from Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Jamie Lee Curtis, in a role she shot before winning the Oscar but released more than two years after Everything Everywhere All at Once. Yes, Borderlands was greenlit more than four years ago and finished principal photography back in 2021.So what happened? Blame extensive reshoots and postproduction, and a cast with many other obligations, especially Blanchett and Hart. Getting them back together for additional shooting was apparently a nightmare, and director Eli Roth eventually bailed to make Thanksgiving, which required Lionsgate to hire Tim Miller (Deadpool) to finish the shots. (Did they learn nothing on Chaos Walking?) Add in a change of Lionsgate film leadership, from Joe Drake to Adam Fogelson, and the general financial shenanigans at a company that is desperately trying to sell itself, and you’ve got $15 million-ish opening weekend tracking for a movie that needs to gross a couple hundred million to be okay. Not great. At least Lionsgate sold off foreign territories to cover a big chunk of the budget. Speaking of box office, here’s Scott Mendelson’s take on the recent surge…

No Need to Survive Until ’25?

Has the box office finally bottomed out? Despite a rough first quarter, ’24 is shaping up to be an inflection year, with an encouraging fourth quarter upon us.

SCOTT MENDELSON

No, this July didn’t quite measure up to last year’s #Barbenheimer phenomenon, but it came closer than you may have realized. With a $300 million (just in July) haul for Despicable Me 4 and a solid North American showing for both Twisters and Deadpool & Wolverine, July brought in $1.18 billion at the box office, down 13 percent from last year but above the $1.13 billion total for July 2022. Despite the mantra among theater chains and multiplex owners that they just need to “survive until ’25”—whereupon, Hollywood has convinced itself, studios will reset from Covid- and strike-aborted production flow—there are some signs of a quicker recovery.While we all understandably fretted about a May led by underperforming fare (IF, The Fall Guy, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), the story changed right after Memorial Day. From early June through early August, every weekend has featured either an overperforming new release (Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Inside Out 2, A Quiet Place: Day One, etcetera) or robust second-weekend holdover business from a recent tentpole. (Inside Out 2 and Deadpool 3 posted over/under $100 million second-weekend grosses.) Now, we’re entering the most crowded August since 2019, with the likes of Trap, Alien: Romulus, and It Ends With Us packing auditoriums—or at least ensuring they aren’t empty while the industry awaits the year-end deluge of tentpoles. Has the industry hit bottom and quietly re-emerged? There are some optimistic signs in the data. The year-to-date domestic cume for 2024 is $4.9 billion. Sure, that’s down 17 percent from a potentially aberrant 2023, but we can credit much of that difference to the lightweight May slate alongside holdover business from Avatar and the $575 million-grossing The Super Mario Bros. Movie in April. Notably, this year is up 1.5 percent from two years ago, which was fueled by Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water. And given the disastrous early months of the year, it’s sort of extraordinary to think that the ’24 box office could catch up with last year’s $8.8 billion haul, or at least surpass the $7.4 billion cume from ’22. Looking at the post-summer lineup last year, there’s a good chance that seemingly anticipated follow-ups to Beetlejuice, Venom, Gladiator, and Sonic the Hedgehog could end the year on a higher note than the output from the last four months of 2023, which earned $2.3 billion. After all, that output was mostly made up of surprise hits (Five Nights at Freddy’s), surprise movies (Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour), and at least one overperforming tentpole (Wonka). More importantly, there is also little reason to expect a recurrence of what had been a key problem amid the Covid-era recovery—namely, semiregular periods of supply-driven famine. Godzilla vs. Kong’s industry-rebooting triumph in early 2021 was followed by a two-month gap before A Quiet Place: Part II and then another monthlong gap before F9 and Black Widow. A robust May/June/July 2022 slate led to a three-month, post-Bullet Train dead zone before offering up Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: The Way of Water in November and December. Optimism over last year’s potential return to normalcy, of course, was muted by the strike. Now, we may eventually look at Memorial Day weekend 2024 as an inflection point— with Bad Boys: Ride or Die acting as the curtain raiser and Inside Out 2 as a harbinger. After all, the final months of the year won’t be strike-impacted and theaters will have a regular slate of anticipated franchise titles such as Moana 2 and Joker: Folie à Deux alongside (relatively) smaller stuff like Terrifier 3, Flight Risk, Night Bitch, and Nosferatu. The comparative abundance of non-tentpoles, which may or may not break out on an individual basis, means that the industry is not just relying on the hoped-for success of a handful of mega-movies to carry the marketplace. Also, the studios now understand, and have understood for at least the last couple of years, that a theatrical release is essential for both theatrical revenue and newer distribution methods, like PVOD and streaming. Not only can releasing Inside Out 2 in theaters result in $1.56 billion at the global box office, but that Pixar sequel will perform better on Disney+ as a result of first being in theaters. There are still problems to be solved or overcome. The audience still spends a larger portion of their overall annual theatrical budget on a smaller number of big-deal franchise flicks. Distribution and exhibition are still coping with the pre-Covid reality of star-driven, non-franchise, adult-skewing studio programmers struggling in multiplexes. But to even try to deal with these challenges, theaters need a regular supply of movies. That looks to be the present and future reality. We don’t yet know if theaters can again reach the benchmark $10 billion-plus in annual totals. Nor do we know if they can find ways to supplement (dine-in menus, popcorn buckets) or mitigate (slightly fewer theaters but hopefully more evenly spaced nationwide) their way to an annual total closer to $9 billion. However, for the first time this decade, the theatrical exhibition industry seems to no longer be fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Now, even the most die-hard streaming-or-bust executives and analysts realize that studios and theaters can either live together, or die alone.

