Happy Gilmore 2 is barely a movie—and Travis Kelce being slathered in honey by Bad Bunny and eaten by a bear is a great argument for a new Razzie for Cringiest Scene—but 46.7 million views in three days on Netflix is pretty amazing. Sandler might be the one piece of pop culture that all generations endorse.

Runner-up: Lynette Howell Taylor, the Academy’s new president. Though as a mostly indie producer, she likely won’t do much to help more broadly appealing films get nominated for Oscars. (And due to board term limits, she’ll be a one-year-and-done leader.) Now a couple news items…

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

13 Emmy® Nominations

including

Outstanding Limited Series

Lead Actor · Stephen Graham

Supporting Actor · Owen Cooper

Supporting Actress · Erin Doherty

_____

[WATCH] The Making Of ADOLESCENCE:

Behind the Bold Single-Shot Storytelling

Go in-depth with the Emmy® nominated cast & crew of ADOLESCENCE as they explain and uncover the inspiration behind the story and see how they pulled off the incredible four continuous takes that make this series a must-watch.

Featuring Emmy® Nominees Lead Actor & Writer Stephen Graham, Director of Photography Matthew Lewis, Director Philip Barantini, and more.

_____

For more on ADOLESCENCE, visit series.netflixawards.com

64 percent Late Show With Stephen Colbert's viewership bump in the 18-49 demo during the first full week after the show’s cancellation. Colbert also logged 3.1 million total viewers, a two-year high. [Nielsen via Late Nighter]

85 minutes Time that Fox News spent talking about Sydney Sweeney and her “good jeans” from Monday to Thursday last week, compared to 3 minutes on Jeffrey Epstein. [Media Matters] 67 percent Second-weekend decline for Fantastic Four, among the worst Marvel drop-offs at the box office, despite strong reviews and fan reactions, suggesting casual superhero movie fans have moved on. 25 percent Decrease in number of theatrical films in production at legacy studios in the first quarter of 2025 compared to 1Q24. [Luminate]

“Imagine my surprise when I opened Instagram and this was the first post I saw.” —Nancy Meyers, posting about the Apple TV+ announcement of a limited series remake of her 2006 film, The Holiday.

Now here’s Kim with the latest on Paramount…

Throughout the tortured months leading up to the sealing of the Skydance-Paramount deal, Hollywood insiders rooted for an Ellison père-et-fils victory. They didn’t want Paramount to be dismantled by private equity sharks, and they certainly didn’t want to lose another legacy studio the way Fox all but disappeared after Disney acquired most of it in 2019. But if a number of major Hollywood players are right, the Ellison victory might lead to an ironic twist: The newly combined company, these people believe, will also take a run at acquiring Warner Bros. One even told me he definitely knows that this is Ellisons’ intention. “Paramount’s just not big enough to compete,” another Hollywood insider said.

Paramount, obviously, was already a melting ice cube, and that problem won’t be reversed by Skydance alone. In 2024, Ellison’s company posted adjusted EBITDA of $81 million. Larry Ellison, who underwrote the Paramount transaction, can also finance future deals. And a slimmed-down Warners—minus the Discovery part—would add a great big library, potentially great franchises, and a sizable jump in subscribers for the combined streaming service: HBO Max has around 122 million, and Paramount+ has about 78 million. Analysts have noted that these streaming services would be complementary, as Paramount+ appeals to broadcast-type audiences that are into CBS shows and Taylor Sheridan programming, while HBO Max tends to be more highbrow. There would obviously be overlapping subscribers, and a combined entity would significantly lag behind Netflix and YouTube, but still: Slap them together and you’ve got real scale. Of course, Skydance coughed up a mere $8 billion for Paramount—a trifle compared with the potentially $30 billion-plus that it would cost the Ellisons to buy skinny Warners. And while yes, the Ellisons have walked an arduous path to lock up the Paramount deal, and they have a lot of slashing to do to get to the promised $2 billion in savings, they’ll have months to take care of that before the Warners-Discovery split wraps up sometime next year. Analyst Rich Greenfield, a partner at LightShed, sounded a somewhat skeptical note about this scenario. After all, David Ellison has vowed to transform Paramount into a company that will lead the way on blending media and technology. “Do you want to buy more studio assets?” Greenfield asked. “It seems far too simplistic. I wonder whether the Ellisons are more interested in buying something like TikTok” as they try to figure out the future of entertainment. The Ellisons have, indeed, shown interest in TikTok since Oracle won the bid to become its secured cloud provider five years ago.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

13 Emmy® Nominations

including

Outstanding Limited Series

Lead Actor · Stephen Graham

Supporting Actor · Owen Cooper

Supporting Actress · Erin Doherty

_____

[WATCH] The Making Of ADOLESCENCE:

Behind the Bold Single-Shot Storytelling

Go in-depth with the Emmy® nominated cast & crew of ADOLESCENCE as they explain and uncover the inspiration behind the story and see how they pulled off the incredible four continuous takes that make this series a must-watch.

Featuring Emmy® Nominees Lead Actor & Writer Stephen Graham, Director of Photography Matthew Lewis, Director Philip Barantini, and more.

_____

For more on ADOLESCENCE, visit series.netflixawards.com

But one source who said he knew definitively that Skydance has long planned a move on Warners pointed to last week’s announcement that the motion picture group is cutting 10 percent of staff. “Warner Bros. is having a banner run of movies, and they’re announcing layoffs?” he said. “Reading between the lines, they’re preparing the company for sale. They need to scale up.” (Warners declined to comment.)

