Sep 11, 2025

Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, coming from New York, where Comcast threw a very nice 30th anniversary party for CNBC’s Squawk Box last night that drew Warren Buffett and Bill Murray (not together). Congrats to hosts Joe Kernen, Becky Quick, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and all the C.E.O.s who schlepped to the 101st floor of 30 Hudson Yards to suck up to them. I’ll be on Squawk tomorrow morning at 6:50 ET talking Paramount’s looming bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

💫💫 I’ll be back in L.A. for events over this kinda shrunken Emmy weekend: No UTA or CAA parties, Amazon sitting this year out, THR not doing its usual thing with SAG-AFTRA, Disney downsizing to Vibiana, NBCUniversal hosting only a small Friday event. And since nobody asked, some predictions: The Pitt for drama series, The Studio for comedy series, and Adolescence for limited series. Oh, and SNL will dethrone John Oliver.

Tonight, some notes on the prospect of Paramount/Warner Discovery, and the thought of HBO and WB people going through yet another disruptive corporate upheaval. Plus, some interesting new data on what moviegoers think of Leo DiCaprio. (They like him! Kinda…)

Discussed in this issue: David Ellison, Dwayne Johnson, David Zaslav, Leo DiCaprio, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Morris, Timothée Chalamet, George Clooney, Kenneth Weinstein, Bari Weiss, Rick Yorn, Steve Cahall, Ike Barinholtz, Ted Sarandos, Mike De Luca, Pam Abdy, and… Sal Saperstein.

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Thursday Thoughts…

Ellison finally moves on Warners: David Ellison’s interest in purchasing Warner Bros. Discovery is now Wall Street Journal official, though the WIH community has known this for weeks. Kim Masters reported in early August that Ellison’s next target would be WBD, and I then noted that David would likely go for the whole company, including the CrapCo cable networks, not just the studio and HBO Max side.

Regardless, David Zaslav can’t be loving this news. The Warner Discovery C.E.O. did not plan to abdicate his throne this way—before he could split the company in April, lose the TV baggage that has weighed down the stock, and finally take his rightful perch atop a pure-play entertainment empire as the King of All Burbank (at least south of the 134). He wants to sell, of course—a flip has been the plan all along—but on his terms (though his payout will be huge regardless). Zaz covets consolidation—he’s been begging for it, including this week, when he called TV a “terrible consumer experience” because there are “way too many choices.” But he’s also been telling friends that the Ellison offer will be too low; that the full value of the Warner assets has yet to be realized, certainly by the stock market; that there’s “momentum” at the company; that he could create a bidding war; and that the government won’t let the Ellisons—Larry was literally the richest man in the world this week!—take two Hollywood studios off the table in one flurry of dealmaking.

Hmmmm. WBD doesn’t have a broadcast network, eliminating the F.C.C. leverage that plagued the Paramount deal. And Ellison continues to kiss Trump’s garish gold ring, overpaying for Bari Weiss to sit atop CBS News and installing Kenneth Weinstein, a Trump-friendly think tank guy, as “ombudsman.” Regulatory issues have become whatever Trump wants them to be, but I don’t think David would be doing this if he didn’t have a tacit blessing—or believe Larry could get one with a phone call or two—even with Trump nemesis CNN involved.

Plus, the scale issues are real, but a combined Paramount/WBD wouldn’t lead competitors in most areas of its business. As Michael Morris at Guggenheim noted, the third- and fifth-ranked studios by domestic box office share would become number one, but the combined HBO Max and Paramount+ streamers would only be number five domestically in viewership, still less than half the market share of Netflix. It would create the top domestic TV business by revenue, Morris added.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the news leaked a week after John Malone, the Warner Discovery investor, predicted the Ellisons would play a major role in the next iteration of Big Media. Malone may no longer be on the WBD board, but he sees the chessboard and he’s still hugely influential. If Warner Discovery was worth $33 billion before the stock shot up on the Journal story, plus its $35 billion in debt, what would the Ellisons need to pay? That’s gonna be the question of the next few months, especially if other suitors emerge. But the price kinda doesn’t matter because, as the Journal notes, this would be a “majority cash” deal—meaning Larry’s checkbook. Steve Cahall, the Wells Fargo analyst, estimated that the Warner Discovery assets are worth about $65 billion. That may seem like a big check to write, but Larry made more than $100 billion yesterday.

