Yep! The Emmy dominators are the usual suspects, with Netflix tying HBO Max at 30 wins each. (Honestly, maybe FX’s John Landgraf, last year’s king, should win the week for avoiding Sunday’s event when he knew his shows weren’t winning—big flex.) Let’s instead go for the director of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba Infinity Castle and maestro of the franchise, which added $70 million domestic to its nearly $300 million global haul, becoming Sony’s biggest debut since the most recent Spider-Man.

Related question: Is it time for Disney to buy a big anime studio? Global animation tastes are changing, and while the company that invented feature cartoons does partner with various anime outfits, it could be caught behind the curve if it doesn’t hire or buy its way into owning a piece of that market.

A little more from Emmys weekend…

Now a little exec news…

David Ellison’s Paramount continues to take shape. The latest: I’m told Josh Goldstine, the veteran marketing executive, is negotiating with new studio leaders Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein for a big role in marketing and distribution. The deal isn’t done, and the impact on the legacy team is T.B.D., but it’s happening, and Goldstine is considered one of the top gets in this area. He was at Warner Bros. until January, when he lost a finger-pointing battle with studio chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy over the 2024 flops. And he famously scored a $20 million settlement from Universal when the studio—then run by Jeff Shell, who is now the number two at Paramount—falsely accused him of “inappropriate conduct.”

165.5 minutes
Average time that U.S. men aged 18-24 spend each day on YouTube, over an hour more than women 18-24 do. [Digital i]

38.6 million
Unique accounts viewing the official Saturday Night Live YouTube channel in the first half of 2025, most in the U.S. SNL content was also the most searched-for topic on YouTube domestically so far this year. [Digital i]

41.4 million
Global viewers for Saturday’s Crawford–Álvarez fight on Netflix, a big audience but less than half the 108 million that watched Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson in November. [ESPN]

35 percent
Decrease in output of U.S. film and TV studios in 2024 from its peak in 2022. Production fell another 12 percent in the first half of 2025 [ProdPro/Bloomberg]

8 percent
Rise in share price (to about $13) of Utah-based Sound of Freedom distributor Angel Studios in its NYSE debut on Thursday. Heavenly! [LAT]

Instead of Feedback, here’s a new monthly segment called Spin Doctors, chronicling the wins, losses, and news in the world of Hollywood P.R. and media. This is written and reported by The Spin Doctor, an anonymous P.R. pro who obsesses over this stuff (with help from me, of course)…

Now here’s Julia with a look at how Paramount+ and HBO Max might fit together…

You’d think that David Ellison might be a little more apprehensive about acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, given the somewhat ill-fated history of the Warners media assets. Since 1990, they’ve passed from Time Inc. to AOL, back to Time Warner, then to AT&T, and finally to Discovery Communications, only to become potential fish food for the newly merged Paramount Skydance. After all, it was only a few years ago that Warner Discovery C.E.O David Zaslav fantasized about challenging Netflix by combining populist networks like HGTV and TLC with the prestige of HBO. Now here comes Ellison, with his own Hollywood dream and a nearly unfathomable family fortune, chasing even greater scale.

There are a few reasons to think that, yes, this time might be different. A combined WBD-PSKY would unite Paramount+, with 79 million global subscribers, and HBO Max, which is on target to hit 150 million by the end of next year. Together, they would account for 3.4 percent of total TV viewing in the U.S., per Nielsen’s most recent Gauge report, ahead of free platforms like Tubi and the Roku Channel but still behind Prime Video (3.8 percent), Disney+ and Hulu (4.7 percent), and Netflix (8.8 percent). (Yes, that 3.4 percent includes Discovery+ and Pluto TV.)

But the industry has largely moved past the scale-for-scale’s-sake mentality that once defined the streaming wars. Now everyone is focused more on engagement than sub growth. And a number of intriguing data points suggest that Paramount+ and HBO Max have largely complementary portfolios. According to a report from Parrot Analytics, in May of last year, there was less than 1 percent of overlap between the content available on Paramount+ and HBO Max. That’s compared to a 20 percent overlap between Paramount+ and Prime Video, and a 5 percent overlap between Paramount+ and Netflix. Meanwhile, that same report found that 13.8 percent of audiences who watched a film or TV show on Paramount+ then went on to watch something on Max. By comparison, some 13.4 percent of viewers who watched something on Paramount+ later watched a Netflix title. Considering Netflix has a much broader and larger content offering, the proximity of these data points could be interpreted as evidence of strong audience-interest overlap between HBO Max and Paramount+.

The two platforms could offset each other’s weaknesses, too. Paramount+ is theoretically great at engaging viewers—last year, it had four of Nielsen’s 10 most-streamed titles in the U.S. (Criminal Minds, SpongeBob SquarePants, NCIS, and Young Sheldon)—but isn’t so hot at customer acquisition. Outside of the Taylor Sheridan shows and the NFL, there hasn’t been enough high-profile content to bring in new audiences. Meanwhile, HBO Max isn’t generating as much engagement (only The Big Bang Theory appeared in Nielsen’s top 10 last year) but is much better at acquiring customers thanks to buzzy HBO titles.

Interestingly, none of the most-streamed Paramount+ shows were exclusive to that platform—so much of that engagement may have come from licensing deals with Netflix and Hulu that Ellison might want to one day claw back. As for sports, Paramount has the NFL, college football, and golf events like The Masters. WBD has the NHL, some MLB, and NASCAR, among others. They both have some rights to March Madness and the UEFA Champions League. (One less-talked-about benefit to the deal for Ellison could be WBD’s international sports rights.)