The Feedback

Lighter feedback this week, so I want to highlight one smart/fun note I got in response to my news of Kimmel and Mulaney passing on the Oscars…“Reaching out to you for an idea that I think will get a surprisingly large amount of support. I truly think the Muppets should host the Oscars. Disney controls that I.P., and between film and television, they really haven’t found a way to properly exploit it. This could be the perfect way to use these characters and keep them relevant through ABC. Additionally, the creative opportunities are endless: They can do parodies of the nominated films, musical numbers—and no one is going to get offended by what a Muppet says. You can also, in the spirit of The Muppet Show, have celebrity guests to the max, which would be a fun opportunity for presenters with minimal preparation and commitment. Finally, this would just be different. I think people would watch out of pure curiosity, and the meme potential for viewers under 35 would be through the roof. There is basically nothing to lose by doing this, and it would be a fun and memorable experiment. I think younger viewers would be thrilled.” —An assistant [Ed. note: I’m in on this, as long as there’s a Piggy/Gaga duet of a Joker 2 song and Statler and Waldorf trash the whole show from the balcony…]

Finally… One Fun Thing…

With everyone from White Dudes for Kamala to Black Women for Kamala groups popping up, tonight’s Comics for Kamala fundraiser, organized by Rep. Eric Swalwell, producer Jamie Patricof, Stand Up NY owner Dani Zoldan, and founder of Brand Up Comedy David Rosenberg, featured Nick Offerman’s very fun rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American.” Click here.

Have a great week, MattGot a question, comment, complaint, or idea who should play Peter Thiel in the Affleck/Damon Hulk Hogan movie? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT

Bankers for Harris

Charles Phillips reveals Kamala’s burgeoning Wall Street allies.

WILLIAM D. COHAN

WaPo Tremors

A close look at the paper’s revived Will Lewis anxieties.

DYLAN BYERS

Kamala’s Next Moves

The pressing tasks on the campaign’s punch list.

JOHN HEILEMANN

Lazarus Lethière

On a major museum effort to resurrect a forgotten art icon.

MARION MANEKER

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