Is any of this good for Hollywood? No. The whole feeling of positivity around Ellison buying Paramount was that a legacy Hollywood studio would remain intact and making movies and TV shows for years to come. So the first thing Ellison does when he gets Paramount is gonna be to buy and thus eliminate a separate legacy Hollywood studio? No, not good, though I suppose there’s a scenario where Warners and Paramount operate independently as “Skydance corporations.”

All while putting Warner employees through yet another soul-crushing merger. It’s awful. Yes, it’s all part of the industry-wide consolidation that we’ve all known was coming. It’s just wild that this deal, if it eventually happens (still a big if, remember), would all be to chase scale and compete with Netflix, which was the exact argument for the failed AT&T acquisition of Time Warner eight years ago. Now, having learned… what, exactly?… here we go again.
Sal Saperstein wants everyone to thank him: Ike Barinholtz is an Emmy nominee for playing The Studio’s coke-sniffing production executive Sal Saperstein, who is thanked over and over in the show’s star-studded Golden Globes episode. It’s a scenario Barinholtz wouldn’t mind seeing repeat itself in real life on Sunday, so he sent his fellow castmembers a funny and unsubtle reminder attached to a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label. (Disclosure: I got one because I appeared in the show; I heard Ike also sent one to Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, who guested in the Globes episode but who may be rooting less for the Apple TV+ comedy.) “Here’s a bottle of Blue Label to celebrate this incredible moment,” Ike wrote. “And if you win, you know what to do.”
Box office over/under: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba Infinity Castle, the Crunchyroll/Sony anime phenomenon from Japan, is tracking to anywhere between $40 million and $60 million (for real). Let’s put the line at $50 million and I’ll take the over based on the huge Imax presales.

Is Leo Still a Unicorn?

For years, DiCaprio has been the pinnacle of Hollywood: a prestige movie star who can actually open movies, with grosses of more than $7 billion. But as Leo hits 50 and starts promoting One Battle After Another, does he still have the same power? A new study runs the numbers.

Matthew Belloni

Summer’s over, it’s getting dark earlier, and the pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio sunning his belly on yachts have been replaced in our feeds by videos of Leo dutifully fulfilling his publicity obligations for his latest expensive drama from an auteur filmmaker. One Battle After Another is yet another prestige project for which DiCaprio was paid more than $25 million and will be the primary reason regular people pay to see it in theaters.

Leo rarely does solo press—even for his Esquire cover story that kicked off this promo cycle, he was interviewed not by a journalist but by his own director, Paul Thomas Anderson. But the plan is for DiCaprio to be out there a little more for this movie, which premiered in L.A. on Monday, nearly three weeks before its September 26 release via Warner Bros. Lots of time to drum up interest and raise the current opening weekend tracking, which is sitting at what would be a pretty disastrous $20 million, according to NRG.

No worries, right? Leo is still the unicorn… right? The industry decided a while back that DiCaprio, and pretty much only DiCaprio, can front a $150 million political satire like One Battle After Another (Warners says $130 million to $140 million, some say far more than that), with a running time of 2 hours and 40 minutes and coming from a filmmaker who has never made a movie that grossed more than $76 million, not adjusted for inflation. Starting with Titanic in 1997, Leo has made 20 movies for theaters and grossed more than $7 billion. His worldwide haul—not including Don’t Look Up, for which Netflix paid him about $35 million to forgo a big theatrical release—has averaged about $350 million per movie. Averaged. And hits like The Revenant ($532 million) and Inception ($840 million) were not easy sells. At the same time, his list of collaborators—Scorsese, Nolan, Spielberg, Tarantino, Cameron, Iñárritu, Luhrmann, Eastwood, Boyle, Mendes, Zwick, and now P.T.A.—reads like an extended Mount Rushmore for the Letterboxd crowd. DiCaprio has still never done a superhero movie or a sequel, and he’s among the highest-grossing actors of all time. It’s downright heroic.

But is Leo still the unicorn? Is that kind of star power even possible today? Killers of the Flower Moon, his most recent team-up with Scorsese, grossed just $158 million worldwide in 2023, though its running time pushed three and a half hours. Before that, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood failed to crack $400 million, and that had Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. DiCaprio is 50 now and looks it, hardly the pretty boy leading man that endeared him to so many Titanic fans. He eschews social media and off-cycle press. And while his manager, Rick Yorn (he still has no agent), had lined up several possible projects to shoot this summer—from Damien Chazelle’s Evel Knievel movie to a couple possible Scorsese reteams—none of them actually happened. Instead, Leo went to Europe with his girlfriend and partied all summer. Can’t say I blame him.