With their streaming portfolios combined, Paramount+ and HBO Max would have accounted for just under a quarter of all audience “demand” in the U.S. in 2023, per Parrot Analytics, whose demand metric is based on a combination of viewership and social media activity. That’s greater than Netflix (17.9 percent), Hulu (15.6 percent), Prime Video (12.5 percent), or Disney+ (9.4 percent). The merged film library, in particular, would create a major competitive advantage, accounting for an 11.1 percent demand share, more than double the demand for Hulu or Peacock’s respective movie catalogs.

Though a metric like demand doesn’t correlate 1:1 with viewership or subscriptions, a combined Paramount-WBD would have a few levers to pull to connect the two—including clawing back the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery content that together comprises 12 percent of total Netflix viewing hours, per Owl & Co. For now, it makes economic sense for both companies to generate extra revenue by licensing select titles to larger platforms. But that calculus will potentially change if Paramount can bulk up with HBO Max, creating a combined platform that has the scale to take advantage of the demand for their titles.

Slapping HBO Max and Paramount+ together won’t solve all of their problems, of course. Both tend to skew older, per Parrot, so Ellison and his streaming chief Cindy Holland will still need to lure a younger audience. Netflix and Hulu remain the go-to platforms for the youngs—with Hulu notching one of the youngest cohorts in the U.S., per a recent Pew Research report. And as for streaming originals, the global audience demand for Netflix would still far outpace a combined PSKY-WBD by 4x, according to Parrot’s metric.

But in a world of rising streaming prices, bundled services and merged libraries and price itself are the key to locking in audiences. Currently, customers in the U.S. are spending about $83 per month on streaming services, only a few dollars less than the total they claim they’re willing to pay, according to Hub Research’s streaming monetization report. Meanwhile, Peacock raised its prices by up to 40 percent this year, Apple TV+ is introducing a 30 percent hike, and HBO Max plans to follow Netflix’s lead and crack down on password sharing. We’re now in a cycle where customers say cost, not content, is the top factor driving their subscription behavior, again per Hub.

A combined PSKY-WBD streamer would need to offer significant cost savings to truly unleash the power of the bundle. Right now, the standard ad-free tier of HBO Max costs $17 a month, while the ad-free version of Paramount+ costs $13 a month. (HBO Max’s ad tier is $10 versus Paramount+’s $8.) A combined offering would probably need to be priced competitively with Disney+ and Hulu, which currently costs $11 a month with ads, or $20 a month without ads, to earn a permanent place in the average household’s monthly budget. While Par+ and HBO Max have moderate churn—both sitting around 6 percent in July—that would likely drop significantly if the two services were merged. Paramount could also continue to use Pluto TV, its free, ad-supported streamer, as a top-of-funnel channel to drive audiences to a combined offering.

Of course, Ellison would need a massively improved user interface and recommendation engine to compete with Netflix, to say nothing of YouTube. Audience attention is more fragmented than ever: As analyst and former Time Warner exec Doug Shapiro has noted, YouTube offers about 20,000 times more hours of content annually than traditional studios. Social video comprises roughly 25 percent of all video viewing in the U.S. Ellison’s potential acquisition of WBD won’t solve any of these issues.

Ellison seems to understand he needs a better mousetrap. Yes, he wants PSKY to bulk up—hence spending $7.7 billion on UFC rights and $1.5 billion on the South Park guys, and giving Timothée Chalamet $25 million. All of which should also help bring in a younger, more male-skewing demo: More than 60 percent of UFC’s audience in the U.S. is made up of Gen Z and Millennials, per Luminate. But all the content in the world doesn’t matter if audiences aren’t finding it. Presumably that’s why Ellison is so intent on investing in technology, too. In his open letter about Paramount Skydance’s future, the word technology appeared 10 times—more than streaming (seven), television/TV (seven), film (five), or entertainment (three), by my count.

It remains to be seen whether Ellison can actually transform Paramount by focusing on tech, or if that’s just the naive fantasy of a Silicon Valley billionaire heir. But there’s no doubting his ambition, or his resources. The real masterstroke would be if Ellison realizes his goal of absorbing WBD and his father acquires TikTok, potentially allowing the family to fuse the world’s most powerful discovery algorithm with one of its largest content libraries. Combining the most watched broadcast network, two of the five legacy film studios, 200 million-plus streaming subscribers, and some Chinese secret sauce may just create the kind of global competitor that David envisioned when he first called Shari Redstone two years ago.

Bill Cohan looks at why Wall Street is so damn excited about a Paramount–Warner Discovery combination. [Puck]

Roy Price has some interesting theories about how to combine the WBD-PSKY assets (and execs). [Price Point]

Just because: Happy two-year anniversary to TKO, home of WWE and UFC, which launched at $100 a share has since doubled in value. Kinda amazing.

Cameron Crowe attempts to explain in a fun way why he’s been in Director Jail for a decade. [The Interview]

Nate Bargatze “turned in one of the most awkward awards-show hosting performances in recent memory.” [Vulture]

Amusing to see trade media monopolist Jay Penske sue Google on antitrust grounds, but Jay’s not wrong that A.I. summaries are “a fire that threatens PMC’s entire publishing business.” [WSJ]

Just for fun, the mini Tom Cruise coconut cakes from Doan’s Bakery at last night’s Emmys Governors Ball…

Have a great week,
Matt

Maya Tribbitt contributed research for today’s issue.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or potential strike signs for new SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin that riff on “Goonies never say die”? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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