Anyway, the financing is a risk that Larry can afford to take, and, as one source noted, he only has one son, who presumably will inherit big bags of money someday. And Larry has been intertwined with his children’s Hollywood ventures from the start—even stepping in to help daughter Megan’s Annapurna Pictures when the film company, after a strong start, started to founder. Annapurna shifted toward gaming, but there has been trouble on that front, too. Nathan Gary, who had managed Annapurna Interactive through eight profitable years, led an exodus of all 25 of the division’s staff members late last summer. There has been some speculation that Skydance will buy Annapurna, which would require a lot of care in setting a price defensible to investors, as the number would have to be disclosed. Managing a public company will be a new experience for David, though not for the combined company’s president-to-be, Jeff Shell. Skydance declined to comment, but an insider dismissed the idea of an Annapurna sale to Paramount.

The Ellisons are not necessarily the only ones interested in a Warners deal. Comcast has long been considered a potential suitor for the company, as noted by Puck and others. One Paramount veteran told me he’s always thought Comcast boss Brian Roberts would love to have those Warner properties, in part to feed Universal’s theme parks. But antitrust hurdles likely would be higher for Comcast—especially during this administration.

Comcast has the NBC broadcast network, a dozen TV stations, and 223 affiliates, and F.C.C. chairman Brendan Carr has already launched an investigation into the company’s relations with those affiliates—meaning that the Trump regime doesn’t like the news they’re broadcasting. As we have seen, the Ellisons quickly responded to the administration’s issues with CBS News and 60 Minutes, and established that they’re going to get approval for the deals they want by any means necessary. Comcast may not be so willing to play ball. One top industry executive suggested that a Paramount-Warners deal, which would eliminate a major studio and countless jobs, would ring all kinds of antitrust bells. While regulatory approvals can always be tricky, we saw how the land lay during the first Trump administration, when the feds let the Disney acquisition of Fox glide by, while battling the much less horizontal AT&T purchase of Warners. Of course, for any deal to happen, investor John Malone and his longtime protégé, Warners C.E.O. David Zaslav, would have to be ready to hang up their spurs. Some industry observers find that hard to imagine. But Malone, now 84, is publishing a memoir this September entitled (deep breath) Born to Be Wired: Lessons From a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the Internet, and Growing Formula One, Discovery, SiriusXM, and the Atlanta Braves. That sounds like an author with more than an intimation of mortality. And here’s the bonus: Once the Warner-Discovery split is finalized mid-2026, it becomes possible for Malone to cook up one of his signature tax-free transactions. While waiting, the newly combined Paramount-Skydance leaders have a year to work out their own SpinCo, doing away with their linear-channel headaches. (CBS, with its sports deals, isn’t going anywhere.) As for Zaslav, associates say he’s very happy now that he is separating Warners from Discovery along with the dying channels. “He wants to play it out,” said one. “He feels like he offloaded all the debt to the new Gunnar [Wiedenfels]-run company, and he wants to be what he always wanted to be: a big Hollywood player.” Yet even this person could see a sale happening. “If David Ellison overpaid, I can see Zaslav selling,” he said. “It would have to be such a huge number.” As Larry Ellison prepares to turn 81, perhaps helping David follow his passion is the move. There are any number of deals to pursue, but a combination with Warners would set David up as an even bigger media power player. And while such a transaction would be whittling down the number of legacy studios, something tells me that the Ellisons can live with that. Though I suspect David Ellison would be just as excited as Zaslav has been to have Jack Warner’s desk in his office.

This week’s sign of Disney’s internal conflict over A.I.: The digital double of The Rock, for which the company spent 18 months negotiating rights, will not be used in the live-action Moana. [WSJ]

Curious what Chris Nolan and other top directors think of Imax sponsoring an upcoming A.I. film festival. [Imax] To me, ESPN taking over RedZone and NFL Network in exchange for a 10 percent ownership stake suggests C.E.O. Bob Iger envisions Disney’s sports unit as potentially a separate company. Joe Pompliano thinks ESPN will now get better matchups. [Huddle Up] Congrats to Mitchell Jackson, fired Vice reporter turned publicist to the odious and canceled, on getting the Times and Vanity Fair to run fawning profiles (with photo shoots!) in the same week. [NY Times, VF] Google explains its A.I. filmmaking initiative while only kinda sidestepping the whole union thing. [Fast Company] Let’s all try to guess the four L.A. costume and prop houses that outfitted Trump’s birthday parade in D.C. [New Yorker] Cue the tiny violins: Burning Man is running out of money. [Bloomberg] Amanda Dobbins and Sean Fennessey ranked the summer movie press tours. [Jam Session] That old rumor about a secret tunnel from the Chateau Marmont to the nightclub down the hill that was founded by Preston Sturges is actually true. [SFGate] Sadly, it took David Geffen’s divorce to teach me the meaning of “hypergamy.” [NY Times]

DreamWorks Animation’s recent hot streak will be severely tested with Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie, which isn’t resonating on The Quorum’s early film tracking chart…

Have a great week, Matt

Julia Alexander and Maya Tribbitt contributed research for today’s issue. Got a question, comment, complaint, or an over/under on how long Murdoch’s California Post lasts? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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