Leo by the Numbers

So, to check whether Leo’s appeal is still as strong, I asked Greenlight Analytics, an industry polling and data-crunching firm, to conduct a little study. The results were encouraging but showed a few weak spots. DiCaprio’s overall awareness was strong at 86 percent, which is in the 99th percentile of the 972 actors tracked by the company. He has a big “fandom” score of 60 percent—essentially, people are asked if they are a fan of his—and his “Will see in theaters” number (37 percent) is good. His strongest traits were “good actor” (71 percent), “likable” (61 percent), and “authentic” (58 percent). His weakest traits were “sexy” (42 percent), “trendy” (48 percent), and “overrated” (23 percent, which was on the higher end of the actors polled).

These numbers are pretty consistent across genders and age groups, but they overindex with both women and men over 35. In fact, his “theatrical intent” with the under-35 crowd—meaning they would pay to see him in a theater—was lower than with the older cohorts. Makes sense, given his age and the kind of movies he makes.

Bill Skelly, whose team ran the numbers for me at Greenlight, told me that DiCaprio “remains one of the most respected actors in the world and is synonymous with prestige cinema.” But, he noted, “theatrical audiences, however, are more distracted and selective than they once were. Leo is still a major draw, but in today’s box office landscape the definition of ‘biggest movie star’ and how audiences are searching for entertainment has evolved significantly.”

True. So to get a better idea of his place in the firmament, I asked Skelly to compare Leo to a competitive set of male movie stars who performed well in recent polls and have released non-I.P.-driven movies recently: Timothée Chalamet, George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Dwayne Johnson, Michael B. Jordan, Brad Pitt, Will Smith, and Denzel Washington. Some findings:

Most respected: Leo’s “Good Actor” score (71 percent) is one of the highest of the group, ahead of Denzel (63 percent) and Brad (62 percent) but behind Jordan (79 percent). So working infrequently and only with a rarefied fraternity of top filmmakers has cemented his reputation. (And yes, it’s a fraternity of collaborators; DiCaprio has not worked with a female director since the 1995 erotic romance Total Eclipse, directed by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland.)
More limited reach: His awareness is strong (86 percent), but below The Rock (93 percent), probably due to his lack of social media presence or other personal promotion outside of his environmental work and paparazzi pics.
A theatrical pull: At 37 percent, Leo trails Johnson (44 percent) and Washington (42 percent) on the “Will see in theaters” question. Meaning audiences admire his talent and want to see him in theaters, but not as urgently.
Big fans: Leo’s fandom (60 percent) matches Denzel’s (60 percent) and is stronger than Pitt’s (53 percent), but it’s not as fervent as The Rock’s (66 percent).
Perception trade-offs: Compared to his peers, Leo has higher “overexposed” and “overrated” scores (32 percent and 23 percent) than Denzel (14 percent and 12 percent) and Pitt (26 percent and 20 percent), suggesting that being the last true prestige star comes with greater scrutiny.

So, what’s the big takeaway? The numbers suggest DiCaprio remains Hollywood’s most valuable combination of respected actor and box office draw. We can debate whether Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy at Warner Bros. should greenlight any prestige drama at such a high price, but if you’re gonna do it, do it with Leo. Still, as he ages and commercial tastes evolve, his box office pull increasingly looks different from mass appeal stars like The Rock, who are willing to play second fiddle to I.P., or even other steady, trusted draws like Denzel. Leo may need to couple a prestige play like One Battle After Another with a more mainstream genre movie (Inception) or A-list co-stars (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) while also trying to juice interest among younger audiences. His legacy is secure, but his future drawing power may depend on either stepping outside the prestige sandbox or mixing and matching needed added-value elements within it.

See you Monday,
Matt

Correction: Sanford Panitch is 57, not 59, as Kim mentioned on Monday. Apologies.

Maya Tribbitt contributed research for today’s issue.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a good name for the combined Paramount/Warner Bros.? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

Puck founding partner Matt Belloni takes you inside the business of Hollywood, using exclusive reporting and insight to explain the backstories on everything from Marvel movies to the streaming wars.

Ace media reporter Dylan Byers brings readers into the C-suite as he chronicles the biggest stories in the industry: the future of cable news in the streaming era, the transformation of legacy publishers, the tech giants remaking the market, and all the egos involved.

Lachlan’s Triumph

DYLAN BYERS

Hollywood M&A Parlor Games

WILLIAM D. COHAN

Ezra’s Shutdown Sermon

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL

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